This toolkit offers a starting point for planners (and practitioners) who want to make their engagement processes more equitable. It offers easy-to-use tools for different parts of any engagement process.

Currently, this toolkit uses the City of Toronto’s definition and listing of equity-deserving groups as they have been identified for the context of Toronto.

While Making Space currently uses the City of Toronto’s definition of equity-deserving groups, the intention is to identify tools within each how-to that remove barriers to reaching a wider group of people. We expect this will benefit a range of people who are typically harder to reach through conventional modes of engagement.

To decide on the tools we combined findings from our wider research in equitable engagement with insights gained directly from City of Toronto planners. We conducted online surveys and co-design workshops with City of Toronto planners to identify their top five needs - the stress points which they identified as being most important to help them begin to shift their engagement practices. We used those how-tos to identify, curate, and design easy-to-use tools.

The first phase of this project involved an extensive environmental scan of existing open-source engagement toolkits available globally. The tools in Making Space were adapted, curated, or designed using those toolkits as starting points and responding to the stress points (i.e. how-tos) identified by City of Toronto planners.

This toolkit is meant to be a sacrificial prototype - a starting point for the City of Toronto to identify how to better embed equity throughout their current engagement processes. We recognize that these tools are not comprehensive, but rather a starting point from which we can continue to evolve and grow and inspire more radical and progressive engagement that moves towards community co-creation and power sharing.