Civic Action

CivicAction (legal name the Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance, formerly the Toronto City Summit Alliance) is a coalition of civic leaders in the Toronto region. CivicAction has worked with business, government, community, labour, and academia to address social, economic and environmental challenges in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. CivicAction is led by a Board of Directors and a 75-leader Steering Committee. CivicAction adopted its current name in December 2010. [1]

Every four years, CivicAction holds a summit to identify the biggest issues facing the region. Out of the summit, CivicAction sets its agenda for the next four years and launches initiatives and campaigns to help tackle these issues. The fourth CivicAction Summit “Better City Bootcamp” was held on April 28, 2015.

Organization

CivicAction is a non-profit, non-partisan organization formed to address challenges to the Toronto region’s social and economic future. It was created by David Pecaut following a 2002 summit of business and community leaders.[2] Pecaut led a 40-member steering committee that generated Enough Talk: An Action Plan for the Toronto Region, which provided the roadmap for the organization's focus on issues where there was a clear consensus for action and where it felt progress could be made quickly.

Following Enough Talk, the committee created a non-profit corporation to convene leaders from all sectors to work together to tackle specific social and economic challenges.

Past and present Board Chairs:

Projects

Following are CivicAction's current projects, campaigns, and initiatives:[4]

Over 6000 people in the Toronto region have been involved in projects CivicAction has developed and supported, including:

Toront03 Alliance: raised and invested over $11 million in post-SARS tourism recovery and branding, leading to over $80 million in economic benefit for Ontario;

Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC): developed in partnership with The Maytree Foundation, TRIEC's Mentoring Partnership has created 4200 mentoring matches and Career Bridge has facilitated over 1000 internships (close to 80% of Career Bridge interns have secured full-time work in their field);

Strong Neighbourhoods Task Force: a collaborative effort of United Way Toronto, the City of Toronto and the Alliance, the Task Force created a plan to revitalize neighbourhoods, identifying 13 as priorities for investment;

Modernizing Income Security for Working-Age Adults (MISWAA) Task Force: developed a roadmap to modernize income security to ensure the full economic participation of working-age adults. An initiative of the Alliance and St. Christopher House, MISWAA helped to bring about the federal Working Income Tax Benefit, the new Ontario Child Benefit, and a provincial dental plan;

Toronto Region Research Alliance: unites governments, technology-based companies, colleges and universities and financial institutions in attracting major investments and promoting research in the Golden Horseshoe;

Luminato: this annual $15 million international festival capitalizes on Toronto’s strong cultural and tourism assets. It features artists from across Canada and abroad and attracted over one million participants in 2007 and again in 2008; and

Canada's first Social Entrepreneurship Summit: together with MaRS Discovery District, the Centre for Social Innovation and The Boston Consulting Group, the Alliance brought together 160 Canadian social entrepreneurs and others to support social entrepreneurship and award the Schwab Foundation's first Canadian Social Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Your32 campaign: Launched in the fall of 2012,[8] CivicAction's Your32 regional transportation campaign brought citizens, community leaders, and elected officials together to build public support for a better and financially sustainable regional transportation system. The campaign saw half of all elected officials from across the GTHA and across levels of government join thousands of residents to pledge their support for new sources of funding for transportation, resulting in a $15 billion dedicated investment in regional transportation for the GTHA in the July 2014 Ontario budget.

References

  1. "City-building group renamed as Greater Toronto Civic Action Alliance", National Post, December 9, 2010
  2. "Knelman: David Pecaut, 54: 'Greatest mayor Toronto never had'", The Toronto Star, December 15, 2009
  3. "Postmedia Network Chairman Rod Phillips appointed head of CivicAction", The National Post, June 6, 2014
  4. http://www.energyglobe.info/canada2015?cl=en&id=147014/
  5. http://www.torontonaiop.org/rex/awardswinners.cfm
  6. "Heads Up Energy Efficiency Newsletter - January 2013", Government of Canada, January 2013
  7. "Anti-gridlock campaign: How would you spend an extra 32 minutes a day?", The Toronto Star, October 10, 2012

External links

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