Civic Impact

Toronto city council recently directed staff to look into the logistics of adding public lands in the Don, Humber, and Etobicoke Creeks to the Greenbelt’s protective fold.

A noteworthy and exciting step, according to Erin Shapero, co-ordinator of the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance. For Shapero and her colleagues, Toronto's decision marks not only a shift in how we think about protecting our ravines, but also a shift in how we think about the Greenbelt itself. "When the [Ontario] Greenbelt was first announced in 2005 by the provincial government it was really about protecting our farmland and protecting our water sources," says Shapero. "Urban areas weren't considered a key part of it. So this is really opening the conversation about what the Greenbelt is and can do."

 

Since it first became law nine years ago, the provincially established Greenbelt has proved an effective albeit sometimes controversial tool for combating sprawl by protecting prime farmland, countryside, and green spaces in the Greater Golden Horseshoe. At 1.8 million acres, Ontario's Greenbelt is the largest in the world, but, until recently, municipalities have not been able to leverage the Greenbelt Act to protect land and water within their boundaries. 

 

In order to bring municipalities on board, the provincial government introduced something called the "urban river valleys designation" in January of 2013. It's a small but significant adage. 

 

"It opened up a new frontier," Shapero explains. 

 

"The urban river valleys designation allowed municipalities to add their public lands to the Greenbelt. This was huge: it meant that the province recognized that urban river valleys are really important as a source to the lake and should have greater protection. It also gave cities a way to use the Greenbelt Act to protect their river valleys."

 

The designation allows municipalities to add public waterways and the land around those waterways to the Greenbelt while also allowing them to maintain their existing environmental controls. That means that, despite designating areas as part of the Greenbelt, municipalities would be able to build on those lands if the purpose was to protect urban rivers and the surrounding areas (e.g.. municipalities would still be able to build flood protection systems, building that would normally be banned on Greenbelt land). Essentially municipal policies can still override the Greenbelt Plan in cases where their environmental polices are stronger. 

For Shapero, the move to add river valleys the Greenbelt has both a symbolic and practical significance. Not only will the designation offer further protection for river valleys, but by invoking the language of the Greenbelt, Toronto and other municipalities are recognizing that sustainabilty is a regional protect. 

 

"This designation is all about protecting water and making ecological links to the larger Greenbelt. Watersheds are all connected. Municipalities can draw lines but rivers don't follow those types of boundaries. It’s the same with the Greenbelt - it’s a regional system. When we're talking about thing like river valleys, it's really a regional issue.

"Urban River valleys are really the lungs of the city. If you look at an aerials map of Toronto we are one of the greatest cities in North America," Shapero continues, "we have river valleys...and they house our rivers which flow into Lake Ontario. That  water becomes our drinking water so the cleaner that water can be the better for all of us."

 

If council votes to add Toronto's publicly owned waterways to the Greenbelt it will become the third Ontario municipality, after Mississauga and Oakville, to take advantage of the provincial river valley designation. 

Since June of last year, Yonge Street has been following the new Toronto music campaign: 4479 Toronto.

 

Thanks to 4479 organizing, Toronto and Austin, homes of the NXNE and SXSW music festivals respectively, officially entered into music city partnership this past October. And now, five months later, 4479 has achieved another of its ambitious goals - the creation of the Toronto Music Industry Advisory Council (MAC).

 

The idea for a Toronto music advisory board was first floated in a 2012 Music Canada report entitled "Accelerating Toronto's Music Industry Growth - Leveraging Best Practices from Austin Texas". Among its many suggestions, the report suggested that Toronto should create a music advisory board similar in structure to the one in Austin, Texas. Completed for music industry advocacy group Music Canada by a third-party researcher,  "Accelerating Toronto's Music Industry" became the basis for the 4479 campaign. 

 

MAC, a board of 30 music industry professionals, includes musicians, venue owners, and studio executives. It's co-chaired by Toronto-based singer/songwriter Amanda Martinez and Councillor Michael Thompson and will meet once a month to discuss strategies for promoting Toronto as a "music city."

 

Last week's inaugural meeting included discussion on how to incorporate more musical performances in major event like the Toronto International Film Festival and the 2015 Pan/ParaPan Games and a bold suggestion from Graham Henderson, president of Music Canada, that the city needs to "look at economic development throughout a music lens."

In a letter sent this week to members of City Council, Music Canada said of new advisory group, "MAC will provide unprecedented opportunity for dialogue between the entrepreneurs and artists who make up our music cluster and City Council and city departments that interact with music on a regular basis.  It will provide regular engagement of organizations like Tourism Toronto and TABIA who are critical partners in our city building efforts.  In short, it will help us work together to build on potential areas of growth and improvement and to create new opportunities for jobs and investment."

4479 (the numbers refer to city's longitude and latitude points) was announced as part of this year's NXNE festival. A coalition led by Music Canada--and made up of members from the music industry, tourism, municipal government and business--the campaign's avowed goal is "to position Toronto as one of the greatest music cities in the world."

Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: 4479, MAC

 

In 2010, the City of Toronto passed a bylaw limiting the placement of digital billboards to only two locations in the city, Dundas Square and the Gardiner Expressway.

 

For the public space activists of the Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC)--vocal critics of electronic billboards--the bylaw's passage was celebrated as a hard-won victory. 

 

But a City of Toronto staff proposal released this past November recommends substantial changes to the 2010 bylaw. And some of TPSC's former members are finding that they may have let their guard down too soon.

 

"We did a lot of work a few years ago with the City on billboard bylaws," says Alison Gourbold, a public space activist and former TPSC organizer. "There was tons of public consultation...and the City decided that based on that and based on the safety data that they would limit the placement of electronic billboards to two specific places in the city. We were pretty happy with the result."

 

In 2011, TPSC officially disbanded (though many of its members and offshoot organizations remain active).

 

"We all went on to other things," says Gourbold. "Unfortunately, in the meantime, the billboard lobby remained active. They never sleep."

 

That's why, despite a desire to move on to new issues, Gourbold's teamed up with former TPSC colleagues Dave Meslin and John Ducharme, to launch Scenic Toronto, a new collective fighting to hold on to the 2010 victories. 

 

The November staff report proposal reccomends allowing large digital billboards in Commercial and Employment areas. It also recommends that "mini" digital billboards be allowed in residential areas. And while the proposal also includes new restrictions (to do with light levels and distance between advertisements), Gourbold worries that these will do little to stop electronic billboards effecting quality of life in residential and commercial areas.  

 

"When the billboard issue came up again we didn't want to get back into it. I don't think that billboards are the most important issue in the whole city, but when we started looking at what the city was proposing it was just so frustrating.

 

"This 40 page [staff report] says things like 'maybe if we allow digital billboards we can control the light levels. Maybe we can make sure they don't go too near to residences.' It's all about mitigating the possible harm. But there's nothing in there about what's in it for the city."

 

City staff informed Gourbold that the impetus behind the new proposal came from councillors who were fed up with having to amend the existing bylaw evey time council wanted to approve an electronic billboard outside the designated areas. 
 

"The councillors got annoyed about all the time the industry was taking up, so they went to the staff and asked them to look into the issue and make some rules."

 

But, says Gourbold, the new rules are a total departure from the 2010 bylaw, yet the aesthetic and safety concerns remain the same. 

 

"The polls show people don't want these [digital billboards] and the evidence shows that are real safety concerns for drivers and that the changing lights coming through windows can be very disruptive."

Gourbold is hopeful that Scenic Toronto can get people to pay attention by the time the recommendations go the Planning and Growth committee in April. They held their first public meeting at City Hall last night. 

 

"At the moment it's just a few activists," says Gourbold. "But we're hoping to get more and more people involved. The only way we can fight a lobby as rich and relentless as these lobbyists is to get a broad coalition of people to pay attention."

 

"If there's no sense that people are watching it's a councillor's best interest to just let the industry do what they want. But if councillors think that people are watching they won't vote for this." 

The Luminato Festival is getting its own academy.

 

In an announcement made early last week, Luminato organizers introduced the Copycat Academy, an artist training program that will coincide annually with Toronto's 10-day arts festival. 

 

Copycat, created and conceived by Berlin-based artist and educator Hannah Hurtzig, is,despite its name, a one-of-a-kind program. 

 

The curriculum for each iteration of the program will be based on the work and biography of a particular artist or artist collective. Students will use this artist's "method of production" to produce their own individual work (hence "copycat"). 

 

In the words of the official program description, "[the intensive] is a critical test of thought and practice, a laboratory where 20 participants can observe the emergence of meaning while they occupy and replicate themselves in the host. It's a master class without a master."

 

For the inaugural 2014 session, the curriculum will centre on influential Toronto art collective General Idea.

 

General Idea, the name for the collective work of conceptual artists Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, was active for over 25 years. After the death of Partz and Zontal in 1994, the General Idea archive was placed on deposit at the National Gallery of Canada. 

 

“We want to rethink the way artists are educated and the way we conceive of education," says Jorn Weisbrodt, artistic director of Luminato Festival. "The tiered and mostly linear approach of the 19th and 20th century academy still prevails. The Copycat Academy uses the multi-arts festival as a platform to leap off of and break up the standardized curriculum—to transform and inspire the most promising artists of the future.” 

 

This Sunday, a group of 17 Toronto youth will meet at the Yorkdale Community Arts Centre to take a class on pattern-making. They'll continue to meet every Sunday for the next seven weeks. And, by the end, each will have sewn and designed a shirt from scratch. 

The participants are part of Sew What?!, a fashion industry intensive offered multiple times a year by Art Starts Toronto, an arts-based nonprofit dedicated to art education in Toronto's under-serviced neighbourhoods. 

Each Sew What?! session, explains Carleen Robinson, program manager at Art Starts, focuses on a different aspect of the fashion industry. That means that participants regularly attend more than one session to learn about everything from designing and pattern drafting to merchandising and display.

"A lot of our participants come for the winter, spring, and summer sessions," says Robinson. "But, at the same time, the program is always growing. In fact, for the session that starts Sunday we actually have more people signed up then we have funding for, but I think it's important not to turn anyone away."

Funding is in fact a pressing issue for Sew What?!; the program is funded by an Ontario Trillium grant, and this summer the 3-year grant runs out. But rather than retire the program, Art Starts has decided that they'll look for ways to fund it permanently. Even if it means moving around some other resources. 

"The program really serves a need," says Robinson. "There is always so much interest and so much excitement. We have so many community partners and the youth are able to meet with real professionals in the industry and really get an idea of what it takes. Many of the youth are interested in a post-secondary education in fashion and Sew What?! helps set them up and learn about what they want to do."

Like all of Art Starts programming, Sew What?! is targeted at Torontonians who face "consistent barriers to participation in the arts." The program offers young people interested in the fashion industry a chance to learn about how multifaceted the field really is, and to see how their skills might be beside utilized. Not only is Sew What?! free, but Art Starts provides tokens to help participants get to and from the courses. 

"There can be obliviously a lot of financial barriers to fashion education, and it's really important for us that this does not pose a barrier for our participants," explains Robinson. "I also make sure to schedule the program in a way that won't interfere with school or other obligations. So we have the course either in the evening or on Sundays to make sure that they still have time for school and other responsibilities."

While Art Starts has been running arts programming for youth and adults for over two decades, Sew What?! is the organization's first foray into the fashion arts. It was launched in 2012 after Arts Starts organizers noticed that the youth they worked with were interested in developing careers in fashion. 

Because the program has to cater to diverse skill levels and interests, Sew What?! is more about breadth than mastery. It's designed to cover as many aspects of the fashion arts as possible.

And even though the funding is running out this summer, Robinson is confident that Art Starts will find the funding to keep the project going. 

"I'm not sure yet exactly how we're going to do it, but we are really committed to making Sew What?! a permanent program. "

Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Carleen Robinson, Program Manager, Art Starts


CORRECTION: The original version of this story stated that Art Starts had been running for only one decade and focused exclusively on youth. Art Starts has in fact been running programs for over 2 decades and works with people of all ages. 

Late last month, the City of Hamilton officially approved a city music strategy that will include the opening of a new music office. While many cities, including Toronto (Yonge Street story here) are pursuing strategies to support and promote their music industry, Hamilton, with a population of only 500, 000, is likely one of smallest cities to take on this kind of project.

 

While it may be smaller city, says Jacqueline Norton, the city’s businesses development consultant of creative industries, "it really battles above its weight in terms of music talent and activity.

 

"Hamilton has a really neat music scene. And some of that obviously is because we’re close to Toronto, but a lot of it is grassroots Hamilton."

 

As examples, Norton points to the homegrown Hamilton Music Awards, Hamilton's multiple music festivals (including the widely popular Supercrawl festival and numerous jazz and blues festivals), and, of course, the national and international success of Hamilton artists (e.g.. Caribou and Monster Truck). 

 

The Council decision freed up $50,000 from reserves that will be used to open a new music and film office and to fund the creation of marketing material and music office branding. The office will also be the home base of the music strategy advisory board that will include representatives from the local music business, festivals, and not for profit organizations.

 

But before any decisions about the board are made, says Norton, the office itself needs to get up and running. 

 

"I’m right now in the process of creating one of those big long checklists of what we need to do before we can do anything else. What do we need to research? Do we need to hire a branding agency? We still have to answer a lot of questions to answer but hopefully in the next few months we should be ready to get going. The first thing we need to do is brand the space. We want to create an identity for Hamilton’s music scene."

 

The overall goal of the office, says Norton, is to support Hamilton’s already established music industry and to attract more music related businesses to the municipality. 

 

"Once we have an established advisory committee they will work with staff to implement the strategy. It’s really a community based strategy. It’s about reaching out to the community-to venues, to  artists, to studios--to try to get things done. It’s only a small office and $50,000 is not that much money, so the office will really be taking on a facilitator role."

"We also just finished a strategic plan and partnering within the community was really important for us. I  couldn’t think of a better partner than another festival that has such a rich history and an audience that is different but complementary to ours. We’re more geared towards families and children and Canadian literature and the IFOA has a more international outlook but we both support and respect each other’s programming."

Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Heather Kanabe, Director, Word on the Street

Mackenzie Green, a new affordable housing community in Richmond Hill, was recently recognized by the Canada Green Building Council for achieving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver certification.

 

The certification, and indeed the existence of the building itself, is a noteworthy achievement for a region in the midst of a signifiant housing crunch.  
 

The York Region has the lowest proportion of rental housing in the GTA and, until very recently, had an almost non-existent social housing program. The homogeneity of the housing stock is becoming an increasingly thorny problem given York's ongoing demographic transitions--not only is York home to some of the country's fastest growing municipalities, it's also seeing a rise in low-income populations.

Between 2001 and 2006, York's poverty rate grew 2.5 times faster than the percentage increase in the total population.

 

But, thanks to movement on the housing issue from the York Regional Council (see Yonge Street's story on the Region's 10-year housing plan) housing options are beginning to widen. Mackenzie Green--a nine-storey 140-unit building located in Richmond Hill--is one of Housing York Inc's most ambitious projects in recent years. Of 140 units in Mackenzie Green, 70 are rent-geared to income, the remaining are market-rate units.

 

And the energy efficiency for which it was recently recognized, says Sylvia Patterson, general manager of the Region's Housing and Long Term Care office, says a lot about Region's overall housing strategy.

 

"We try to do all our work from a sustainability framework. We're working to increase the stock of affordable housing in York and it's important that we build our buildings for the long term because we're going to own them for a long time. We want to make sure they're energy efficient, easy for us to operate, and comfortable for the residents. Building a building to LEED guidelines helps to ensure that those goals to be met."

 

Mackenzie Green, which opened this past September, was purchased by the Region from a developer who built the property with clear Regional directives.

 

"The building was bought from a developer who built the building for us," says Patterson. "There are specifications that the Region gives to the developer. We demanded, for example tri-sorters [waste, recyclables and organic waste]. We wanted to ensure that our impact on the community in terms of waste and energy is limited.

 

"We made sure the developer built to LEED frameworks. LEED certification ensures discipline, it means that it meets national and international standards not just in how the building operates, but in how it is built. During construction, for example,over 70 per cent of construction waste diverted from landfill."

 

In addition to diverting waste, Mackenzie Green also boasts energy and water-efficient laundry facilities, green power electricity, a roof that reflects sunlight and heat away from the building, underground storage for 70 bicycles, and proximity to transit. It's these characteristics, among others, that landed the building its recent certification.

 

"During the recent ice storm, Mackenzie Green was without power for a day and half but it never lost heat," explains Patterson. "It is that efficient and well insulated."

 

"The building limits environmental impact to the community and, of course, it's less expensive for the residents."

 

Look at any recent policy document from the Ontario Ministry of Longterm Care and you’ll find a common theme: the importance (especially in the context of an aging population) of community health services. 

 

As the aging population of the province increases, Ontario's Community Care Access Centres (CCACs)--a government supported network that connects Ontarians with in-home and community-based health care--will play an increasingly vital role in delivering health care and helping Ontario seniors maintain their quality-of-life.

 

But how the CCACs--and indeed the entire Ontario healthcare system--will cope with significant demographic changes is still unclear. 

 

A recently completed 4-paper series published by Ontario's 14 Community Care Access Centres (CCACs) looks to tackle some of this ambiguity by asking tough questions that, according to the final report, "need to be asked and discussed if Ontario is to serve the growing number of seniors and children with complex needs over the next two decades."

 

"We launched the paper series--Health Comes Home: A Conversation about the Future of Care--because we know that a lot of populations, including not only seniors but people requiring hospice palliative care, and children with complex needs, are going to need integrated at home-care in the coming decades," says Sharon Baker, chief operating officer with the Ontario Association of CCACs. "We need to know what kind of resources we'll need to provide the best kind of care and this might involve a real transformation of the health care system."

 

The four papers in the series outline the demographic and technological shifts that will affect health care delivery in the coming decades focusing specifically on the changes and opportunities faced by populations most often served by CACC services: seniors with complex health care needs, children with chronic condition and their caregivers, and patients requiring longterm palliative care. 

 

In general, the papers were intended to address four interrelated questions:

 

What should we expect from our health system? How will we come together to meet the needs of patients? How will we pay for a transformed system?  How will we value and care for our informal caregivers?
 

"The reports are not full of answers" says Baker. "They are really just a first step in sparking a conversation."

 

A conversation that, she hopes, will be continued on the Ontario Associations of CCAC's new interactive website: http://moreandless.ca.

 

The website, which presents the information in the paper series in a simplified and user-friendly format, also invites visitors to provide their own feedback. 

This past Friday, the Toronto Reference Library hosted a gala featuring some pretty impressive attendees. Toronto's Poet Laureate, George Elliott Clarke, was there. So was Kenny Robinson, the widely successful Gemini-nominated comedian. The well-known artist and activist Andrea Thompson performed spoken-word.
 

The artists were just some of the performers that had gathered to kickoff the start of Black History Month at the Toronto Public Library (TPL): an annual month-long event series that brings a wide-spectrum of performers into library branches across the city.

 

Despite a sometimes scant budget, Black History Month, says Joseph Romain a programming coordinator with TPL, always manages to attract a high level of talent. 

 

The challenge, says Romain, is not finding the talent, it's sorting through it all. 

 

"We have a broad spectrum of talent in the city from the black community. It's really a matter of selecting rather than searching. We have so many networks and people always want to come back--it's almost too big."

 

To help him program the 2014 events, Romain enlisted the help of spoken-word artist Andrea Thompson.

 

"I do a lot of programming, but my programming is all over the map so I often need to reach out for some expertise," says Romain."Someone who knows who is doing what and where and why it's interesting. Andrea Thompson was really helpful in reaching out to a number of communities and artists."

 

"We tend to hire really big people. If someone is a birthday party entertainer you won't find them at these events. It's true that people make better money doing what they do elsewhere. But they recognize we're an important part of the community and we get really good acts."

Among the people participating in this year's events (in addition to Elliott Clark, Robinson, and Thompson) are Gemini award winning film maker Seth-Adrian Harris (who will be giving a presentation at the Palmerson Branch on February 4th), some of Toronto’s best black poets who will perform poems from the The Great Black North poetry anthology (February 20th at Downsview; February 26th at Riverdale) and Ian Keteku, the 2010 World Poetry Slam Champion (February 13th at Amesbury Park). 

"People like to see themselves in our buildings and see their community represented. The artist want to come out and people want to come out to see them."

Full schedule here.

"There are so many talented young people [in Toronto]; gems in different communities who, with just a little bit of a push and a little bit of direction and mentorship, could do spectacular things."

 

It's for that reason, explains Roshanak Jaberi, associate producer with Toronto's Expect Theatre, that the Toronto theatre company has taken on its newest endeavour -  training and mentoring Toronto's emerging artists.

 

For the past seven years Expect Theatre has partnered with Arts Etobicoke to host the annual urbanNOISE Festival in the Jamestown/Rexdale area. The festival, which every year features local and international artists, also provides training for up-and-coming artists from the community.

 

It was in part based on the experience of putting together urbanNOISE (only one of Expect Theatre's many projects), says Jaberi, that she and artistic directors Chris Tolley and Laura Mullin, saw the need for a pre-professional training program for young artists. 

 

"When we were working in Rexdale with UrbanNOISE we always had a training component and a mentorship and workshop component along with the festival. We got to see some of the needs and challenges in the community and we also saw so many young people from different communities who were so talented and who are interested in art not just in a recreational way, but who really wanted to make performing arts a career and who just needed a little help to get there."

 

"When we finished urbanNOISE [last year was the festival’s final year] we were looking to do something that still served young artists in various communities and we had this vision of creating a kind of training program and ensemble."

 

After securing funding for the project from the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the Ontario Arts Council, Expect Theatre officially launched its new program, the Emerging Inter-Arts Ensemble, in the beginning of 2014.  

 

The ensemble’s first project, Beats + Intentions, will start next month and has three years of funding support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

 

Beats + Intentions is an a two-week intensive that pairs emerging artists with skilled facilitators and gives participants the opportunity to work with other emerging artists from across the city. In order to reach a diverse set of participants, Expect is holding auditions for the program (details here) in many of the city’s priority neighbourhoods including Regent Park, Parkdale, Rexdale/Jamestown and Kingston Galloway/Orton Park. Once accepted, the participants--who could run the gauntlet from filmmakers, to dancers, to songwriters--will participate in a two-week intensive with facilitators and will perform in a collaborative final presentation.

Every emerging artist will also be compensated for TTC fare and will receive an honorarium for their contribution to the program.

 

"This is such a great opportunity for young people to take advantage of the professional artist facilitators we’ve got. These are people in high demand whose schedules are not always open. If young people had to pay for training with them it would cost thousands of dollars, so this is an amazing and unique opportunity because they don't have to worry about not having resources to take advantage of this program...Many of these emerging artists are right out of high school and in a transitional period  and looking for employment opportunities. The honorarium helps us  support them and also give a sense of accomplishment."

 

Writer: Katia Snukal

Thanks to a sizeable grant from the provincially-funded Greenbelt Fund, George Brown College and St. Michael's Hospital have officially embarked on a partnership to enhance the hospital's menu by integrating more local food products into the hospital's patient meals.

 

"The grant allows us to engage our faculty and students in our culinary program--specifically the students in our culinary management program--to work with St. Michael's staff to come up with innovative and healthy tasting recipes by using local ingredients," says Winnie Chiu, director of the Food Innovation Research Studio (FIRSt) at George Brown's Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts.

 

"We are really happy to be working with St. Michael's hospital and to help them improve local food procurement by focusing on the public sector staff who prepare the food and helping them to cook utilizing even more local ingredients."

 

In order to do this, says Chiu, faculty and students will first have to learn about how the hospital already procures and prepares its food -- it's not just about coming up with new recipes.

 

"What is really important here is that we are working on recipes that can be utilized. There's no point in developing recipes that can't be reproduced. By teaming up with St. Michael's our students can work with industry in a real time environment using the culinary skills they've developed. It allows them to understand a complex food service environment."

 

While the project is still very much in the "concept" phase, Chiu anticipates that the end result will not only be a realistic and improved menu at St. Michael's, but also the development of a training program and of wealth of ideas that can be shared with other public sector employees looking to integrate more local food into their menus.

Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Winnie Chiu Director, Food Innovation Research Studio (FIRSt), Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts, George Brown College

More than 300 hundred guests will congregate tonight at Queen West’s Great Hall to celebrate Toronto, "the world’s most youthful city."

 

The youthful city accolade, awarded to Toronto this past November, comes courtesy of the YouthfulCities project, "a social venture" launched in 2012 with the goal of mapping the world's cities from "a youthful perspective." YouthfulCities, which plans to release the index annually, was established in 2012 by Decode, a global youth market research firm.

 

While the index has been publicly available for months, tonight’s event, says Sonja Miokovic, global director of YouthfulCities, is about celebrating Toronto’s success as well as creating dialogue on how to use the data to improve our urban environment. It also serves as a kind of homecoming for YouthfulCities, itself a Toronto-based organization (as Miokovici and the YouthfulCities website states, the aggregators were in no way biased towards their home-city as the categories used were selected by youth in all participating regions).

 

"The event is really about launching the index at a national level, celebrating Toronto's success, and sharing with our city some insights from the Toronto data. We've also collected data from other Canadian cities that we will share at the event to give an idea of how other Canadian cities are performing. [Toronto was the only Canadian city officially included in this year’s survey]."

 

Tonight’s celebration, which also doubles as the official Canadian launch of YouthfulCities will include a panel discussion with Toronto civic leaders, (including Che Kothari of Manifesto and Allan Broadbent of the Maytree Foundation) and presentations by representatives of Toronto youth-based nonprofits (including 1 Love T.O. and the For Youth Initiative). 

 

As Miokovic points out, although Toronto ranked highly in many categories, it still has a ways to go in others.

 

"Toronto was the top winner overall, but it only narrowly beat Berlin and New York and in some sub-indexes Toronto was not one of the leaders. So while we did great in terms of digital access, youth employment, economic status, food and nightlife etc., we didn't do quite as well in civic participation or in safety and mental health. The survey shows that these are really areas we should be thinking about and maybe we need to look to see what other cities are doing well...One of the great things about the index and the sub-indexes is that it helps us to share best practices and local learning at a global scale."

 

The first YouthfulCity Index ranked 25 cities using 80 unique indicators. The organization hopes to expand to 75 cities for the 2015 rankings. Full index and methodology details available at youthfulcities.com.
 

Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Sonja Miokovic, Global Director, YouthfulCities