This is a time when Canada must harness its community-driven resilience. We’re asking you to share examples of how Canadian communities are responding to the crisis with creativity and imagination. Collective problem-solving and collaboration will be instrumental in how Canada mitigates the local impacts of COVID-19 and creates on-the-ground solutions.

Highlighted Initiatives

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Initiatives

Toronto tech startup company hires restaurant staff to provide free meals for frontline workers

Local businesses

Toronto tech company ResQ has committed its services and resources to ensure that free meals are delivered to front-line workers and hospital employees by hiring restaurant staff that have been laid off.

Equitable “social” contractor non-profit in Toronto continues to deliver accessible services

Local businesses

Building Up is a small contractor non-profit that has maintained its operation throughout COVID-19 to provide reasonably-priced services as well as an equitable pre-apprenticeship program developed for those who face barriers in accessing employment.

Saskatchewan university student forms online initiaitive to deliver caremongering acts across Province

Food

Residents across Saskatoon and Regina have joined a Facebook group initiated to achieve community caremongering initiatives such as food security, challenges to local eviction regulation and partner with organizations that seek to help elderly, immunocompromised, and youth populations.

COVID-19 Response Advisory Committees

General: Tools for engagement | Policy leadership

The City of Vancouver’s municipal Councillors are holding working sessions with committees representing a variety of affected groups, ranging from 2SLGBTQ+ to seniors to Urban Indigenous Peoples.

Downtown Eastside Community Resilience Taskforce

Frontline services | Policy leadership

The City of Vancouver is organizing a multi-agency taskforce to generate engagement and harm reduction strategies as at-risk populations in the area face greater challenges during the crisis.

Winnipeg restaurants, shops and services made available to residents during COVID-19

Food | General: Online communities and networks | Local businesses

Winnipeg Free Press has produced an online directory platform for operating small business to reach customers that are looking to shop, eat and buy locally.

Post-secondary student initiates inclusive project making masks for deaf and hard of hearing

Public health

A Kentucky college senior constructs masks to help hard of hearing individuals by sewing bed sheets and plastic fabric that display speakers’ lips to allow for ASL and speech/lip reading.

Calgary RV dealer donates trailers for healthcare workers with families to self-isolate

Fundraising and volunteering | Housing and homelessness | Local businesses | Social isolation

A Calgary dealership owner whose operation was cancelled due to COVID-19 prepares RVs to be shipped across Calgary to mitigate self-isolation challenges faced by healthcare workers with families.

COVID-19 community volunteer engagement by the University of Toronto

General: Online communities and networks | General: Sector resources

U of T has developed an online directory of various volunteer opportunities across Toronto categorized by initiative type that aids in connecting local residents to organizations’ postings.

Leading economists’ recommendations for business support during COVID-19

General: Sector resources | Local businesses

Comprehensive e-book titled “Mitigating the COVID Economic Crisis: Act Fast and Do Whatever It Takes”. Edited by Richard Baldwin and Beatrice Weder di Mauro, the volume aims ‘to collect the thinking of leading economists on what is to be done’.

Local takeaway meals during COVID-19 – Toronto

Food | Frontline services

The 519, a charity that promotes inclusion for LGBTQ2S communities has began preparing meals that are available 7 days a week for Toronto residents.

Essential Solutions Project: Multidisciplinary Advisory Panel for COVID-19

General: Online communities and networks | Housing and homelessness

The Broadbent Insitute webinar lists recommendations to mitigate the impact of inequalities among marginalized communities.

Posters that businesses can use to communicate how they are operating: pickup, delivery, in person or online

Food | Local businesses

This is real-life representation of the Riverside BIA Directory, a colour-coded live map which indicates in real time what level businesses are operating at. The colour codes are the same for the map and signs. Green indicates a business that’s open but may have reduced hours and offerings, yellow means a business is open online or via phone only, and red means the business is closed for now.

Together Apart: Platform to support small businesses in the Ottawa region

Food | General: Online communities and networks | Local businesses

List & links to businesses that are open and what kind of service they are offering (gift cards, delivery, etc.)

Inside Ajax newsletter profiles various COVID19 community initiatives

Arts and Culture | Children | Food | Fundraising and volunteering | General: Online communities and networks | Seniors | Social isolation

This edition includes profiles of At Home with Ajax Council FB Live Series; COVID-19 Window Project; Stay Home Ajax #SupportLocal; Ajax Library: Meet Flipster; “Community to Table” Food Box; Friendly Call Program for Seniors; and Ajax Hygiene Hub.

Visit Guelph website & social media provides information on how to support local during the pandemic

Food | Local businesses | Policy leadership | Shop Local

The virtual discovery page shares ways to support local businesses, farmers and growers, and charities through new digital ways.

Canadian company helps local small businesses sell products during COVID-19

Local businesses | Shop Local

London Drugs will be dedicating shelf space in select stores to small businesses that have had to close their doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That space, located in the centre aisles of the stores – which the company says it is “transforming into local central” – will be stocked with products entirely from local businesses.

Canada Bikes’ crowd-sourced google spreadsheet details COVID19 bike/pedestrian responses across Canadian cities

General: Crowdsourced tools and resources | Mobility and transportation

Categories being tracked include: are bicycle shops an essential service; are beg buttons disabled; partial closures; closed streets; distance and transit-oriented development.

New Brunswick is using ‘household bubbles’ to socialize amid COVID-19

Policy leadership | Public health

The introduction of ‘household bubbles’ allows a family in one house to choose one other household to spend time with, assuming that both agree to the arrangement and don’t have close contact with anyone else.

Architecture firm shares architecture challenges for children in lockdown

Arts and Culture | Children

British architecture studio Foster + Partners is publishing a series of architecture challenges, including building a paper skyscraper and creating a city, to keep children in coronavirus lockdown entertained.

City of Montreal issues call for proposals for non-profits for the purpose of providing technical support to businesses

Local businesses | Policy leadership

Proposals can address issues pertaining to supply, administrative support, people management, sales systems or other areas. The implemented solutions will help small businesses deal with the challenges from COVID-19.

Mi’kmaq not-for-profit using technology to make medical supplies

Indigenous | Local businesses

A Mi’kmaq run non profit agency is using 3-D printing technology to make medical supplies for health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 3-D printers are normally in classrooms across Nova Scotia but are now in Halifax printing protective equipment that may be in short supply for isolated communities.

Downtown Kamloops’ BIA COVID19 web & social media platform

Local businesses
Three focus areas: DOWNTOWN TO GO, a #Supportlocal campaign; BUSINESS is OPEN, information on Downtown Kamloops Businesses that are closed (temporarily), offering take-out, pick-up, online stores and other business models that will help the community stay #ykastrong; COMMUNITY & INNOVATION showcasing how Downtown Kamloops businesses are pivoting; and RESOURCES FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS

In-house Elders available for support during this time of crisis, offering support and building resiliency.

Indigenous | Mental health

Canada’s national Indigenous women’s organization, NWAC, is the political voice of Indigenous women, girls and gender-diverse people in Canada, inclusive of First Nations on and off reserve, status and non-status, disenfranchised, Métis and Inuit. They are working with our Provincial and Territorial Member Associations (PTMAs), our NWAC elders and youth and communicating with Indigenous Services Canada to keep members informed and updated about COVID-19.

A Toronto-based consultancy has built a visualization of sidewalk widths in Toronto to support decisions and data around social distancing

General: Crowdsourced tools and resources

Created by Ratio.City, an organization with a mission to gather this data and provide the analysis that will unlock the potential of cities around the world.

Virtual map gives general location of fairy houses and gardens in Greater Victoria

Children

Inspired by scavenger hunts and other creative activities people are thinking up to keep busy during the pandemic, Breese decided to create a virtual map of the region’s fairy hot spots.

Recovery site for homeless COVID-19 patients offers dignity and a pathway to housing

Frontline services | Housing and homelessness | Policy leadership

The recovery site for COVID-positive homeless people is a unique collaboration between many health partners, government, addiction recovery supports, community & neighbourhood groups and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontier Canada providing expertise on project co-ordination and logistics. Among the primary goals of the recovery site is treating homeless patients with dignity in a clinical setting and ensuring they have a home to go to afterward — not a return to homelessness.

British Columbia working with the Cities of Vancouver and Victoria to transition people living in encampments into temporary accommodations with wraparound supports

Housing and homelessness | Policy leadership

The Province of BC, in partnership with BC Housing and local municipalities, has worked to secure and operate 686 hotel and community centre accommodations in Vancouver and 324 hotel spaces in Victoria. This allows people from the encampments to safely physically distance, with access to important health, social and other supports.

Manitoba government wants contractor to provide meals for 15,000 students, as pandemic halts school programs

Children | Food | Local businesses

The contractor will supply the meals to 17 hubs set up across the province. The food will then be delivered to homes or a specific pick-up location by a network of volunteers, non-profit organizations and private-sector food delivery companies, the RFP states. They’ll deliver a five-day supply of food products for each student every week, with instructions on how to prepare the meals.

Five large companies (including two banks) come together to support front-line healthcare workers and help fight food insecurity in Toronto

Food | Fundraising and volunteering | Local businesses

The Scotiabank Arena has been transformed into Toronto’s largest kitchen to prepare up to 10,000 meals a day. Working with a network of hospitals to donate to front-line workers and Second Harvest to donate to food banks and shelters this coalition of partners is delivering meals across Greater Toronto.

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