Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
den project, Evergreen worked with the local residents to develop a portion of the
park as a safe, social, outdoor meeting place where people can gather and interact,
meeting their neighbors and taking ownership of this public space. Many local resi-
dents, through their work with the garden, became engaged in the weekly stewardship
group restoring the neighboring Eglington Flats and Topham Pond (Kelly Krauter,
pers. comm.). Providing the resources and funding for the creation of a community
garden allowed the local residents to come together and realize what resources and
priorities they had to contribute to developing their community. This created a hub
for the community around which people became active participants in contributing
to community pride and improvement. Evergreen has discovered through its work
that, starting with the priorities of the neighborhood, a process can begin wherein lo-
cal residents contribute to making the city greener and their neighborhood more liv-
able (Rebekka Hutton, pers. comm.).
Challenges and Opportunities for Racialized Volunteerism
in Urban Restoration
Toronto organizations working on ecological restoration projects are implementing
strategies and programs to make their practice more inclusive. The results have been
varied with some projects successfully involving a greater number of racialized people
(Kelly Krauter, pers. comm.) and others struggling to become more inclusive (Beth
Cragg, pers. comm.). The following sections look at some of the challenges of be-
coming more inclusive and highlight opportunities for increased inclusivity within ur-
ban ecological restoration in Toronto. The opportunities highlighted are (1) organiza-
tional and leadership structure, (2) improving the participatory framework, and (3)
social justice in ecological restoration.
Organizational and Leadership Structures
The majority of leaders and decision makers within the Toronto restoration commu-
nity's major organizations, including the City of Toronto, the Toronto Regional Con-
servation Authority, and Evergreen, appear to come from a western European back-
ground. The absence of racialized people in these leadership roles contributes to an
imbalance of power that is reflected in the priorities and aesthetic values represented
in the restoration projects as well as the locations selected for restoration (Newman
2008). It is almost impossible to be inclusive within a decision-making process if
equality is not built into the framework, and the organizations leading the project do
not have diversity within their leadership (Burayidi 2000). While they may under-
stand this idea, most environmentally focused organizations in the Toronto region
still struggle with the challenge of changing their organizational structure to include
the voices of racialized people (Joanne Jeffery, pers. comm.).
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According to Shannon Thompson of the Toronto environmental group Greenest
City, urban ecological restoration projects that do not involve racialized people at all
levels of decision making miss out on the values, ideas, and support of a large portion
