{"id":41825,"date":"2013-02-27T09:00:14","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=41825"},"modified":"2013-03-09T13:19:47","modified_gmt":"2013-03-09T18:19:47","slug":"lorinc-westons-parks-donation-rewires-relationship-with-city-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/02\/27\/lorinc-westons-parks-donation-rewires-relationship-with-city-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Weston\u2019s parks donation rewires relationship with city hall"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

For years, I\u2019ve played pick-up hockey on Thursday evenings with a group of guys at Campbell Park, a somewhat forlorn space near Dupont and Lansdowne. The rink, which doubles as a tennis or basketball court in the summer, sits adjacent to a little clubhouse.<\/p>\n

Early on, the clubhouse \u2014 a cinder-block shoebox with a pair of grim bathrooms and a kitchenette \u2014 was nothing more than a desolate change room. But a few years ago, Jutta Mason and her intrepid parks reclaimers at CELOS<\/a> (Centre for Local Research into Public Space), colonized the Campbell Park clubhouse<\/a>. Little by little, stuff began to accumulate there \u2013 some tables and chairs, games, toys, appliances, crates containing spare hockey gear, etc.<\/p>\n

The bored Parks & Recreation guy who hung out in the kitchen disappeared, and a succession of young people have taken over, cooking this and that, yakking with the kids who hang out. Campbell was getting the Dufferin Grove treatment, one found object at a time.<\/p>\n

As far as I know, this transformation has been less hard-fought, and somewhat less ambitious, than Mason\u2019s original project. That fight involved years of turf wars as she and the CELOS activists sought to wrest Dufferin Grove Park from the clutches of both the local drug dealers and the parks mandarins at City Hall.<\/p>\n

Mason, as it turned out, had more will power than either gang. The question is, has the City really absorbed those lessons about establishing better and more constructive relationships between local community groups and specific parks?<\/p>\n

Toronto Park People (TPP), which will have its third summit this weekend,<\/a> and the Garfield Weston Foundation plan to test the proposition. Their new $5 million\/3-year program, announced yesterday [ PDF ]<\/a>, will allow local organizations apply for grants to invest in improvement projects to parkland owned by the City, Toronto Community Housing or the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority.<\/p>\n

TPP executive director Dave Harvey says the grants can either go towards programs or events, as well as more complicated capital projects, such as tree planting, natural playgrounds, food gardens, trail improvements and so on. The grants, the group says, may range from $25,000 to $750,000, and the aggregate will not exceed the $5 million. The organization will vet applications twice a year.<\/p>\n

Harvey\u2019s goal, besides the local improvements per se, is to re-wire the relationship between community groups, the City and neighbourhood parks. In many U.S. cities \u2014 New York being an especially vivid example \u2014 conservancies have become well-established institutions, serving as intermediaries between the public and municipalities. The Big Apple\u2019s Central Park Conservancy (CPC)<\/a> emerged in the wake of the city\u2019s financial meltdown and the associated decay of the park. Since 1980, it has raised a stunning $600 million, mostly from private sources, for park improvements and stewardship. It maintains much of the space and runs programs.<\/p>\n

While the CPC is by far the largest conservancy, there are many others, including Winnipeg\u2019s Assiniboine Park<\/a>. Yet there are no comparable examples here, with the exception of the Evergreen Brickworks<\/a>, which has been supported for years by the Westons and other philanthropists, including many corporate donors.<\/p>\n

Toronto has parks that have had makeovers thanks to an infusion of Section 37 cash, as was the case with the remade Jean Sibelius Park<\/a> in the Annex. But with the new grant program, TPP is pushing past a door that hasn\u2019t been opened before in a systematic way: using donated cash to underwrite changes to a public park.<\/p>\n

It will be intriguing to see how the City responds to a project that received funding from TPP. Many smaller parks are simply ignored, but others have served as stages for complicated and divisive local debates over dog runs, playground improvements, skate park plans and non-conforming uses, such as the illicit but popular BMX trails in High Park.<\/p>\n

When local groups come to the city with the TPP\u2019s cash and an improvement plan, the parks department will obviously sit up and take notice. After all, money talks, especially for an organization like Parks & Recreation, which, TPP says, spends over $300 million a year on operations and upkeep.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s when the process questions click in: What happens if the City doesn\u2019t like the plan, or if the local councillor decides he or she won\u2019t support an approved project for political reasons (e.g., it upsets a friendly ratepayer group)?<\/p>\n

Harvey, whose organization has helped CELOS in the past, understands that those grassy expanses may contain more than a few landmines. So he recommends that prospective applicants collect the necessary local backing before they submit their applications. \u201cThese are public spaces and the work needs to be done to build a proposal that has broad support,\u201d he says. \u201cThose are the best kind of projects anyway, because they\u2019ve got lots of buy-in.\u201d<\/p>\n

photo by Miles Storey <\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For years, I\u2019ve played pick-up hockey on Thursday evenings with a group of guys at Campbell Park, a somewhat forlorn space near Dupont and Lansdowne. The rink, which doubles as a tennis or basketball court in the summer, sits adjacent to a little clubhouse. Early on, the clubhouse \u2014 a cinder-block shoebox with a pairContinue reading “LORINC: Weston\u2019s parks donation rewires relationship with city hall”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":41828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parks","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: Weston\u2019s parks donation rewires relationship with city hall - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/02\/27\/lorinc-westons-parks-donation-rewires-relationship-with-city-hall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: Weston\u2019s parks donation rewires relationship with city hall - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For years, I\u2019ve played pick-up hockey on Thursday evenings with a group of guys at Campbell Park, a somewhat forlorn space near Dupont and Lansdowne. 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