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.
Timeline and Activities
Current Research Stage: Implementation Analysis
Research Questions
At this point in the project, which focuses on objective 3, our current research questions are:
- What actions need to happen in order to achieve the desired future for KGO?
- Thinking with systems change conditions, what steps are needed for these actions and what are the relevant roles and responsibilities of systems-level actors?
- What are the points of connection between these pathways and Toronto’s climate action goals?
Documents and Publications