A Developmental Evaluation of High/Low Diversity and High/Low Resource Communities: Identifying Precursors for Engagement

In 2023, for the third year in a row, the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) supported 7 communities across Canada to design and implement local climate action through The Synergia Transition and Resilience Climate Action Program (STARCAP). STARCAP offers community members a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC); Toward Co-operative Commonwealth: Transition in a Perilous Century, and accompanying participatory workshops, frameworks, networking, and other guidance related to advancing social change. In order to understand how well the program was supporting community members in leading and participating in climate action, CCEDNet chose to apply a Developmental Evaluation approach with the aim of re-centering marginalized voices.

We began our evaluation with deep ethonography in St. James Town, one of the 7 communities participating in STARCAP. Our hypothesis was that by focusing on the most diverse community in Toronto, which is the most diverse city on the planet, our findings could be extrapolated to multiple contexts across Canada. What we learned was that the uniqueness of St. James Town (over 140 languages are spoken here; it is the most dense neighbourhood in Canada; and has more people with advanced degrees per capita than anywhere else in the country) offered fertile terrain to explore how diversity, resources, and community priorities intersect. The iterative nature of our evaluation allowed for multiple pivots and divergent explorations before we landed on the reciprocally beneficial question: What precursors are required for community engagement?

This question was motivated by the understanding that community members have unique desires and dreams, and that competing priorities related to these dreams, as well as the realities of survival mean that the level and nature of participation vary greatly across communities that are homogeneous and resource rich, and those that are diverse and low income.

Building on the themes of trauma, privilege and community cohesion uncovered during our research, we designed future visioning workshops that dug deeper into community member priorities. We then explored the current state of the climate crisis locally as well as internationally, along with climate action initiatives as a means of identifying barriers and enablers to these desired futures. Our hope is that by understanding how what we dream of is entangled with present day realities, we can begin to identify steps towards our dreams that also align with preserving the planet on which these dreams rest.