Vision

Melanie Sack, Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Society, participant at Participatory City Camp, Wasan Island, 2019

The McConnell Foundation, Participatory City Foundation, the Maison de l’innovation sociale (MIS) and MaRS Solutions Lab cohosted a Participatory City Camp at Wasan Island in Ontario in July 2019. The camp brought together a group of city builders and civic innovators from Canada and abroad. This gathering became a pivotal moment in the Participatory Canada journey, kicking off a pan-Canada partnership and strategy that ultimately led to the social R&D phase in 202012. Participants explored ways to build, scale and finance the Participatory City London model in Canadian communities. They also generated a list of key principles to catalyze the R&D phase:

• Embed reconciliation within the pan-Canadian approach.

Indigenous communities must be meaningfully engaged in the design process of Participatory Canada. • Enable the participation of everyone, every day in order to address the multiple interconnected challenges that our communities face. • Design and integrate the platform as a living ecosystem. • Consider providing support for projects outside target locations. Connect and support residents who do not live in the sites where interventions are taking place to better integrate their needs in the design of the model. • Build innovative partnerships with governments to advance institutional and regulatory innovations. • Connect academic institutions and civic spaces into the participatory ecosystem. • Provide a platform for everyday residents to experiment and scale new ideas to address social issues. • Map the usual and unusual suspects to invite them to take part in this transformative movement for change.

12 To learn more about this gathering, please visit: https://medium.com/cities-for-people/participatory-city-camp-d674fab868de While some of these initial principles have evolved in the past year, the essence and scope of the vision remains largely unchanged. At the heart of the approach is a very simple idea: that residents of any place should have free and inclusive access to the tools and opportunities they need to act, with their neighbours, on the things which matter to them, using their creativity and talents, and developing their skills in the process. Recognizing that the context in which these tools are provided will always be complex, with multiple overlapping systems of governance, ownership and power, and that the histories and ways of working are unique to each place, we nevertheless set out to learn and take on the challenges together. The potential upside of building a new system for community resilience made it worthwhile to the partners.