Understanding Emerging Demand

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.

G. Limited financial resources in cities

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.

H. Demonstrating impact

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.

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.

The Participatory Canada Roadmap advises on the direction of potential future strategy through growth and scaling of the Participatory City approach in Canada. The Participatory Canada Team, along with current and potential partners, will use the information captured in the strategic convening sessions, accompanied by their initial reflections on the Roadmap, as key data points to inform sequencing and implementation for strategic planning that will occur in early 2021. The goal will be to use the Roadmap for the long term planning by the core team to inform the possible future directions for further development and implementation of the Participatory City approach in Canada.

The Roadmap identified key themes, gaps, constraints, assumptions, implications, and opportunities that will need to be considered by the Participatory Canada team over the 1, 5 and 10 year path of growing and scaling implementation. They will need to consider how to ensure balanced growth over the next decade of the six essential components of vision, context, learning architecture, school, resources, and evidence in scaling practical participatory ecosystems while ensuring coordination, communication and relationships also grow proportionally and sufficiently to support the growing network of cities across Canada. Similarly, focusing on people in the near term, sustainable financing in the medium term, and networks in the long term will support scaffolding in the growth and scaling pathway.

Through the three strategic convening sessions, many points of alignment were identified between the participants, city experiment teams, and the existing principles of the Participatory City approach to also support systemic growth and scaling. These elements of consensus should serve as initial design principles for Participatory Canada to be observed by the city and national teams while designing and supporting the deep implementation city and subsequent smaller and medium sized city implementations. In-person learning, balanced by digital alternatives, will be foundational to the development of Participatory Canada. In the early phases, the focus and attention to the capabilities and capacity for local experts to adapt the Participatory City approach for Canadian city implementations will be critical. While immersive experiences will allow individuals and teams at the forefront of new city implementations to understand the intangible benefits of practical participation ecosystems, they will need to be balanced against the constraints of safety, to be overcome through modifications such as safe gatherings or digital programming to establish similar experiential learnings. The deep demonstration campus will be necessary for validation of the approach for potential partners, funders, and interested groups. Creating and proving success locally, combined with demonstrating the large impact of the approach (e.g. through poverty reduction, job creation, and decreased spending in health care) will help prove the model, ensuring sustainable financing and implementation for the long term.

While the Roadmap puts forward choices to help frame the path and direction of Participatory Canada, to support the vision and ambition of the approach and to respond to the growing interest from cities, the national and city implementation teams will need to effectively leverage the thought leadership and knowledge from the experiences in Barking and Dagenham, and the early learning from the Participatory Canada city prototypes. Additionally, the efforts to grow and scale the approach will need to center evaluation, learning and continuous improvement while factoring in the unique challenges and vision for Participatory Canada. Over the near, medium and long term, the considerations and choices suggested for growing and scaling the essential components will need to be thought through, tested and evaluated to refine a domestic pathway for growing and scaling the Participatory City approach in Canada. Underlining these considerations are assumptions and gaps where the national and city teams will need to further explore and assess how they may impact the inclusion of the Participatory City approach within communities.

The pathway for growing and scaling the Participatory City approach will hopefully be both exciting and systemic. Through the development and utilization of new impact measurement frameworks, Participatory Canada could become a leader in how to establish, embed, and finance participatory social infrastructure in Canada over the next decade, and beyond.

The pathway for growing and scaling the Participatory City approach will hopefully be both exciting and systemic. Through the development and utilization of new impact measurement frameworks, Participatory Canada could become a leader in how to establish, embed, and finance participatory social infrastructure in Canada over the next decade, and beyond.