It's the first Saturday of February and the air outside stings with cold as a heavy, wet snow blankets the city. Yet, despite a day whose weather might charitably be described as inclement, a merry throng has gathered inside George Brown's Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts.

Some 350 people convened on a single floor of the college's Adelaide Street campus, each person belonging to one of 17 different community organizations across the GTA. All are there for the same reason: they want to help make their neighbourhood a better place.

To that end, they've given up their weekend to take part in a program called Playing for Keeps (P4K), an initiative brought together with the help of the Toronto Foundation. In the lead up to the 2015 PanAm Games this summer, each of the 17 organizations that is a part of P4K will host their own miniature neighbourhood games. Apart from promoting physical fitness, the object of the exercise is to cultivate social capital within each community.

The OECD defines social capital as "the links, shared values and understandings in society that enable individuals and groups to trust each other and work together." In the context of a large city like Toronto, creating strong and vibrant communities can be a challenge in the face of sometimes inadequate infrastructure, income inequality and other, systemic hardships. Investing in social infrastructure is critical.

Almost as soon as they were announced, the Toronto Foundation identified the Pan Am Games as a community-building opportunity. Nadien Godkewitsch, Manager of Programs at the Toronto Foundation, explains: “A whole slew of people were looking at us and saying, 'You know, you, as a foundation, are a neutral convener. Can you bring us together to talk about how we might build a social legacy?’”

From there, Toronto Foundation brought together groups from across Toronto, Ajax and Hamilton to discuss ways of engaging newcomers, youth, and long-time residents of various communities to build leadership capacity within community organizations. These individuals would thus become, in the words of Godkewitsch, “hosts to the city that they love as we move toward the Pan Am Games.”

And so, the volunteers find themselves at George Brown. Over the course of two weekends, they'll be put through a program carefully designed by the school's faculty to give them the tools to serve as community ambassadors during the run of the Games.

Godkewitsch says, “They go and activate their communities with neighbourhood games, which are moments of fun and play that bring people together to have physical activity and share in food and cultural fun in their communities, then the hypothesis is that if we’re able to develop that infrastructure, then we’ll be able to have more vital communities.” It's no small goal, and the amount of trainees ad up to no small number; so far, some 1000 volunteers have been trained.

Some of those volunteers belong to the Mentoring Junior Kids Organization (MJKO), a boxing charity based at Bathurst and Lakeshore that largely serves youth from Parkdale. “Having access to volunteer training is very good,” says the organization's executive director, Miranda Kamal. “Being a small organization, it's actually huge for us.” As Kamal and her husband, Ibrahim Kamal—who is also MJKO's Program Facilitator—explains, the opportunity to serve as a P4K hub will make activities more accessible to the youth they serve.

But it isn't just the trainees and community organizations that are benefitting from the training process so far. Don Sagarese, a professor in the Department of Hospitality and Tourism at George Brown and one of the P4K training instructors, has found the experience of co-leading a mass community empowerment project to be—for lack of a better word—empowering.

 “If the Pan Am Games represent an idea of various coming together in a central location to share their socio-cultural ideals, to share the points of connectivity and aspirations,” says Sagarese, “and if my teaching has provided people with the confidence they require to be a big part of that, then I’m totally satisfied with my contribution.”

"It’s difficult to feel a part of a community when you feel like you’re going to be deported,” says Miranda Kamal. “It’s small stuff like this that helps them forget about issues like that. In a nutshell, that’s what Playing for Keeps is about. It’s about having fun, forgetting the day to day, and just enjoying yourself.”