Building resilience against climate change — one community at a time

When COVID-19 hit, United Way Greater Toronto (UWGT) and the City of Toronto quietly built something most residents never saw: a network of community organizations, organized into local clusters across the city, that could spot needs and move resources fast. It worked.

Now that same strategy is serving as roadmap for climate-driven crises — which are becoming more frequent and severe — such as extreme heat waves, cold snaps, fires, floods, power outages and poor air quality.

UWGT and the City began to look at whether the Covid model could be rebuilt for emergency preparedness, so they wouldn’t have to start from scratch every time there’s a crisis.

“We’re trying to develop some of those process pieces, like how do you rapidly shift a program or service during an emergency in a multi-service space with multiple partners,” said Alex Dow, director of neighbourhood solutions at UWGT.

UWGT leads Community Coordination Tables — a model for coordinating local agencies and resources — that brings together more than 500 organizations across Toronto, Peel and York Region to tackle pressing challenges head-on.

As part of its broader Community Coordination Plan in Toronto, UWGT is working with the Canadian Red Cross and other partners to build a more resilient system for responding to and recovering from future shocks and stressors.

This includes a Resilience Hub Pilot, which explores how community hubs can support neighbourhood resilience, doubling as entry points for community members to access vital supports during crises. Pilot projects to date include the Rexdale Community Hub and Thorncliffe Park Community Hub.

During this pilot phase, a major fire broke out in two towers of a Thorncliffe Park high-rise, displacing hundreds of people. The Neighbourhood Organization (TNO) co-leads the Thorncliffe Park Community Hub (TPCH), which provides social services, settlement programs and healthcare navigation for the community.

“TNO was able to pivot very quickly because of our relationships in the community,” said Nalini Pandalangat, vice-president of health, wellness and community development at TNO.

They made an executive decision to open up the hub, putting a large-scale, multi-agency response into place overnight for 115 local residents. The hub and its partners worked with the City and the Canadian Red Cross to provide food, blankets and emergency supplies, and to assess who needed medical care.

“None of this was part of a funded mandate,” said Pandalangat. “We knew that this was the right thing to do.” Now UWGT is looking to systemize the lessons learned from this experience — with community input.

Research has shown that climate change and extreme weather events can disproportionately impact ethnic minorities, Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities, as well as vulnerable populations such as seniors, people living with disabilities and people with underlying chronic health conditions.

For example, during an emergency, an isolated senior may have nowhere else to go. Or a displaced multi-generational household may not have enough resources to house everyone in a hotel.

“We’re trying to keep front and centre the kind of communities and individuals that we know are more vulnerable to those impacts,” said Dow, “and making sure they don’t get forgotten when these things happen.”

That means a system needs to be built and led by the communities most likely to be affected, rather than one designed for them from the outside.

In each community, the need is different, and the emergency response might be different, too. The localized response should not be seen as an add-on, said Pandalangat, but as the foundation upon which systems are built.

“It should be informed by the local community, whether it is community organizations, whether it is the residents,” she said. “Even with the Thorncliffe Park fire, the response was successful only because there were local organizations and local community involved at that scale.”