Penticton lies at the heart of the Okanagan region in the south of British Columbia. The region’s temperate climate, beautiful lakes, and award-winning wineries have made it a popular tourist destination in recent years. The community of 37,000 has also seen rapid population growth in the last decade: between 2016 and 2021, the city’s population grew three times as fast as projected in its most recent Official Community Plan, in part due to an influx of remote workers during the pandemic and a growing workforce supporting the tourism industry. This growth has put pressure on the community’s housing stock, with the result that housing prices spiked by 50% in five years. 

Building a new life in a new country starts with making a new home. For families arriving in Canada with few resources, newcomer services can be a help in obtaining housing – but the items needed to fill the new homes are often overlooked. Some newcomers arrive with only their suitcases and urgently need bedding, kitchenware, seasonal clothing, and other essentials. ]Home Essentials Newcomer Support](https://henstoronto.com/) (HENS) began in 2018 with a single volunteer and her family who noticed this major gap in the settlement system and began collecting household goods for newcomer families. This effort grew into a neighbourhood non-profit organization that now operates across Thorncliffe Park, Flemingdon Park, and Scarborough – three Toronto neighbourhoods where many new arrivals to Canada first settle. A volunteer-led effort, HENS redistributes donated goods to newcomers in need, with the goal of helping families establish safe, functional homes to begin their new lives.

Post-secondary students in Hamilton, Ontario, are getting a close-up view of the value of municipal operations while building transferable skills as part of CityLAB Hamilton’s experiential learning program. An innovative partnership between the City of Hamilton, Mohawk College, McMaster University, and Redeemer University, CityLAB Hamilton connects students, faculty, and civic leaders with community-focused projects that align with the City’s strategic priorities. Since its inception in 2017, the program has welcomed more than 4,500 students and supported over 260 hands-on projects across the city.  

Modelled on similar experiential learning programs elsewhere in Canada, CityLAB Hamilton is distinct because it is housed within the City Manager’s Office, which gives the team a level of insight and access into priorities, projects, and staff across multiple municipal divisions. As a result, the projects are varied and represent the city’s current strategic priorities, giving students meaningful opportunities that address specific local needs. Projects may be suggested by city staff, faculty members, or the community, and have encompassed a wide range of academic disciplines and programs of study. They have included designing public awareness campaigns, conducting policy research, analyzing data, and increasing community engagement. Each year, program participants contribute to dozens of projects as part of their coursework, including independent or group research, hands-on participation outside of the classroom, and research competitions such as the Higher Education Analytics Data competition.  

Imagine a single program that creates meaningful employment opportunities, revitalizes derelict properties, and makes homeownership a possibility for local low-income families. It exists in downtown Sault Ste. Marie thanks to the Affordable Home Ownership Program (AHOP), an innovative partnership between the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing and the District of Sault Ste. Marie Social Services Administration Board (DSSAB).  

Sault Ste. Marie is the third-largest city in Northern Ontario, with a population of 72,000. It is experiencing a high level of housing pressure and a growing wait for social housing despite its comparatively affordable homes. At the same time, there are many abandoned properties downtown, which contribute to lower property values and raise concerns about safety among neighbours. More recently, the city’s economy has also suffered in the wake of U.S. tariffs on the steel industry, which have resulted in widespread layoffs and unemployment despite investments (from both the private sector and the federal government) aimed at shoring up the sector.  

Health-care practitioners have long known the positive impact that community has on well-being, but it is only recently that linking non-medical resources to health care has been recognized and codified as a national practice in Canada. The Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing (CISP) was founded in 2022 to establish a community of practice and to create a research and evidence base for demonstrating the efficacy of this approach at a national level. Through network building, training and accreditation programs, and practical toolkits, CISP has begun to shift health-care policy and practice across the country.  

Social prescribing is a health-care model that enables providers of health care or of social services to refer individuals to community resources and other non-clinical supports in order to improve their health and well-being in a variety of ways. Some provide basic needs in the form of income supplements, housing, and food. Others connect patients with local activities – such as arts organizations, cultural events, or nature outings – creating a sense of belonging and supporting their physical, mental, social and emotional health. The connections to local organizations are facilitated by link workers within the health or community-care sector. The practice is centred on equity and local context, and is adaptable to different cultures, capacities, and needs. 

Young people need spaces in their neighborhoods where they feel safe, are heard, and can be themselves. In 2016, the City of Mississauga recognized that youth in Malton – an ethnically diverse and geographically isolated neighbourhood in the city’s northeast – lacked sufficient access to health and community services, as well as dedicated spaces for recreation and arts programming. In response, they created the Malton Youth Hub, a one-stop destination for the area’s youth. The Hub, a converted swimming pool, houses in its 18,000+ square feet of space a recording studio, a commercial kitchen, multipurpose rooms, and a spacious atrium space for casual meet-ups and performances on a pop-up stage. Since its opening in Fall 2023, the Hub has become a vibrant destination for Malton residents aged 12 to 25, who find there a place to access services, express themselves without judgment, learn, grow, and have fun.  

The impact of climate change is uneven: often, low-income, highly racialized urban areas with fewer resources are harder hit. Young people living in these communities want to be part of the solution, but they are under-represented in environmental leadership spaces and can face significant barriers to participating in climate action. Skills for Change, an employment resources organization based in Toronto, sought to address both of these challenges by creating the Youth Climate Action Initiative (YCAI) in 2023. The program provides climate education and skills-based leadership development for participants aged 16 to 29 and was designed with youth from newcomer, racialized, and underserved communities in mind. Over the course of the 6-to-10 week program, participants develop the knowledge, skills, networks, and confidence they need to take meaningful action in local sustainability initiatives. 

In designing the climate education workshops, Skills for Change sought to include a variety of perspectives and to not just teach knowledge but provide tools for building participants’ confidence. Workshop content includes long-term visioning, community engagement and needs assessments, project management, grant writing, and professional communication skills. Some workshops have explored sustainability through an Indigenous lens, teaching traditional knowledge about our relationship to land and climate action. The program also builds interpersonal connections between participants, most of whom identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of colour, with many living in Toronto's identified Neighbourhood Improvement Areas. YCAI participants value being part of a community that shares similar lived experiences and backgrounds and that offers them a space where they can feel welcome, represented, and fully able to contribute. 

The City of Edmonton is equipping its residents to respond to the climate crisis with community action in their own neighbourhoods. The Neighbouring for Climate initiative focuses on building local social infrastructure and fostering opportunities to build networks, increase skills, and take collective ownership. The underlying principle is that while addressing climate change can feel overwhelming, collective action can make participation more tangible and accessible. The program, launched in 2024 after a period of community co-design and pilot testing, is part of the city’s Climate Resilient Edmonton adaptation strategy and action plan. Neighbouring for Climate encourages residents to become “climate connectors” who bring neighbours together to learn, share ideas, and act on local projects, from hosting information sessions about electric vehicles and resilient landscaping to establishing cooling centres. Program participants are supported through an online hub, newsletters, workshops, networking opportunities, and a toolkit. The city has created easy-to-use, readily adaptable guidebooks, templates, and action cards for sharing ideas, which feature themes such as Emergency Preparedness, Food Security, Energy and Fuel savings, Nature and Plants, and Waste and Water. Beginning in 2026, the city is even offering micro-grants of between $500 and $5,000 to support neighbourhood-driven adaptation projects. Only a couple of years in, the program has onboarded 243 connectors in 111 Edmonton neighborhoods and partnered with various municipal departments and community leagues. It continues to grow and widen its reach, celebrating small wins and learning by doing along the way.

Cross-Econ, an open-data initiative based in London, Ontario, is helping smaller Canadian municipalities build capacity to derive and share data insights. Established in 2023, the organization uses information from federal data sets to publish standardized dashboards, reports, and maps that foreground local insights for communities. Cross-Econ has developed six national data products to date: (1) a housing affordability econometric model that highlights the benefits of municipal coordination, (2) an open housing-data platform with 30 years of data from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, (3) housing-need benchmark reports, (4) a map of over 90,000 businesses that make up Canada’s climate economy, (5) a national AI-industry map illustrating the AI supply chain, and (6) a Canada Strong Fund map with municipal economic benchmarks. The initiative encourages organizations to keep their data sets open and free to all, making them available on a bilingual website so non-profits, governments, foundations, and grassroots organizations can more easily access, interpret, and share data. In three years and with no marketing budget, Cross-Econ has grown to thousands of users, with maps of over 1,000 communities. By creating a shared municipal data foundation, Cross-Econ is levelling the playing field for advocacy, planning, and decision-making across Canadian communities.

Taking inspiration from the Little Free Libraries that have become a common sight in many neighbourhoods, the youth group Finding Present established a Free Little Art Gallery in the foyer of the Timms Community Centre in downtown Langley, B.C., as a space for young artists to connect, share supplies, and exchange works of art. The gallery is specifically aimed at local youth, who often lack access to low-cost, welcoming places to socialize. With support from the Neighbourhood Small Grants program of the Association of Neighbourhood Houses of British Columbia, as well as from the City of Langley Youth Program, the Free Little Art Gallery opened in 2025 with a launch party that brought together youth of all ages to build connections and learn new artistic skills. The community has since taken collective ownership of the project, donating supplies and expanding the exhibition space. In 2026, additional grant funding helped the group create a series of summer programs linked to the gallery, including free crafting circles for youth artists and a program of “art drops” that encourage artists to leave small artworks in their favourite community spaces. By giving young people the space and materials to be creative, the Free Little Art Gallery is also fostering a culture of connection in Langley. 

In a rapidly growing Eastern Ontario community, the Municipality of North Grenville is experimenting with creating more missing middle housing through its Additional Residential Unit (ARU) Initiative, which encourages the building of self-contained units on properties that already have a primary residence. Also called “accessory dwelling units (ADUs),” or “in-law suites,” these secondary units can accommodate extended family or guests, or be rented out. ARUs contribute to intergenerational living arrangements, can create extra income for homeowners, and are an excellent option for the efficient and gentle densification of existing communities. Made possible by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Housing Accelerator Fund, the ARU Initiative offers North Grenville homeowners a one-time grant of $25,000 and four municipally approved detached ARU design options free to use for those eligible to build an additional unit on their properties. The municipality also reformed its zoning to allow ARUs as of right in many areas. In just over a year, the results have been striking: with the combined impact of the zoning reforms and the new initiative, over 30 new ARUs have been developed across the municipality, and 10 grants have been awarded. The municipality has continually improved the initiative: based on lessons learned from academia and community feedback, it has adjusted designs to lower costs, explored panelized construction options, and developed landlord and tenant education programs. The ARU Initiative is a model for expanding housing options through thoughtful experimentation, building capacity in North Grenville as the township transitions from its rural roots into a more urbanized centre.

A number of online rental platforms post listings of accommodations in Toronto, but the Toronto Home Zone (THZ) is unique in the support it offers renters seeking secure and affordable housing in Canada’s largest city. The online platform, created and hosted by the Toronto Housing Society, offers active moderation and human verification of its rental listings in order to protect its users from scams, discriminatory practices, illegal lease terms, and unwarranted price escalations. A volunteer-run digital network, THZ connects renters, roommates, subletters, and landlords, as well as offering templates for subletting and roommate agreements, rent receipts, and other tools for building knowledge of fair rental practices. A rolling 120-day Live Market Insights tool gives a picture of true market prices undistorted by false or underpriced listings. THZ’s strict community conduct rules facilitate a social infrastructure that increases transparency and protects its members from exploitative practices. THZ volunteers reviewed over 12,500 listings in 2025 alone, rejecting thousands that failed to meet community standards for fairness, transparency, or legitimacy. The platform’s trust-centred approach has attracted 150,000 members to date, demonstrating that bottom-up community action can improve safety and transparency within existing systems. Looking ahead, THZ is actively evolving to decentralize the platform and use lessons from its collected data to create a model ready for replicating in other communities throughout Ontario.

With consumer spending accounting for roughly 60% of Canada's GDP, the impact of purchasing decisions can extend far beyond the transaction itself. Many people want to buy local, but given the complexity of global supply chains and ownership structures it can be difficult to determine a product’s origins – standard labels such as “made in” or “product of” reveal little. The Shorefast Institute’s Economic Nutrition certification program closes this information gap by making the flow of dollars spent at a business or other organization more visible. Certified organizations trace each dollar they spend in a fiscal year and report the results on a label that meets Shorefast’s standard. Modelled on a food nutrition label, an Economic Nutrition certification mark traces the money that an organization spends in terms of geography (percentages to local, regional, national, and international destinations) and of activity (percentages to labour, material, business operations, wages and salaries, etc.). This transparency allows people to see where their money goes and how it strengthens local economies. Certified organizations include private businesses, social enterprises, non-profits, municipalities, chambers of commerce, and Indigenous organizations, demonstrating the concept’s adaptability across sectors and regions. At a time when governments are increasingly required to “buy Canadian” and public interest in supporting local is growing, the initiative's standardized framework for measuring and communicating impact has become more critical. While the model was first developed on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, in 2018, it has expanded to include partners in New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia, showing the widespread value of connecting commerce with communities. 

Black youth can face significant barriers to accessing mental health support, including cost, long wait times, transportation challenges, cultural stigma, and a lack of culturally responsive services. Healing Roots, a youth mental health program run by the Scarborough Centre for Healthy Communities, was created to address these barriers and support the emotional, psychological, and social well-being of Black youth aged 10 to 29 in Scarborough, Ontario. The program is designed to meet young people where they are through a range of evidence-based supports – such as peer connections, mentorship, mental health workshops, and summer camps – aimed at reducing stigma and building resilience among Black youth and their families. Healing Roots has also developed and filmed several public service announcements to encourage conversations about mental health and help-seeking in the community. The program is committed to ensuring that all services are representative of Black cultures, experiences, and identities. As demand for culturally responsive mental health services continues to grow, Healing Roots is working to expand its programming, increase outreach, strengthen partnerships, and improve service delivery.

Many young people experience climate anxiety, eco-grief, and the stress and uncertainty of growing up in a time of worsening climate impacts such as wildfires, drought, and extreme heat. Saskatchewan-based Break The Divide (BTD) created the Climate Emotions and Resilience Program to support youth in rural, newcomer, Indigenous, and racialized communities that are at the forefront of these changes by providing them with spaces to connect with each other and opportunities to take action in their own communities. The program helps young people process climate-related emotions, build coping skills, strengthen peer connections, and move from isolation toward agency, resilience, and local action. BTD hosts workshops and programming in schools and communities seeing the effects of climate change, using a framework of education, dialogue, storytelling, reflection, and action-oriented activities – often facilitated by near peers of the participants. The initiative moves beyond a focus on awareness and behaviour change to help young people form social connections and confidence that will support their mental health while also building local climate resilience, leadership, and belonging. To date, the program has reached over 2,500 students in schools and communities across Saskatchewan, and has helped to normalize conversations about emotions relating to climate change while equipping young people with practical tools for coping, reflection, and community action. 

Nearly 25% of households in Toronto experience food insecurity, with Black and Indigenous communities disproportionately affected. Traditional food banks are serving more people than ever, faced with higher demand and an increasingly challenging economic environment. FoodShare Toronto’s Grown in TO program tackles these problems with an approach that encompasses cultivation, distribution, and community action to create a robust and truly local food system. On urban farms across Toronto, growers cultivate food that is then distributed in produce boxes and bulk orders to seniors’ residences, schools, Indigenous child and family support centres, and community kitchens. FoodShare’s dedicated team of packers and drivers provides an affordable alternative to commercial delivery suppliers by prioritizing access to fresh food over profit. The organization also supports a city-wide network of more than 50 community produce markets intended to bring fresh food to the places where communities need it, including on college campuses and in the lobbies of social-housing buildings. Through this integrated system, FoodShare is supporting communities from growers to end consumers, improving the predictability of how food moves through the system, and creating a more sustainable, resilient, and local supply chain.

Malvern, located in the eastern Toronto district of Scarborough, is one of Canada’s densest, most diverse neighbourhoods. It is also the site of a major proposed redevelopment project – Malvern Town Centre – that will bring new opportunities to the area but also poses risks in the form of rising rents and the potential displacement of existing residents. While community planning is intended to take local needs and priorities into account, standard consultation processes rarely reach low-income residents, small business owners, newcomers, and tower communities, let alone produce genuine community co-creation. The Our Malvern, Our Future research initiative seeks to bring more community voices into the Malvern Town Centre planning process by connecting academic insights to community action. The initiative, launched in 2025 with the support of the City of Toronto and led by the Toronto Community Benefits Network and Our Greenway, has consistently prioritized community needs and Indigenous leadership, including calling for intergenerational spaces, affordable housing, and local-resident representation in art and design throughout the site. A technical advisory group translates the priorities voiced by community members into inputs for municipal engagement processes. And community canvassing, in partnership with the INTERACT health research collective, will collect data from 13,000 households to establish a baseline before construction begins so residents’ experiences can be tracked throughout the redevelopment. By establishing this model for applied research in a large-scale urban redevelopment, Our Malvern, Our Future empowers Malvern residents to play a central role in their future neighbourhood – and paves the way for further data-informed, community-led equitable urban redevelopment in Canada.