Reports
Learn about our work.
Year 2 Report
Year 2 of the Community Climate Art Pilot
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This year’s work focused on expanding our impact through the 4 strategic pillars from last year's recommendation: Connecting to the City, Building to Scale, creating an Ecosystem Guide and expanding Dedicated Space. We’ve continued to explore our core question: How can the city can equip, enable, and empower community-led climate action in support of the implementation of the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy?
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This report highlights the successes, opportunities, and challenges faced in Year 2 across the four core pillars of our work. New recommendations are also made to continue building on community impact.
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Climate Mapping
Mapping community climate action in Toronto
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This report on Mapping Community Climate Action in Toronto covers activities from our project’s year one climate mapping work. We surveyed organizations starting with the members of Toronto Climate Action Network, and compiled maps to understand existing connections and towards building cross-sectoral collaborations necessary to achieving systems-level change.
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Our relational and geographic mapping work affirmed our theory that many climate groups connected to the TCAN network are centered downtown, and that intentional outreach to most-impacted and equity-owed communities is needed to improve future climate engagement.
This initial mapping work resulted in a set of 9 recommendations for action, and possible directions for next phases of mapping.
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Youth Engagement
Creatively bolstering climate engagement among youth
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This guide book on Creatively Bolstering Climate Engagement Among Youth was researched and written by University of Toronto undergraduate students for Toronto Climate Action Network (TCAN) and the Lighthouse Collective project, to offer best practices and experience-based suggestions for institutions, non-profit organizations, or artists interested in using art-based engagement strategies to involve youth in climate action. This guide was created as part of an undergraduate final year Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project (MUCP), with the School of Cities.
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The team of students identified that young people, as an equity-owed group, have been inadequately engaged in climate action and decision-making. The students recommend using various multimodal avenues of outreach, using relation-based engagement, taking a place-based approach, and setting up collaborations to scale-up engagement work. Considerations on accessibility, audience, and outreach media are explained, along with resources for further reading.
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Malvern Community Challenge
A collective impact climate art pilot
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Starting in 2022, Canadian Community Challenge has been designing and piloting a multi-phased approach to art-based community engagement, with an initial focus in Malvern,North Scarborough, grounded in the team’s history and longtime family connections to that community. This report describes the pilot approach, the community-based activities that were carried out in the first year of the pilot project, and insights drawn from year one.
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This report explains CCC’s focus on the importance of community narrative, and why art-based approaches are vital to creating meaningful community conversations and visioning. Focusing on empowerment and climate justice, and using both backcasting and collective impact approaches, the report concludes that marginalized communities are uniquely positioned to embrace a transformative change narrative. This year in Malvern demonstrated exactly the role we need community climate art to play, and the value it brings.
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Features
Publications and reports we’re featured in.
Youth Climate Engagement Strategy (2025)
City of Toronto report: Understanding how the City can best support existing youth climate leadership and broader youth climate engagement and action
TransformTO progress (2024)
City of Toronto report: Implementation progress to date on responding to City Council directions on the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy
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The City of Toronto’s climate action strategy, called the TransformTO Net Zero Strategy, identified supporting youth leadership on climate action as a key priority for the City. The City of Toronto and a team from the University of Toronto undertook a collaborative engagement process to understand how the City can best support existing youth climate leadership and broader youth climate engagement and action.
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Recommendation 1 of the Report is to "Fund, resource, connect, and support the development of climate hubs with a youth focus.” The Lighthouse supported Youth Harbour hub at the Centre for Social Innovation is an example of one of the three types of hubs recommended by the report. The report notes that they "see climate hubs with a youth focus as responding to all of the 11 themes."
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This City of Toronto progress report discusses its commitment to supporting resident-led climate action and engagement by dedicating resources to supporting community hubs, community centres, neighbourhood pods and other local support networks, as key social and physical infrastructure for strengthening community climate engagement and resilience, and how our Collective Impact project is advancing that work (see report p5).
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The City is supporting our foundation-building Collective Impact work; towards integrating climate into the existing network of community hubs, and establishing new climate-specific hubs, especially targeting youth, and art-based approaches to community engagement.
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