Navigating the Pathways of Growth and Scale

Participatory City is an inspiring initiative with the great promise of impact through creating more inclusive and participatory communities and culture within cities. The pathway to scaling and growing the Participatory City approach in Canada will need to both grow the essential components, and scale towards its ambition over the next ten years (see Figure 10). The direction of growth and scaling of Participatory Canada will be dependent on balancing the approaches to scaling social innovations, determining the appropriate funding strategies and partners, and being flexible towards future externalities and systemic possibilities that emerge as implementation occurs across Canada.

Through the three convening sessions, there were many points of alignment between the participants and the principles of Participatory City. These elements of consensus serve as initial design principles to help guide the development of the Participatory City approach in the first deep city implementation and in subsequent cities. Over time, the essential elements will grow with the approach. Additionally, three factors will also scale over time: connections to people, sustainable financing, and building networks.

Navigating the growing and scaling pathway means making key choices about the context and support for sequencing and strategic decisions on resources, such as considerations for when and how to develop people and capacity, financing approaches and methods, and how to support cities. Working through the roadmap also means considering the different elements for scaffolding the pathway from the present to reach the ten year vision by addressing assumptions, gaps, risks and opportunities in growing and scaling the Participatory City approach within communities.

The Participatory Canada Roadmap puts forward choices to help frame the path and direction of Participatory Canada that need to be considered for growing and scaling over 1, 5 and 10 years of implementation.

Over the next decade, the six essential components and their three cross cutting activities and dynamics will need to grow and scale as the base for Participatory Canada. Starting with initial ‘national’ support needed from the city teams, over time, support from the more mature cities using the Participatory City approach may transition as communities build capacity for the approach within cities across Canada. Establishing formalized structures and nurturing relationships with the main learning campus will enable new cities and communities to join and utilize the Participatory City approach to create more cities with practical participatory ecosystems.

Establishing a national platform that connects Canada directly to Participatory City UK and to grassroots city programs will aid in building the foundational Participatory City principles and infrastructures within Canada. A key scenario being considered by Participatory Canada is to have a primary focus over the first one to three years to successfully build a learning campus in an initial city, and build capabilities and provide support in up to an additional nine cities. All would be part of the learning and research community of the Participatory City global network, through the ‘Here&Now’ school. This scenario was informed by participants in the three strategy sessions who collectively expressed the need for Participatory Canada to go deep within a city to demonstrate the impact, learning capacities and resources required for growing and scaling the program here in Canada.

While Participatory Canada builds the deep demonstration learning campus in partnership with one city initially, in the key scenario, the team would also support and build inter-city relationships, research, and evaluation. This would provide a national view with continuous learning and adaptation of the work as well as compound the outcomes being generated.

Within the key scenario, the essential components (see Figure 7) signify the critical elements that need to be established for a functioning practical participatory ecosystem. They create the foundation to build the infrastructures for the Participatory City approach that lead to impact and social innovation in communities.

For Participatory Canada, the vision and ambition of the program is being co-developed with the current three prototype communities in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto, to understand the unique benefits and opportunities appropriate for their contexts. Furthering the discussions from Wasan Island in 2019, the three strategic convening sessions validated the major themes for the vision and identified new elements that have emerged over the past year of experimentation. The vision for Participatory Canada should include the following elements:

• Respond to the needs of communities, and provide residents with the agency, ability, tools and network to jumpstart their own ideas and ventures. • Change the ways communities and cities function to enable a systemic culture of participation that residents and visitors recognize, and that builds social capital and community resilience. • Provide the means for communities to thrive and create resilience by fostering inclusive and meaningful interactions within communities and remove barriers to practical collaboration. • Create the use cases and evidence to help shape policy and advocate for systemic and policy change that is more responsive to the needs of communities and cities. • Provide training and reciprocal learning from the community to inform the Participatory City approach. Create new models for cities to interact and learn from one another.

The ambition and vision of Participatory Canada needs to manifest from a bottom-up approach, that is enabled through the national team and the supporting network of global practitioners. In the early stages, in-person learning modes are preferred and welcomed to provide foundational principles to the designers and local practitioners. The initial, deep city implementation in Canada will require a substantial amount of time and training with the London-based team to immerse themselves in these principles and skills.

The Participatory Canada team will need to make strategic choices around the implementation of the vision in Canada, since every city has its own unique context. Consider creating flexibility within the program design, learning and measurement methods to allow for the exploration of new models, such as developing Indigenousled or co-led approaches that center reconciliation, and address systemic racism. Also consider embracing the unique challenges in each community as a means to advancing and developing the current set of Participatory City approaches. Through the three strategic session discussions, participants identified the need to effectively respond to the demand emerging from many cities and communities in Canada. Further development and adaptation of the Participatory City approach is critical to establish a proven use case in Canada which will help unlock sustainable funding. Initially for the deep city implementation, Participatory Canada should carefully consider the conditions needed for success in order to have the proper support, achieve the desired impacts, and gain leadership and buy-in from various levels of government and community. This would help create the initial agency and clearing of “red-tape” for the community to build participatory practices. Additionally, local leadership (eg. public servants, community organizations) and experienced project designers will help catalyze the initiative to activate and engage the community.

Participants in the convening sessions and in other discussions identified additional necessary conditions to ensure success for the Participatory City approach in a local context.

• Demand for the approach exists from coalitions of community organizations, political leaders, and public servants. This manifests from an awareness of core challenges within communities with an innovative mindset to leverage new tools and models to address these challenges. • There are identified communities with great need.

Underlying challenges and city motivations to address social challenges, like reconciliation and racism, should be considered a priority. For example, this could manifest in collaborating with city partners and amplifying programs in existing Neighborhoods Improvement Areas.31 • Connect with passionate community organizations, individuals, and accompanying talent pools to source multidisciplinary teams with designers, project, and program managers. • Local infrastructure exists to support the physical spaces necessary for deployment of programs like the Warehouse (Maker Space), Every One Every Day storefronts, and

Tomorrow Today Streets starter kits.

Additional considerations need to be assessed while the Participatory Canada team strives for validation and success in the deep implementation as a means to promote and accelerate the adoption of the Participatory City approach in other places in Canada. The team will need to consider factors around local economics, global visibility of the program, and the immediacy of impact required. In particular, financial viability is an important quality to consider in each local context that stems from different economic factors in each region of Canada. For example, the growing inequity and affordability challenges within a city like Toronto could significantly impact the cost estimates put forward in this Roadmap versus smaller municipalities. Inversely, Toronto could provide opportunities to drive immediate impact and learning opportunities for communities facing challenges, because of high quality local talent, and the well connected global presence and network of a city of its size. These factors provide additional pressures, challenges and opportunities to consider when implementing the Participatory City approach in any community in Canada.

Figure 11 - Participatory Canada Learning Architecture

The Participatory City learning architecture is a foundational element for communities and cities to embody and proliferate the values of the approach. Participants in the three convening sessions expressed a strong affinity towards experiential learning. Gaining knowledge through practical experience creates opportunities to build deep empathy for the Participatory City approach and values while enabling teams and communities to adapt the tools and services to their local contexts.

Through the spectrum of learning architectures developed through the Participatory City approach, the following fundamental principles must be considered in the Canadian context to help build the necessary capacity for learning over the next decade.

• Compliment inter-city learning architecture with intracity learning to increase the learning efficiency for all

Participatory City practitioners. This inter-city learning architecture may also help inform the definition of a minimum viable system for Participatory Canada by distinguishing what is unique to each city versus what is universal across all cities. • Make reciprocal learning experiences as essential between teams, communities, and cities. While a deep and thorough understanding of the Participatory City approach is needed from all involved to ensure alignment and added value of the model, there is also a need to deeply understand each specific context in which Participatory City will occur. A clear understanding held by Participatory Canada and all participants ensures the legitimacy of Participatory Canada for all. For example, this enables sharing and embracement of local participatory culture and experiences, including

Indigenous culture and experience; existing initiatives and partnerships that could support and amplify the

Participatory City approach; etc. • Prioritize immersive and distributed, peer-to-peer, human interaction focused learning mechanisms in the learning architecture. Preferred even in the early learning stages of the

Participatory City approach, these methods were perceived as more valuable for building trust and relationships that are seen as critical for a successful kick-off, as opposed to using more data-driven learning mechanisms. Prioritizing in-person learning mechanisms will impact the resourcing and learning infrastructure required at both the city and national level, such as the school.

Participatory City learning architecture (see Figure 11) takes a laddered approach to building knowledge and gaining the necessary skills and experiences that lead to the creation of practical participatory ecosystems. There are three phases of learning architecture development.

• Early Interest and discovery: Tangible elements and communication pieces, such as websites, articles, reports, and in-person and online events, create awareness and an entry point into the Participatory City approach. • Development knowledge: Activities, such as city government webinars, discovery days, workshops, study trips and camps, and development workshops build knowledge and experiences in the ways the Participatory

City approach can impact communities. • Building initiatives capacity: Mature phase activities, such as online workshops and learning networks, project kits, domain knowledge development, learning frameworks (system components), playbooks and webinars (system components), tutoring and development design, immersive core training in live projects, and live projects networks, further develop skills and expertise in the Participatory City approach.

Participants in the three convening sessions expressed that trust needs to be established at the forefront to enable the Participatory City approach to take hold within our communities and give agency for the program. Creating and building trust is needed at the community level through the design of programs and impacts. It is also important to build legitimacy around the impacts and purpose, allowing for the development of the necessary relationships that drive funding opportunities, and social and economic license to operate within a city. Building trust can be enabled through the Participatory City learning architecture and by a focus on thoughtful communication and relationships between the participants and the layers of government engaged in the work. Additionally, even though participants preferred experiential learning, building trust through digital means needs a renewed focus given the effects of COVID-19 over the past year. Enhancing the digital offerings within the learning architecture by focusing on the quality of interactions, digital mediums and tools used, and the community of learning surrounding the learning modules can bridge the divide between in-person preferences and the constraints towards digital.

Core to the Participatory City approach is the prevalence of physical assets and spaces for the community to congregate and create value within their communities. The deployment and experimentation of Participatory City within early adopter cities will rely on the development of and access to these spaces in the heart of communities in which people live. Spaces, like the warehouse and shopfronts in Barking and Dagenham, provide the necessary opportunities for practical participatory ecosystems to take hold. Having these core pieces of infrastructure supported and made available by cities and governments creates sustainability for the Participatory City approach and provides anchor locations within the community. These investments into the community serve and support the social infrastructures that this approach is looking to cultivate. Strong relationships with cities and adjacent funders, such as foundations and non-profit developers, could serve as alternative means to finance these spaces.

Additional learning topics were identified by participants in the three convening sessions that should be developed to add knowledge, capacity, and new perspectives to the Participatory City approach in Canada. They include how to:

• Embed Indigenous practices within Participatory City for the Canadian adaptation • Better engage residents in shops with maximum inclusivity in Participatory Canada communities • Share best practices for the set-up and management of community storefronts • Develop and utilize tools from local experiments in other

Participatory Canada implementations • Share and evolve the business case for creating social infrastructure, like public makerspaces

The Participatory Canada team will need to consider how to best promote and develop the learning architecture in Canada so that it can support many different types and densities of communities. Communication and ecosystem activation will need a common language. Consider how to leverage the school, learning approaches, and external communication tools to bridge the language gaps that exist. This will allow Participatory Canada to build strong and consistent narratives to bring others along in this space. There is also a market challenge of developing new metrics and non-economic indicators that measure the impacts that a practical participatory ecosystem looks to achieve. Consider how to build the capacity and expertise for measurement through the learning architecture in Canada to enable new forms of outcomes based financing with the ability to validate and measure success. This would help Participatory Canada to build stronger business cases for communities and cities.

The school creates an essential hub for the Participatory City approach. It is a place to connect the growing set of deep learning campuses, share learnings and adaptations of the approach, and create skills for city teams and communities. The initial deep city implementation should act as the main Canadian learning campus of the Here&Now school to be a hub and entry point for other Canadian cities to connect into and discover the Participatory City approach. Cities would be able to leverage the resources and expertise from the campus as they become more mature Participatory Canada cities. The school forms a core piece of the learning architecture of Participatory Canada to create a space for new cities and communities to leverage knowledge and apply it to their local context - building capacity for systems change.

• As a first touchpoint into the Participatory City approach for new communities • As a way to coordinate learnings across cities and teams • As an aggregator of outcomes and impact measurement • As field based sites for demonstration of social R&D practices • As a skills and knowledge ‘educator’ • As an ongoing learning and training place for cities and communities

The initial deep learning campus in Canada should provide a local connection into the global Participatory City learning platform. The connection to the Here&Now school could help facilitate new learnings and opportunities to co-build new initiatives with local teams and partners. Connecting into a larger network of experimentation could also provide benefits for the domestic and global community to adopt emerging practices. Testing would need to be conducted to better understand how the Canadian deep learning campus can leverage the Participatory City learning architecture while identifying how to best share the learnings back to the global platform and other participating cities in Canada. The initial three city prototypes in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto can serve as the testing grounds for the potential variations of the adapted learning infrastructure and their connection to the school.

At the onset of growing the deep learning city implementation, strong relationships and dedicated resources will need to be established to ensure in-person learning occurs and relationships form. This will require the creation of collaborative partnerships between Participatory Canada and local governments to design and engage key individuals, building trust and localizing the Participatory City approach based on the current Canadian prototypes. The Participatory Canada team should consider how to engage with post-secondary institutions, academics, and experts (designers) since they will be necessary in building local capacity and establishing the Canadian Campus. Over time, engagement with these organizations and individuals will need to scale across Canada to support and connect to other learning campuses. Funding relationships with philanthropic and public sector partners will need to be established to catalyze early investments into the school and deep learning implementation.

There are many considerations for how the school can be most effective in building the necessary skills and knowledge base within Canada. The Participatory Canada team should consider and adapt over time the optimal structure and functions of the school within Canada so that it is of value to communities and is in harmony with the efforts of the global Here&Now school. These functions require varying skills sets and resources to implement, and also require management and coordination of relationships with Participatory City UK, other global learning campuses, and at the community level. Participatory Canada should consider how to implement, grow, and scale the following functions of the school:

Adequate resources are needed to create the conditions necessary for successfully growing Participatory Canada for developing learning campuses (initially a deep demonstration in one place) and for supporting broader growth and scaling in other communities and cities over time. Both people and financial resources are required to provide the support for the on-theground efforts to create, measure, and demonstrate sustained impact of practical participatory ecosystems (see Figure 12).

The roles and responsibilities of city teams and a national team depend on the purpose and function of each entity. In the key scenario surfaced by participants in the three strategic sessions, the national team would function as the School to support the deep demonstration city implementation. The national team should be established at the onset to provide support and leadership to all participating cities and communities. Roles and responsibilities should be focused on several key areas to embed the current learnings of the Participatory City approach and to communicate the initiative to build relationships across the country. Participatory Canada would offer partnerships and collaboration, national level developmental evaluation, codification of learnings, and knowledge building. It would also take the lead in coordinating the construction of learning formats, curriculum and materials, and disseminating and diffusing the expertise, research, and know-how to other Canadian cities that adopt the Participatory City approach.

Support from the national team in the early stages of the deep implementation city should help amplify relationship building, connections to the global platform, and coordination of financing for the prototypes. Overall, the national team should be responsible for fostering relationships to build and finance the infrastructures needed for the development and implementation of the approach as the network of partner cities and neighbourhoods grows over time.

Each city would require a local team to help steward the learnings of the Participatory City approach and to adapt the approach to their local context and communities. City teams should initially focus on building practical participatory ecosystems through on the ground programs and connections to the Participatory Canada city network. City teams in the early stages should be composed of experts in the field of community program development, delivery, and design, to be able to support and execute complex initiatives. After approximately two years of successfully growing the participation systems locally, a city should become a Deep Learning Campus, with the expertise and programming to develop and implement immersive experiential courses that could be used and experienced by new city teams. Overall, the city teams should leverage the skills of designers, project and program managers, storytellers, and collaborators to establish and build towards the local vision, establish and nurture relationships, and support community initiatives that develop the practical participation ecosystems within their local communities. Figure 12 - Supporting the growth of Participatory Canada

Figure 13 - Estimated costs associated with an example of one cohort of cities at different levels of implementation depth of the Participatory City approach over five years

Participatory Canada should develop financial estimates and assumptions for initially supporting one deep and four medium city implementations with the intention of supporting a further 5 small implementation cities by year 3. Early stage prototype implementations for a city, lasting from three to twelve months, could have cost ranges of $125,000 to $650,000 for a team, platform components and shop locations. The financial projections accompanying this section reference the Barking and Dagenham, UK use case, which may inflate costing projections due to a mature social and participatory infrastructure built to this point. In years 0-3, Participatory Canada may scale up or down the number of shopfronts and maker spaces as well as the size of the learning campus support for each of the deep, medium and small implementations. Early portfolios of prototypes across neighbourhoods, or even cities, should be explored to test system components and how they interact with inter and intra-city learning and global knowledge sharing and mobilization. As cities mature in embedding the Participatory City approach, costs could increase to around $2.6 million per year to run a full deep demonstration Every One Every Day program at scale within a city, reaching a population of 220,000. This estimate accounts for 5 shop fronts at maturity, with the system proliferating across various neighborhoods within the city. Small to Medium sized implementations would target to have 2 and 3 shop fronts at maturity to engage up to 120,000 individuals. Each city implementation would have funding to support learning architecture in their local contexts. Figure 13 describes the estimated costs associated with an example set of cities at different levels of implementation depth of the Participatory City approach in one cohort of cities that join Participatory Canada at the same time - one deep implementation city; four medium scale implementation cities; and five small implementation cities. The financial estimates in the example do not reflect the addition of costs from other cohorts of cities joining each subsequent year. See Appendix B for financial notes and assumptions.

Early stage funding of Participatory Canada could target public granting opportunities for city prototype development and for establishing the learning and system components that would create the foundations for the deep learning campus. Near term options for funding explored through the strategic sessions gravitated towards traditional funding and granting opportunities through public and philanthropic funds. The team should also focus on raising funds from provincial and federal governments, starting in the early stages, in particular drawing on social and civic infrastructure, and COVID-19 recovery budgets. Participatory Canada is also a good candidate for continued funding through the Investment Readiness Program32, to help build on the early city prototype work. As evaluation and measurement is in development in early stages, and it is more difficult to directly demonstrate impact, more complex methods related to outcomes based financing, like social impact bonds, community bonds, and other private capital, would not yet be appropriate. The ambition from Participatory Canada, combined with perspectives shared by participants in the strategic sessions, indicated a preference to have municipal support and budget allocation geared towards practical participatory ecosystems, likeinvesting in Participatory Canada. Later stages of funding could start to leverage outcomes based financing methods to supplement city funds, which would be based on outcomes achieved in early stages, with the anticipation of demonstrating deeper and more impactful outcomes after ten years. Medium to long term options should be more defined, with attributable and traceable outcomes and impact measurement to build business cases with predictable returns on investment. Additionally, funding from social impact bonds, community bonds or other financing with an impact lens could apply in the long term to finance the physical assets and infrastructure for growing and scaling Participatory Canada.

Participants of the three strategic sessions stressed that Participatory Canada should work towards fulfilling the ambition of the programming being sustainably financed and embedded long-term into municipal balance sheets, similar to how library systems are funded as free, community resources. Outcomes and impact measurement will be critical in demonstrating the viability and effectiveness of the practical participatory ecosystems over time. Specifically at the city level, aligning with desired neighborhood and city impact objectives, and at the national level, aligning with large community infrastructure impact objectives.

In defining the total people and financial costs for growing and scaling Participatory Canada, the team should consider the degree of funding and operational support provided by the National team. There is great benefit in providing national support and resources to develop a robust team and programming to increase the chances of success for the deep implementation city and overall validation of the Participatory City approach in Canada. The team should consider how much funding and support is required and can be provided from the national level, both people and financial resources, as new cities join the Participatory Canada network. This consideration will need to balance the nurturing of the overall program in Canada through growth and scaling, while creating capacity within and between cities and with decreasing reliance on the National team for ongoing sustainability over time. This could be achieved through building capacity in cohorts of new cities and enabling knowledge and skills transfers to future cohorts from established partner cities.

Developing evidence of impact through evaluation is highly important for Participatory Canada to consider both in the early stages of implementation and ongoing over time. Demonstrating impact in the broad context of Canadian cities will be essential to prove the viability and effectiveness of systems change through practical participatory ecosystems. At a local level this will be reflected in the need to demonstrate the success of the learning architecture and how the Participatory City approach is deployed and adapted in each local context. To date, a developmental evaluation approach has been used to continuously learn and iterate through the three city prototypes in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto. This has helped develop an understanding of the Participatory City processes, activities, and early impacts. Participants in the three strategic sessions indicated that this method of evaluation should continue to be relied upon in the deep implementation cities and when onboarding new cities in Canada. Evaluation will continue to generate information that leads to the refinement of Participatory Canada at the national level, and at the local community and city level through developing and documenting learnings for new cities to consider when initializing the Participatory City approach in their own communities.

Participatory Canada should use the Participatory City Outcomes Framework as a model to employ within Canada to measure and monitor the systemic benefits manifested through compound outcomes. It also supports the measurement of the overall impacts achieved via engagement and proliferation of participatory projects within communities33 .

Participants in the three strategic sessions strongly emphasized the need for reliable evidence and impact to be demonstrated initially through the deep implementation city to form the trust and agency needed to embed the Participatory City approach into our cities in Canada. Cities should use this approach in the short term to document the direct and immediate effects (e.g. participation and projects) while capturing the compound outcomes over the long term (e.g. mental wellbeing, and growing confidence and capabilities). This will not only give cities the deepening confidence to adopt the Participatory City approach, it will also provide much needed evidence to funders to provide funding support for sustainable implementation.

The compound and amplified outcomes resulting from Participatory City programs and systems are the driver and value generation for communities and cities. Early indicators, such as participation and programs within a community, create deep impact and shifts in the way our communities function and how resilient they are long term to socioeconomic shocks.

33 Participatory City Foundation, (2020), “Tools to Act”, Page 30, http://www.participatorycity.org/ tools-to-act Key factors, which can be identified for impact and value creation over time and that improve the wellbeing of individuals, families and neighbourhoods, were focused on during the strategic convening session discussions. Each factor should be tracked and reported on over time. For some factors it may be challenging to attribute causal relationships. However, proxies should be identified and used to generate sufficient information to demonstrate financial impacts which can be leveraged for outcomes based financing for funding programs or used as cost avoidance accounting for cities. The following factors are informed outcomes aggregated from the Participatory City UK Y2 Report and supplemented by conversations in the convening sessions.

• Education: Provide spaces for collaboration, interaction and learning to benefit the sense of community while fostering the necessary skills to participate in the community and local economy. This can manifest into higher literacy rates, completion of secondary and post-secondary education, greater skills development, and the opportunity to assume meaningful employment. These benefits could translate into a reduction of costs for unemployment. • Work: Develop spaces and opportunities for individuals and neighbours to come together to create products and services for the local community. This provides income and a sense of belonging within the community. This directly translates into a reduction of costs for unemployment. • Health and wellbeing: Create the necessary programs and connections into the community to generate positive experiences such as feeling welcomed, included and accepted within a community. Additionally, the promotion of growing, preparing, and eating healthy, home-cooked food, while pursuing active lifestyles, provides outlets to have fun and focus on self and family health. These factors may contribute to the reduction and use of health services. • Crime: Create purpose and connection in the community to help reduce criminal and mischief activities. This can lead to a significant savings in detainment and policing costs for a city, and justice system costs for the province and country. • Caring: Ease the burden on families and provide meaningful work and a sense of belonging within the community by participating in programs that foster co-caring opportunities for children and elderly community members. This leads to stronger community connections and a reduced financial and time burden for families around care. At a higher level, this reduces the need for child and elderly care services.

Through the strategic session consultations, proof of systems change and achievement of the ambitions of Participatory Canada can be identified by the following evidence being demonstrated within participating communities:

• Development of micro and local economies that foster resilience in communities • Reduction in racial tensions, Indigenous reconciliation realized from greater participation and inclusive programs through co-creation within communities.

• Positive social and civic asset value by virtue of flourishing communities, community engagement, and thriving local economics. • Demonstrating the tangible and intangible benefits to cities, resulting in buy-in from municipalities and investment from various levels of government.

Developmental evaluators and measurement leads need to be established at the national level and within the city teams to support learning and iteration cycles, and create and adhere to the evaluation frameworks set out by Participatory Canada. These individuals should be in two-way communication with the global learning platform to facilitate knowledge transfer and oversight of the collective impacts across Participatory City. Within the early phases of the deep implementation city, Participatory Canada should provide guidance in teaching the frameworks developed in Barking and Dagenham while looking to make refinements for the local context. Creating and developing these communication channels will help support the business cases of Participatory Canada to grow deeply within and across cities. Developing clear communication channels and transparency of data will create trust within the system, across the global learning platform, city leaders, local organizations, and community members.

Participatory Canada will need to decide on the degree of centralization and embeddedness with respect to the national team supporting evaluation and measurement of city implementations in both the near and long term. A preference towards city led capture of data, with support from Participatory Canada, should be tested across the city implementations to assess its viability. Consistent frameworks and tools need to be available to local teams to help standardize the practice of measurement for both the development of the Participatory City approach in Canada as well as demonstrating the outcomes and impacts from the local activities. The degree of development of these tools by the national team or at the city level should also be considered and tested. Once outcomes are captured, they can be shared by the cities to the global platform to support collaboration and building of expertise across the full global community of Participatory City practitioners.

Figure 14 - Participatory City Outcomes Framework

The six essential components are all underpinned by three common elements of coordination, communication and relationships that will support the growth and scaling of practical participatory ecosystems and ultimately Participatory Canada. Learnings from the Canadian experiments as well as the deep knowledge of Barking and Dagenham will be crucial in identifying how these elements can be effectively utilized and organized at the onset of the deep implementation city and subsequent light, medium, and deep implementations. Most prominently, these elements form the foundations to assist the Participatory Canada implementations to succeed and grow through shared learnings and effective management of relationships and alignment of the six essential components for scaling participatory systems.

These elements will also be key factors in the development of sustainable and viable local programming and economic conditions for Participatory Canada. Communications and relationships are critical for the growth of Participatory Canada to effectively tell the story of potential and realized impact generated within communities and to build interest, demand, and collaborative support for the approach across cities. Having sound management and talent to bring these elements together will also affect successful growth. Ultimately, the Participatory Canada team should consider how coordination, communication, and relationships will be affected and how they can support the growth and scaling of the Participatory City approach as they grow and scale across the six elements over the next ten years.

In addition to considering the six essential components and the three supporting elements of coordination, communication and relationships, Participatory Canada will also need to build and scaffold foundations around people, sustainable financing, and networks over the next ten years (see Figure 15). Through the next decade, the initial ‘national’ support needed from the city teams may transition to a different type of support for more mature cities as the model builds capacity within cities across Canada over time. Formalized structures and nurtured relationships with the global campus will allow new cities and communities to join and utilize the Participatory City approach to create more practical participatory ecosystems.

The immediate and near term time horizon should focus on bringing together the right people, infrastructures and spaces for the initial cohort of cities. It is imperative to continue to leap-frog the learnings from the UK and Canadian experiments, focusing on the development of the outcomes measurement frameworks (to support future financing) and the vision and growth of Participatory Canada across the nation.

Of high importance is the development of the initial deep demonstration city and the accompanying Here&Now campus. This demonstration site will form a strong validation case for the Participatory City program in Canada. Critical to its success will be the team that is assembled to develop the participatory infrastructure, bring expertise and program knowledge, design and execute the programs, and lastly, to engage the community.

Additionally, four cities with medium support from the national team will comprise the rest of the first cohort. They will begin to build capacity in their local contexts, preferably in diverse regions across Canada to increase Participatory Canada’s exposure across the nation. These cities will then provide the support and mentorship for another five small or light implementations to continue to build momentum for participatory systems in our Canadian cities.

Establishing a national team with necessary expertise and vision to lead the development of Participatory Canada will be foundational to start developing the resources and bandwidth to focus on supporting city teams. Coalescing additional roles and responsibilities, such as program managers, coordinators, and evaluators, will help to develop core infrastructure and future focused capabilities. Developing capabilities like impact measurement, reporting standards, communication, and learning, will create the conditions necessary to start leap-frogging current participatory practices, while priming Participatory Canada for future financing and business case development.

Furthermore, through strong narratives and partnerships, key potential partners like city officials and potential funders of Participatory Canada will need to be brought along the journey to have visibility into the impacts and evolution of the program. Interested groups will be engaged by building trust and being educated on the importance of transitioning towards practical participatory ecosystems.

Specific outcomes and measurement frameworks will need to be established at the onset to capture necessary data to be used in general communication and in building business cases for additional funding. The data collected will allow the Participatory Canada team to better understand and attribute the impacts of the program to develop the case for future cost savings or returns on investment to engage potential funders. Whether financing comes later on from outcomes funders (private sector), philanthropists, or municipal budgets, the data collected will be an integral input to rally the support of these potential partners and funders.

1. Onboard five cities into Participatory Canada, supporting one deep demonstration city and four medium implementation cities. An additional five cities will be identified to be supported through a light exploration into Participatory

Canada. 2. Develop the people resource capacity and expertise to facilitate the execution of the Participatory City approach in the local contexts of the ten cities. 3. Develop and test initial outcomes architecture to begin demonstrating the values and impacts of the Participatory

City approach.

A strong focus should be placed directly on the communities participating in the first cohort of cities to effectively communicate, establish local leadership, and develop capacity for the Participatory City approach. Looking to best-practices from city experiments in the UK and Canada will help support the narratives and methods to effectively do so.

Over the medium term, establishing sustainable financing methods should be emphasised to promote the scaling of practical participatory ecosystems in Canada. In this phase Participatory Canada should grow from the initial cohorts of cities, towards financing and establishing the next decade of cohorts. Outcomes measurement, data, and strong narratives from the city implementations will be critical inputs for the success of establishing sustainable financing.

As a lead city, the deep implementation site will be relied upon to provide strong evidence and data that establishes a strong business case for the Participatory City approach. Two major financing tools that would allow for sustained growth of Participatory Canada are outcomes based financing and municipal support by way of budgetary spending on the programs. Outcomes based financing would require demonstration of attribution of the desired outcomes that would be purchased by an outcomes funder. The infrastructure and methods for capturing and reporting on the impacts generated through the Participatory City approach will need to be quickly established and tested at the onset of the first cohort of cities in order to produce and collect the required data. Municipal budget spending would also require demonstration of impacts from the program to justify either a spend or a reallocation of funds to produce the desired community benefits and results from the Participatory City approach. Additionally, continuing to create and share the stories and narratives produced from the local initiatives could support the business cases and development of relationships with potential funders who need to see the impacts demonstrated through evidence.

In this time frame, the Canadian Here&Now campus should be fully operational and sustainable, providing a hub of expertise for cities across Canada. This campus should be the main domestic point of interaction for all communities and cities currently utilizing, or keen to develop, practical participatory ecosystems.

This phase will look to support an additional four Canadian cities in using the Participatory City approach. Critical to their successful initiation will be the support from the first cohort of cities, through immersive experiences, learning and capacity building, and guidance. The Participatory Canada team should provide coordination support for the new cohort of cities. It should also leverage the first cohort of cities’ expertise in building the capacity for and embedding the Participatory City approach, programs, and learning architectures locally in their cities.

1. Support 4 additional cities by leveraging the first cohort’s lessons learned, expertise and guidance to leap-frog the cities into using the Participatory City approach. 2. Utilize the accessible outcomes architecture and demonstrate the values and impacts of the Participatory City approach to funders and potential partners. 3. Offer guidance and expertise at the Canadian Here&Now campus to help other cities develop the capacity for social systems change.

By the ten year time frame, Participatory Canada should look to deepen relationships and networks that enable long term growth and scaling of the Participatory City approach. The ambition conveyed in the strategic convening sessions suggested that Participatory Canada should aim to support the Participatory City approach where there is clear demand and appropriate conditions in at least 50 Canadian cities or communities by 2030, all of which would support one another to develop the necessary programs, assets, and systems to achieve positive social outcomes. In the ten year time frame, impacts should be felt within the cities that have developed the practical participatory ecosystems, demonstrating clear community value and continuing to propel the growth of Participatory Canada.

As more cities are supported by the Participatory Canada platform beyond the initial two cohorts of cities, Participatory Canada should focus on exploring a geographic network structure as an option to provide more localized support for cities. This structure could help scale to additional cities by developing relationships and building capacity in new cities in a region while supporting the coordination and dissemination of learnings from other cities, regions or global experiments. Each region could focus on building lead cities to create a regional support network and demonstration of the Participatory City approach that could be adopted by neighbouring communities and cities.

Deep demonstration cities and more mature implementations should be supported by Participatory Canada in developing learning experiences for other cities. The local learning campuses and stories developed from their implementations of the Participatory City approach should be accessible for shared learning by Participatory Canada and the global learning platform. There may be resources (people capacity and funding) needed to further support the coordination for deeper collaboration and learning opportunities during this expansionary phase of Participatory Canada.

In this phase, Participatory Canada should also focus on sustaining existing financing and finding and establishing new, sustainable financing to support ongoing program delivery while catalyzing support for new cities. The national team can help facilitate and support the building of relationships, education for key potential partners and interested groups, and sharing program data to develop new business cases for support.

With a mature Participatory Canada by 2030, various funding methods should be tested to see which best support cities and their networks across the phases of implementation, leading to the development of best practices around financing models.

Through the three strategic convening sessions, other discussions, and secondary research, many assumptions, constraints and future considerations surfaced that should be addressed by Participatory Canada over the next ten years to effectively grow and scale the Participatory City approach. Using a futures lens and systemic solutions to consider possible externalities and uncertainties will ensure that the growth of Participatory Canada remains flexible and adaptable to any possible pathway the Participatory Canada Roadmap might take during this decade.

Most of the Participatory Canada Roadmap describes the scale, or depth of implementation, as the quantity of programs within a given city. This includes the number of shopfronts, learning architecture elements in the school, and participation from cities across the programs. Participatory Canada should work to identify and measure other factors across the essential components for scaling (see Figure 7) that currently play a role in successfully embedding the core principles, expertise, and momentum towards practical participation ecosystems. For example, other essential components of deep scaling could include how deep the knowledge and experience of practitioners may be in a community and in a city overall.

Participants in the strategic sessions advised to create one deep city implementation to provide a successful use case that can build confidence for potential partners and funders in scaling the Participatory City approach to other eager cities. However, this pathway omits the potential to leverage a blossoming social sector that is emerging across Canada. A focus of Participatory Canada could be on supporting communities with existing participatory practices in place. Adding the Participatory City approach to existing practices could amplify the effects of existing programming, leading to faster and stronger creation of social and systemic infrastructure for long term systems change and community resilience. There are many organizations and large public agencies that can provide the connections, resources, and programs to scale quite rapidly across municipalities while enabling adaptation to each local context. Leveraging community networks could create opportunities for scaling the adoption of ‘products’ like the Tomorrow Today Street kits in 190+ municipalities across Canada. Participatory Canada should explore partnerships in cities with ongoing social R&D and practical participation infrastructure to see how, collectively, impact can be accelerated in those communities. Participatory Canada should ‘leap-frog’ support as much as possible for every new city implementation to build off existing learnings, architecture, and infrastructure rather than starting from scratch each time. This would enable quicker and more successful deployment and development of impacts for people, place, and planet compared to each previous city implementation. Building off other experiments and use cases predicates a high degree of learning and immersive experiences to fully understand the conditions for success and how they may apply to new contexts. This will have implications to how cities construct and educate their teams prior to, and during implementation, creating the necessary capacity to effectively implement these practical participatory ecosystems within their communities in highly adaptive ways.

As a relatively new initiative in Canada, the momentum and ‘stickiness’ of the sharing of new learnings and collaboration across teams will need to be proven over time. As the model matures, Participatory Canada and the city teams should consider how to redistribute the effort needed to continue to increase the approach’s effectiveness, draw on new learnings, and create best practices that can be used for leapfrogging. For example, types of learning architecture that favour in person engagement or intimate learning can keep energy high, but require dedicated resources and potentially higher costs to sustain. Programs for practitioners, such as communities of practice, utilize the interest and energy from participants and can bridge distance through digital mediums, but also require effort and coordination to curate and sustain relevant topics. Over time, these types of initiatives may succumb to lack of inertia and relevancy for participants and should be recognized as a potential risk to decreasing effectiveness of the approach in later phases of Participatory Canada growth and scaling.

While there is an ambition to have funding for the Participatory City approach embedded into each city budget as part of ongoing support costs for social infrastructure, there is no clear pathway for how to shift it there. Participatory Canada will need to manage emerging tensions along this pathway from funding and early-stage partners on how their engagement in Participatory Canada sunsets and transitions to longer term partners and funders as the program builds capacity and grows in local communities over time.

The potential persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the potential for emerging future pandemics could cause ongoing socio-economic challenges that might impact how Participatory Canada grows and scales. In the near term, the team should focus on how to safely hold in-person and immersive experiences, as well as experiential learning, while making and testing alterations for programming using digital means. These adaptations will significantly impact how practitioners and new teams learn and experience leading examples in London, UK and at the Canadian deep demonstration campus. Furthermore, the socio-economic challenges emerging in communities may require a shift in the type of participatory programs and accompanying infrastructure that is needed in communities. This could transpire by shifting from persistent community challenges (eg. accessing and growing healthy food) to emergent challenges experienced through the pandemic (eg. creating an open making society to cultivate the local economy). These changes should be developed and evaluated over time, shifting as the needs in communities change.

In recent years, and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, municipalities are facing increasing pressure to deliver more services with small budgets. They are constrained by tight financial positions due to a large focus on climate transition, high breadth and costs to deliver services within the city, and a looming gap in infrastructure spending from other levels of government. This reality may become more severe in the future given the challenges, and resulting spending from Canadian governments for recovery efforts related to COVID-19. Participatory Canada should consider what growth and scaling might look like with less reliance on city funding and embedding into city budgets. Sustainable funding with other long term funding partners should be explored, including considering how transition finance can be leveraged to create and embed participatory social infrastructure into communities over the next decade.

Participatory Canada ultimately will need to consider how to create and demonstrate and measure impact across communities and cities in the Canadian context as a key step to wide-spread growth and scaling in Canada. Measurement frameworks should be developed and tested with existing and potential partners and funders over time. These tools should ensure that intangible outcomes, like happiness and quality of friendships, can translate into large measurable impacts, like reduced use and spending in the healthcare and justice systems, that can be supported and funded in long term and sustainable ways. Demonstrating impact will be the key factor in successfully growing and scaling the Participatory City approach. Participatory Canada has been demand-driven since its inception. It is not a ‘push model’ that is implemented in communities from a top-down perspective. Instead, it was created based on the demand from a number of municipalities and communities in the field to learn more about and test the feasibility of the Participatory City approach. It sparked interest for several years in many places in Canada, including Quebec. Over the past couple of years, with the emergence of Participatory Canada, a number of community leaders and organizations have been turning towards la MIS to explore the possibility of implementing this approach in their community to bring participatory work to the next level. In addition to the work that Solon has been developing and supporting in Ahuntsic-Cartierville in Montreal, a number of other communities and jurisdictions in the Greater Montreal region and elsewhere in Quebec have taken steps to build the Participatory City approach.

Communities and organizations in other parts of Canada have also shown interest and reached out. This increase in interest and moving toward action deserves to be explored and analyzed further. Some questions that Participatory Canada should consider further as they work on growing and scaling the initiative include:

• Why is there a burst of interest now? • What elements of the Participatory City approach are the most appealing to interested actors and potential partners? • Are these actors already involved in some of the numerous participatory initiatives in their community? If yes, how can the Participatory City approach be hybridized with these existing participatory initiatives to generate more impact? • What in the Participatory City approach is of most interest for potential funders? How can this help structure a Canadian narrative and ensure sustainable funding for Participatory

Canada?

Understanding this emerging demand more accurately could help strategically inform the building of Participatory Canada over the next ten years as it grows in different cities across Canada.