After the Danzig Street shootings in 2012, Rotarians in Scarborough started talking to one another. “The shootings were a symptom, but we knew the problems ran deeper than that,” says Dave Hardy, the
Scarborough Community Renewal Campaign Coordinator. Home to eight Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, and with a population larger than Halifax, Scarborough “needed leadership,” says Hardy.
The five Rotary Clubs in Scarborough stepped up to the challenge. In 2014, they launched the first Community Renewal Campaign, modeled on Saint John, New Brunswick’s Benefits Blueprint. The Rotarians researched community issues and held a series of one-on-one conversations with local resident, stakeholder interviews, and consulted with some of Scarborough’s most important community institutions, like hospitals, colleges and universities. Out of that first year came about a dozen recommendations on how to improve Scarborough, and a commitment from the Rotary clubs to keep asking questions.
This year, the Rotarians are expanding their scope. While the campaign continues and has been expanded to include local faith groups and high schools, they’re also actively working on building up Scarborough’s civic infrastructure, arts community, and business power. “We’re asking City of Toronto to move 10,000 staff from the downtown core to Scarborough,” he says. They’re also supporting Dinner and a Song, a resident-led initiative that sees Juno-nominated artists perform in local restaurants, and a business association.
It’s not going to be an easy transformation. “Between 2002 and 2012, Toronto gained 1.2 million square feet of new office space, while Scarborough got 800 square feet.” In a city with the population of the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo area, Hardy says there are no major museums, no major art galleries, and one of the symphonies “just graduated from a high school to a church.” Hardy says “The challenge is that nobody in a leadership is really seeing us at all.”
That may change next year, when the Community Renewal Campaign hosts an international conference about the suburbs. Hosted at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, the conference will focus on “bringing international experts on suburbs to meet with local residents to change to the dialogue about what it means to be in a suburban area.” In the meantime, the campaign will continue to gather information about how the Rotary Club can support a vital Scarborough. As hardy says, “We have a philosophy that this isn’t stuff that government should do. The community needs to come together and work together. Rotary is bringing groups together that will succeed.”