Next Steps

This report was partly written during the COVID-19 pandemic and we began to weave the emerging impacts into the stories we were reporting. However, there is much more work to do to make sense of the impacts of COVID-19 on park systems across the country and how we can move forward together—both in the near term as part of recovery and in the longer-term.

Park People is committed to doing that work with you. We will be using the learnings from this report to help frame that work, which will also shape the next Canadian City Parks Report for 2021.

If your city is not represented in the report, please let us know you’d like to see it next year. And of course, please let us know how you used this report, what you found most interesting, and how to improve it next year.

Thank you for reading.

Park People is a Canadian charity that supports and mobilizes people to help them activate the power of parks to improve the quality of life in cities across Canada.

We support a national network of park group volunteers and community organizers, non-profits, park professionals, and funders across Canada, through networking events, grants, toolkits, research, resources, and professional services.

Founded in 2011, Park People has since helped community park groups undertake more than 3,000 events supported by 23,000 volunteers. Thanks to our generous donors, we have directed investments of more than $6 million in parks and park programming.

Through support from The W. Garfield Weston Foundation, we’re able to bring you the second edition of our annual Canadian City Parks Report. The report tracks challenges, trends, and opportunities in Canadian city parks both through numbers and the stories that inspire action, progress, and shared learning.

Are you a park person? There are lots of ways to get involved:

• Sign up for our Newsletter
• Join the Park People Network
• Use our Research and Resources to help you make awesome things happen in your park