Appendices

The Scaling Scenarios session was the first session in a series of three strategic sessions that were used to develop the Participatory Canada Roadmap. The first session generated a shared understanding about what Participatory Canada aims to scale. Through the session, participants gained consensus on the desired ambition for Participatory Canada in a 10 year vision. Working backwards through time, key milestones surfaced for the 5 year and 1 year visions and their associated implementation components.

Attendees Aggie Paulauskaite Alex Ryan Delyse Sylvester Greg Woolner Jayne Engle Jim Anderson Keren Tang Kia Kavoosi Mélanie Bisson Nat Defriend Patrick Dubé Paul Messer Shannon Lutz Sophia Hortwitz Tessy Britton Tracey Robertson Virginie Zingraff Yanique Bird

Links • Briefing Note - http://shorturl.at/qzMQ7 • Briefing Slides developed by Participatory City Foundation - http://shorturl.at/wxPSZ • Session Harvest - http://shorturl.at/hjAHS

The second session looked to build a common understanding of the case for a national learning architecture for Participatory Canada. This would catalyze the work of Canadian cities interested in experimenting with the Participatory City approach to co-define a set of learning mechanisms in a Canadian learning architecture to help cities achieve their goals and impact over the next 3–5 years.

This was framed through three learning dimensions:

1. How could a Participatory Canada learning architecture help accelerate the design, experimentation and application of best possible Participatory City practices at the local level to generate impact in Canadian cities? 2. How could a Participatory Canada learning architecture help build legitimacy of the Participatory City approach, and accelerate and maximize the commitment of key potential partners in Canadian cities (i.e., government officials, community organizations, citizen collectives)? 3. How could a Participatory Canada learning architecture help create the conditions to sustainably scale the Participatory

City in Canadian cities, beyond the three prototype cities in

Canada?

Aggie Paulauskaite Aimee Gasparetto Alex Ryan Andrea Nemtin Chloé Dodinot Dale McFee Delyse Sylvester Denise Soueidan-O’Leary Enniyeah Okere Greg Woolner Indy Johar Jayne Engle Keren Tang Louise Ellaway Marie-Josée Parent Maude Lapointe Nat Defriend Pam Glode Paul Messer Shona Fulcher Sue Talusan Wissam Yassine Yanique Bird

• Briefing Note - shorturl.at/fFJLQ • Briefing Slides developed by Participatory City Foundation - http://shorturl.at/lmwT6 • Session Harvest - http://shorturl.at/tzAT5

The purpose of the Financing Scenarios Session was to help identify the last set of information required to design the Participatory Canada Roadmap. Overall, the session aimed to generate possible pathways and tools to financing a scaled Participatory Canada, including:

• Identifying funders and funding appropriate for financing Participatory Canada • Discussing how funders could get interested and commit to funding, and • Selecting which financial tools would be well suited to the implementation of Participatory Canada based on the outcomes, time horizons and scale of funding required. Through the session, participants worked with two Participatory Canada Scenarios around nationally led or city led implementation leadership over 1, 3-5 and 10 year time horizons to explore the financial impacts between the two.

Adam Jagelewski Alex Ryan Delyse Sylvester Denise Soueidan-O’Leary Greg Woolner Jayne Engle Jennifer Angel Keren Tang Kia Kavoosi Louise Ellaway Mélanie Bisson Michelle Baldwin Micheal Lukowitz Mike Davis Nat Defriend Patrick Dubé Paul Messer Shannon Lutz Sophia Horwitz Tessy Britton Tracy Robertson

• Briefing Note - http://shorturl.at/zEGNP • Financing Pre-read Slides - http:// shorturl.at/itN37 • Session Summary - http:// shorturl.at/dwyKO PARTICIPATORY CANADA ROADMAP 255

1. These are examples for illustrative purposes, describing the deep (large), medium and small implementations reaching approximately 75,000 to 220,000 people in a mature state with social and participatory infrastructure in place. Cost estimates are based on historical spends from Barking and

Dagenham, UK and Participatory Canada, extrapolated to a total of 10 cities. • 1 Deep City Implementation: 5 shopfronts reaching 220,000 people • 4 Medium City Implementations: 3 shopfronts reaching 120,000 people • 5 Small City Implementations: 2 shopfronts reaching 75,000 people 2. Deep implementation city includes additional National

Learning campus costs, while medium and small implementation take proportional costs for local learning architecture. 3. Phased in costing over 3 years from the first year of each city implementation. Costs are realized by 33% in year 1, 67% by year 2, and 100% by year 3. 4. National team costs estimated at $1.2M as per Participatory

Canada forecasting and historical spend, phased in over 3 years. 5. Approximate non-staff costs for elements of the deep implementation (from Barking and Dagenham use case); shopfronts 11%, warehouse 5%, Tomorrow Today Streets 5%, communications 5%.

6. Staffing costs as a percentage of total implementation cost and is scaled based on the amount of shopfronts (3 designers per shop); neighbourhood staffing 35%, school staffing 13%. 7. Overhead costs at ~10% as per historical spend

The following details represent the estimates prepared for and details surfaced during the three strategic convening sessions. The details of suggested personnel and team structures validates early thinking from the Participatory Canada team.

Deep Implementation City Team (at onset, minimum 6 full time staff with additional contract support as needed)

Each city requires a local team to help steward and adapt the Participatory City approach to their local context in an effort to create more participatory and inclusive communities. Project teams, consisting of designers, storytellers, collaboration development, and program leaders, manage the local vision, establish relationships and support community initiatives. The following represent potential roles that would be beneficial to include in the initial deep implementation city team.

• Fully trained designers per shop. It was noted in the Barking & Dagenham experiments that three designers are needed per shop to facilitate and create the programs. They are the ’do-ers’ and on-the-ground experts of Participatory City practices and tools to help build capacity within a community.

The number of designers will scale alongside program development and within a city to ensure effectiveness. There will be approximately 13 designers in one fully developed deep demonstration city site based on live experiments in

Canada and the UK. • Communications. The communications lead is responsible for the storytelling, design, and creative assets for the deep city implementation and programs. They serve a dual role of co-creating assets with residents to drive engagement at the community level while communicating and reporting upwards on the outcomes to Participatory Canada and the global learning platform. • Operational team consisting of a program director and evaluator. This team is responsible for overall management and holds the various relationships with community members, organizations, the national support team, and the global platform.

The program director manages the program within their communities. They closely communicate with various partners and develop deep relationships within a city to establish trust and agency for the programs being developed and implemented.

The evaluator and learning specialist supports the learnings and documents outcomes from the programs.

They have a close relationship with the domestic school, other evaluators, and global teams to continue to refine, learn, and develop evaluative measures for the

Participatory City approach.

Participatory Canada Core Team (at onset, minimum 4 full time staff with additional contract support)

This team should be established at the onset to provide support and leadership to the participating cities and communities. The roles and responsibilities focus on several key areas to embed the learnings of the Participatory City approach, and communicate the initiative to build relationships across the country.

• Lead Director. The lead director for the national team builds and strengthens relationships with the global school, city and community teams, and strategic and funding partners. They play a lead role in creating content, strategy, communications, research and learning. • Coordinator. The Coordinator manages the administrative, programming, communications, and reporting obligations for the national team. • Evaluator across cities. The evaluator creates a national scale evaluation framework and helps embed new evaluation methods and learning while supporting local processes to capture relevant data. • Supporting local partnerships and fundraising initiatives.

This role helps connect and build cases for funding across municipalities and communities. They can be regionally based, and activate community partners and connect cities to relevant funding opportunities.

Based on the learnings and the foundations of the social R&D phase, many partners are interested in moving into a deeper building and scaling period. A growing number of communities, organizations, foundations and government agencies have expressed interest in helping create this participatory social infrastructure, which would involve building and strengthening a network of residents, partners and champions across the country.

The findings from year 1 of social R&D show that the Participatory City approach to building large scale participation is feasible, highly adaptive and desirable in a variety of Canadian contexts.

What happened in Canada was not simply a replication of a model from the UK, but the improvement, development and adaptation of an approach to meet the realities and contexts of our communities.

In Nova Scotia, Every One Every Day Kjipuktuk-Halifax is Indigenous-led and centres reconciliation in its work. In Montreal, Notre voisinage is building solidarity among longstanding residents and newcomers to Canada, with projects that foster community-led ecological transition. In Toronto, Our Neighbourhood is strengthening social cohesion, especially between residents from different backgrounds who live in different kinds of housing.

Prototyping simultaneously in three new cities was challenging, but paid dividends in rich learning. Local teams developed and adapted the Participatory City approach in their unique contexts, continuously improving, evolving, and building on lessons learned.

There is strong demand and interest in this approach from civic leaders, developers and community organizations as well as from municipal and provincial governments. There is institutional demand at two levels:

1. There is a wider interest and buy-in for community building from private, public, and civil society sector leaders. In this first R&D phase, the prototypes have formed partnerships with existing community service providers and local businesses.

2. There is growing interest from decision-makers in larger institutions such as provincial and municipal governments. In the three pilot cities, major decision-makers see value and are drawn to the potential for the Participatory City approach to affect population-level outcomes.

The findings in this report show that the Participatory City approach is engaging a wide range of residents in each neighbourhood and is building networks that bring together individuals and communities that have not been connected previously.

A key finding is that inclusion is inherently cultural. As a result, the conditions for inclusion must be tailor-made to suit each context and be continually adapted and improved. While there are ideas and approaches to learn from, inclusion will always come from building and continually creating these conditions with communities.

There are early indications that the Participatory City approach is viable in many different contexts and is able to integrate into existing ecosystems of local programs, community assets, and businesses.

Despite this, there were challenges that influenced the viability of implementation in each city, most notably the COVID-19 restrictions of 2020 and 2021. These restrictions uprooted an approach that is fundamentally centred on bringing people together.

Additionally, the time commitment required to adequately meet the needs of each project extended beyond the capacity of all three teams. The relatively small teams in each city served different roles and functions (ie. communications, evaluation, delivery, management, administration, and more). This proved especially challenging for prototypes with part-time project team members or team members split between different projects.

Through a range of qualitative and quantitative data collected, the three prototypes demonstrated that the Participatory City approach is capable of delivering value for residents and neighbourhoods.

In each city the prototypes created multiple opportunities for residents to participate, a necessary building block for repeat participation, and has been shown to lead to individual- and community-level outcomes.

The participation activities vary from context to context and from city to city, yet the value created is similar across all three cities. Common themes that surfaced during R&D include: residents feeling more connected to their communities; sharing and learning skills and culture; and having a hand in shaping future programming.

Knowledge generated from prototypes, convenings and from conversations with partners during the social R&D phase highlighted essential components for growing the practical participatory ecosystem within each city and across the country. These components are:

As Participatory Canada builds its foundation of these essential components for growing and scaling practical participation ecosystems, we see that a phased approach will be important over the next one, five, and 10 year horizons. Each phase would focus on supporting and growing people’s capabilities, identifying and mobilizing sustainable financing sources, and strategically scaling across geographies using a strong network and relationship approach.

The Participatory Canada ecosystem is substantial. We’ve involved hundreds of people—from strategic, government and foundation partners to implementers, local organizations and residents on the ground who are rolling up their sleeves.

Partnerships in Participatory Canada are structured in a trifecta, with each group bringing unique expertise, knowledge, networks and resources. The success of the initiative relied on the synergy between all three groups:

1. Participatory City Foundation – Knowledge and expertise in practical participatory ecosystems, including sharing of resources such as design, templates, past evaluations and learnings as part of the Here&Now School as well as mentoring, coaching and strategic-level support and guidance.

2. McConnell Foundation – Resources and nationwide networks including funding to support the social R&D phase and mobilizing energy and inquiry through its extensive network in cities and communities across the country.

3. Local partners – In-depth knowledge and networks in communities. Lead organizations in each city—Mi’kmaw

Native Friendship Centre in Kjipuktuk-Halifax; Solon collectif in Montréal, and Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto— were critical in implementing and adapting the Participatory

City approach on the ground. They have strong relationships with strategic partners such as civil society, municipal governments, and the private sector, which allows them to navigate existing participatory culture and landscape, and mobilize resources and buy-in important for the long-term success of the work.

Just as co-design was a fundamental principle guiding how each team co-created the participatory platform with residents, it was and is the working principle underlying all the partnerships throughout the social R&D phase. As much as possible, and as appropriate, local teams and the national core team (made up of members from Participatory City Foundation and McConnell Foundation and COLAB for developmental evaluation) made decisions together. This fostered the co-creation, co-learning and co-development spirit essential to the Participatory City approach.

As with any learning experience, things weren’t always perfect. Between the pandemic and the virtual nature of working together, communication and information-sharing were not always smooth. We were constantly adjusting and reminding one another of roles and responsibilities. • Co-design, plan and launch the R&D prototypes in Kjipuktuk-

Halifax, Montreal and Toronto; • Work together with each city’s team to achieve success of prototypes through continuous developmental evaluation methods; • Evaluate impact through continuous qualitative and quantitative data collection, analysis and reporting; • Explore desirability of a large scale initiative to emerge from this prototyping phase, through engaging with government, funders, and national and local organizations across sectors; and • Build learning infrastructure as part of a community of practice and the global Here&Now School of Participatory

Systems and Design.

These objectives relied on the contribution and input from all groups. Partnership work is complex, can be messy and requires time to develop relationships, trust, shared vision and understanding. The social R&D phase has laid the foundation to continue and improve upon these partnerships.

During its first phase, Participatory Canada demonstrated potential to contribute to larger-scale improvements in our cities and communities by bridging across differences, centering reconciliation, and reducing social isolation. In its next phase, partners aim to further build this participatory social infrastructure where there is demand. Partners will build in ways that strengthen community resilience, social cohesion and capabilities for local creativity and innovation so that communities can continually learn, adapt and act collectively in their transition efforts, while growing relationships of trust, with reconciliation at the heart of it all.

Broader societal trends which are gaining momentum and with potential relevance for community resilience include: 1) redefining infrastructure so that we build to meet the increasing challenges of this age; 2) strengthening collective capabilities so that we can think, learn and act together with wisdom; and 3) innovating financing in order to value what matters while building community wealth and a wellbeing economy. Each of these trends needs to be addressed and embedded at the local level so that communities and residents have the agency and tools to strengthen resilience.

The notion of infrastructure is changing. The recently proposed federal budget reveals stronger emphasis on the importance of social and natural infrastructure to improve community wellbeing. To be fit for the future, civic infrastructure will need to be more adaptive to enable people living in proximity to mobilize and work together in times of crisis. Building this infrastructure requires strengthening social capital. Early evidence shows that Participatory Canada can provide an effective platform to do just this. Government funding is critical, and will reinforce the concept that social infrastructure such as Participatory Canada should be a fundamental public investment and public good accessible to everyone to help build community resilience.

If communities are to transition to socially and economically equitable, net-zero carbon environments, they will need to strengthen collective capabilities to act together and to continually learn from other communities about what works. Learning opportunities for the participatory approaches in this report will expand as more communities in Canada and around the world adapt them to their contexts, improving them along the way. The Here&Now School will provide a learning architecture connecting the various Participatory Canada nodes and will connect with research partnerships and communities of practice, including globally. A critical contribution to the wider network is the early experience of centering reconciliation in Halifax, which involved a two-eyed seeing evaluation approach that embedded truth and reconciliation at all levels of the initiative. The pandemic revealed that financing resilience in local communities is more rapid and responsive when decisions are made closer to the ground. The current model of governments determining how community recovery occurs is increasingly inadequate. To respond to future shocks and chronic problems, communities need better financing tools at their disposal beyond the traditional grants, loans and equity investments available. Newer social and community finance tools exist, such as impact bonds, impact investments, and outcomes-based financing, however they are not yet at the required scale, and a greater range of instruments for community wealth building is needed. In short, there is a need to innovate community resilience financing. While a number of community wealth labs and initiatives are underway, and new economy models such as circular, doughnut, and wellbeing economy frameworks are increasingly being applied at local levels, they have not yet attracted substantial investment from governments or philanthropy. We see tremendous opportunity to bring such frameworks and approaches to Participatory Canada, and to innovate impact and outcomes measurement tools that can redefine value when it comes to long-term community resilience. There are hopeful signs in the 2021 federal budget, which commits to building capabilities in the social purpose and social finance sector with the next iteration of the Investment Readiness Program of Employment and Social Development Canada, which also provided support for Participatory Canada in its social R&D phase.

The three elements of redefining infrastructure, strengthening collective capabilities, and innovating financing are crucial to developing investment-ready ideas from a social R&D base. With all of these pieces in place, a robust and mutually reinforcing R&D system takes shape in each community. Rather than picking individual R&D concepts to develop in isolation, the Participatory City approach creates an open, fertile R&D ecosystem with the strongest and most investable ideas flourishing as a result. In this regard, we can learn a lot from what is happening in the UK, where expansion of Participatory City R&D into business incubators is supporting the growth of local collaboratives and cooperative business models.

There is lots of work ahead, and we know that no single organization, agency or government can make a lasting impact on its own. This report is not just a retrospective of what we have accomplished, but also an invitation to join us. Quite simply, we cannot do this alone. Help us build the inclusive, participatory, resilient communities needed for the future.