PARTNERSHIPS
Our First Year
of Civic Hall Toronto BY Shea Sinnott, Program Manager, Civic hall Toronto Civic Hall Toronto is a non-profit hub for those working to strengthen civic innovation in Canada’s largest city. They build relationships between government innovators, entrepreneurs, technologists, and residents, and help them collaboratively address civic challenges using technology and design. I can’t believe it has been a year since I stood on a podium in The CSI Spadina Atrium and introduced the world to Civic Hall Toronto.
Good things happen when you bring people from different sectors together and remove barriers to shared learning and collaboration. We know this because we’ve seen it. Through our programs, the team at StreetARToronto connected with members of Civic Tech Toronto and built a new, interactive digital map of the city’s incredible street art. Toronto’s Entrepreneurship Services team met with the Indigenous business community and together they began building a new
Indigenous Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. And Ample Labs, a local civic tech startup, connected with the city’s Shelter Support and Housing Administration to collaborate on an app that connects residents experiencing homelessness with services like food and housing. As we head into our second year, we look forward to strengthening these existing relationships, and creating opportunities to forge new ones. If you’d like to get involved, head to civichallto.ca!
We launched the program with a clear goal: to break down siloes in the city – siloes isolating government from residents, or cutting the tech community off from the social impact sector – and enable innovators to co-create solutions for the Greater Toronto Area. And that’s what we’ve done. Over the past year, we signed up 13 government teams from the City of Toronto and the City of Markham, and welcomed them to work alongside us at CSI. We ran 32 events for 771 people, including 13 training workshops for public servants. We held six office hours events, where the public met our government members and shared the issues that matter to them.
Photography by Liz Beddall of Liz Beddall Photography
The Collider Centre for Social Innovation 7