Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Chronic and extreme heat cause the most weather-related deaths in Canada. Importantly, heat events greatly affect people with fewer social and economic resources, and who live and work in unsafe and unstable conditions. Community organizations that work directly with these groups are well-positioned to support them during heatwaves and other climate related emergencies. However, these organizations are often not well supported by the local government actors who lead more formal climate-related strategies, like heat response. This work therefore aims to address this important practical gap by describing the challenges of collaboration between local community and government actors and, in doing so, building new partnerships to strengthen future heat response initiatives. Our team is building upon existing connections with the Toronto-based community organizations, Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW) and Toronto Environmental Alliance (TEA), and the City of Toronto. First, we are conducting interviews to better understand past experiences with climate collaborations from community partners and local government representatives including, for example, factors that either enable or impede working relationships with local government. Second, we are conducting a concept mapping activity to identify climate-related values, strengths, and priorities among CREW, TEA and community members. Key findings from these activities will be combined, and we will work with all project partners to co-develop strategies for strengthening meaningful heat response involving community organizations, the City of Toronto, and public health and climate research networks. Our findings will be shared with community, policy, and scholarly audiences through webinars, infographics, academic manuscripts and other activities determined by our community partners.