Community Vitality in Action

Toronto

Story:

In 2001, the Toronto Community Foundation (TCF) began monitoring the health of the city and sharing the results through Toronto’s Vital Signs®. The report serves as an annual check-up on the vitality of Toronto and provides a snapshot of the positive and negative trends in areas important to our quality of life. Since Toronto’s first Vital Signs® publication, the report has been adopted by 15 communities across Canada and is now conducted nationally by Community Foundations of Canada. 

TCF has been particularly successful at ‘leveraging’ the findings sparked by the Report into further community leadership initiatives, including the Toronto Dialogues series, the Vital Ideas and Vital People grant programs, and successful partnership solutions to some of our city’s most pressing issues.

The Toronto Sport Leadership Program (TSLP) is a successful outcome of a Toronto Dialogue which brought diverse groups together to discuss the interrelated issues of youth violence, youth unemployment, school drop-out rates, and drop-off rates in youth recreation. During these discussions, the Mayor’s Advisory Panel on Community Safety (Sport Working Group) surfaced a practical problem that the city and other employers were facing: the lack of qualified youth staff to fill well-paying jobs in recreation. The Foundation then decided to convene six institutional partners along with the Foundation’s fundholders to work together for a common goal: increase access to opportunities for youth in training, employment and community leadership. The creation of the TSLP is an example of how different groups working together can leverage high-impact outcomes for the community.

The Foundation’s fundholders provided seed funding which enabled the Toronto Sport Leadership Program to be launched.  In January 2006, free training and certification as lifeguards and basketball and soccer coaches was offered to the first TSLP cohort of over 100 students from the city’s most at-risk neighbourhoods.  In four years, over 400 youth have gained transferable, marketable skills and are part of a roster of diverse, qualified sports staff for public and private employers. The Toronto Community Foundation has coordinated this unique work-shared collaborative between Toronto Community Foundation, City of Toronto (Parks, Forestry & Recreation), YMCA of Greater Toronto, United Way Toronto, Toronto Catholic District School Board and Toronto District School Board. Partners have worked hard to make TSLP a great model of program efficiency and collaboration.

In 2008, TCF documented and evaluated the program, and explored how the model could be sustained. Discussions are now taking place among the partners to incorporate TSLP into their ongoing program offerings.  Tool kits for partners and a video have been produced to share this story of success and to encourage replication in other cities.