Chair: Brian Beaven

The Trees and Greenspace and Sustainability Committee is dedicated to preserving, protecting, and expanding Centertown’s greenspaces and tree canopy. The committee also helps develop creative gardening programs, promotes community events in our parks, and advocates for sustainable solutions to climate change in our community.

The Trees and Greenspace and Sustainability Committee initiatives include:

• Advocating for an increased urban tree canopy and more parks and greenspaces, specifically in relation to proposed development projects;

• Promotion of community activities in parks and greenspaces;

• Volunteer maintenance of parks including St. Luke’s Parkette and Dundonald Park and “guerilla gardening” when warranted;

• Promoting green, sustainable solutions now focused on mitigating use of single-use plastics;

• Heritage advocacy in relation to heritage landscapes and vistas.

The Trees and Greenspace and Sustainability Committee (T&G) is a formal standing Committee of the Centretown Community Association that has its own semi-autonomous Chair and its own small endowed “Tree Fund” designed to permit it to execute its mandate. Because of the interplay between real estate development and the promotion of greenspace, the T&G maintains a very close working relationship to the CCA Planning Committee.

Trees, parks and greenspace has always defined the focus of T&G activity. Over the past several years, T&G has negotiated the creation of the Off-Bank Community Garden and supported guerilla gardening, principally but not exclusively focused on St. Luke’s Parkette in the south east corner of the Golden Triangle.  In September of 2018, T&G organized a Dundonald Gardening Group (DGG) as a Working Group of the Committee. Under the leadership of Lead Gardener Barbara Sibbald, the DGG has already transformed the gardens into something approaching the vision anticipated for the park when it was completed in 1907.

T&G has also been involved in helping organize community events in our neighbourhood’s greenspaces.  For several decades the focus of T&G’s event activity was the Minto Park festival every June. Since 2017, the T&G has collaborated with the Centretown Community Health Centre and the Dundonald Park Working Group to initiate inclusive community-based Earth Days in April and Fall Festivals in September using Dundonald Park as our venue of choice.

To address environmental issues and the challenge of climate change, the CCA has sought to expand the scope of the mandate of T&G to provide leadership in promoting green and sustainable solutions to mitigate the threat of global warming. Since 2018, T&G has aspired to collaborate constructively with the federation of Community Associations for Environmental Sustainability, CAFES. Earth Day in Dundonald Park was first launched in April 2018 in an effort to provide various local environmental groups with a means of connecting at the grassroots level. In September of 2019, the Single Use Plastics Sub-Committee was initiated by T&G and approved by the CCA Board.

Interested in joining this committee? Become a CCA member today and contact us at treesandgreenspace-chair@centretowncitizens.ca

Header Image: Dundonald Park, Centretown/ Photograph by Stephen Thirlwall