Research
Project Description
Visionary Communities is a four-year project using the Connected Communities Approach (CCA). It partners community and universities to improve living conditions in Kingston Galloway/Orton Park (KGO) neighbourhood, aligning with the residents’ and nonprofits’ aspirations.
The aim is to contribute to positive changes and create sustainable, vibrant, and safe neighbourhoods in Toronto, guided by community needs and actions.
We’ll work closely with people in KGO, like residents, local groups, and partners, to find out what’s already happening in the neighbourhood. We want to understand what the community cares about, its strengths, and the challenges it faces. With this knowledge, we aim to help come up with practical solutions that the community itself wants. We’ll share what we learn with the City of Toronto and its Climate Advisory Group, hoping to use this community knowledge to guide engagement and shape citywide climate policies and solutions. This includes making sure the city and formal institutions are accountable to the communities they serve.
Objectives
- Co-develop an impactful ‘collaboratory’ focused on identifying and testing SDG solutions in / with the KGO community, operationalized through a community-university-city partnership.
- Deepen understanding of and align our work with existing relationships and areas of momentum in KGO through iterative processes of listening and reflecting back what we heard, strengths-based mapping and relationship building, and scanning of past and contemporary records of neighbourhood-based projects and activities.
- Work with local organizations and grassroots groups to co-create equitable sustainability transitions “pathways” (bundles of strategies/actions) that will further their aspirations for KGO and be advanced through their community-initiatives.
- Integrate SDG solutions and community aspirations/ objectives for the future of their neighbourhood through pilots and use cases.
- Evaluate, learn, and scale.
Visionary Communities Activities
Current Research Stage: Activities 5 and 6
Activity 5 Creating an Ecosystem of Solutions
What set of activities can build on existing momentum to support achieving the desired future, beyond the life of the Visionary Communities project (ending in 2027-8). For this purpose, six of the levers of action to achieve the desired neighbourhood future have been prioritized by Visionary Communities’ workshop participants and will be examined in detail.
Activity 6 Implications for City of Toronto
We are now helping the City design climate interventions that are rooted in community work. A briefing session was held for the EC&F Division’s staff who focus on climate engagement in November 2025, and in early 2026, we were asked to provide a training session for the 2026 cohort of Neighbourhood Climate Champions hired by the City. That training session, entitled “Don’t Lead with Climate/Lead with Local Sustainability”, was delivered on April 16, 2026.
Documents and Publications