Community leadership is essential to climate equity and resilience.
Across all three cities, the Lab’s research, community engagement, and structured experimentation have pointed in one clear direction: community leadership.
Community-led responses to climate-related emergencies are more likely to build on the strengths and resources of local communities — leading to more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable outcomes.
Two phases of work have shown that communities are already building climate resilience — but that formal systems are not keeping up. Without deliberate efforts to centre justice in policy and funding, the most vulnerable will be left without viable paths forward. Trusted relationships and informal networks are often the bridge when systems fall short.
Phase 2 explored three city-specific models with important lessons for community-led climate responses:
Toronto: Neighbourhood Resilience Nodes
In Toronto, the Lab found that climate resilience already exists — in the community hubs, mutual aid networks, and trusted relationships that have kept people connected through crisis after crisis. The challenge is that the people who need these resources most are often the hardest to reach: language barriers, mobility challenges, and a long history of systems that didn’t show up make formal channels hard to trust.
Working with community partners, the Lab explored an approach led by Circle Community Land Trust that focuses on a network of neighbourhood resilience nodes — hyper-local connection points that meet people where they already are. Inspired by models like Block Parent and vaccine ambassador networks, the approach fills the gap between formal community spaces and the informal, trusted channels that equity-denied communities actually rely on.
What we learned:
Reach is a trust problem as much as a resource problem. Hyper-local approaches, like community resilience nodes led by community climate ambassadors, help close the last mile gap by addressing trust, accessibility and language barriers.
Vancouver: Social Service Collaboration Platform
In Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, climate impacts are compounding existing challenges like opioid overdoses, housing insecurity, and health concerns — adding even more demand on already-stretched frontline organizations. Building on the work of Vancity Community Foundation and SFU’s Centre for Community Engaged Research Initiative, the Lab explored a platform for local organizations to share resources, expertise, and support across these overlapping challenges — reducing gaps, duplication, and administrative burden, and freeing up capacity to direct where communities need it most.
What we learned:
Co-design that includes residents, not just the organizations serving them, surfaces different priorities than services alone reveal. When residents, organizations, and the broader DTES community each named their own top priority, residents converged on one answer: a community-led climate resilience hub.
Waterloo Region: Lived Expertise Model
In Waterloo Region, the Lab prototyped an approach that puts lived experience at the centre of climate resilience design — not as a consultation step, but as the foundation. Working with community partners, the Lab connected and lifted up existing grassroots-led resilience efforts through mutual aid and financial support, and worked to incorporate the knowledge of people navigating inadequate housing, health needs, and climate vulnerability into the programs and principles being designed to serve them.
What we learned:
Putting lived expertise first has real costs — resourcing and compensating community members as experts, and building in the time and power for that expertise to shape design, not just inform it.
What are community-led resilience hubs?
Meeting everyday needs
Community-led resilience hubs go beyond emergency response. They are spaces where communities can come together to address both everyday and emergency climate needs on their own terms.
Trusted location
Hubs are trusted places where people access resources, share knowledge, and support one another.
Community collaboration
Hubs are different from top-down approaches. They are effective because they are built from lived experience and local knowledge, and because the community is actively engaged in co-development and operation.
Building capacity for mitigation
They create space for healing, organizing, and mutual aid. They meet people where they are, address barriers that formal systems often overlook, and build the kind of trusted relationships that turn out to be essential when a crisis hits.
Community-led resilience hubs emerged as the Lab’s focus because the communities and the evidence pointed there. They are one of the most promising approaches to climate resilience and equity — and understanding what it would take to support and scale them is the work of Phase 3.
What’s next: Phase 3
Phase 3 is the Lab’s move toward the deeper question in Canada’s innovation system: not how to generate better ideas about climate resilience, but how to align the policies, funding structures, and institutions that would allow community-led approaches to take root and scale.
