Little Forests Kingston

It was down to the wire, but with 3 minutes to spare we submitted our grant application for the 2BT Capacity Building program! Thank you to everyone who put so much work into making this happen! Here’s the final application and letters of support from old & new collaborators (new ones include City of Kingston & Rotary).

Meeting Saturday at 10:00

Meeting: Saturday February 12 10:00 am

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83651860259?pwd=QUIrR1cwbmxadm5jbVl4WldLWUl1UT09

Agenda:

• Hannah will walk us through a decision making framework, using our draft values & vision to work through Noah’s Starbuck’s case study 

• We’ll brainstorm our visual identity. If you have time before tomorrow’s meeting add images or notes to a Miro board. The image below is from a session we did to plan our delegations using Miro.

Brainstorming our visual identity

We received a $5000 grant from Nature Canada for launching our website, a hosting service for the Forest Builder app and a contractor to work on our visual identity: logo, colours, fonts, banner etc

Use Miro to share ideas, visuals, graphics, logos, websites etc that resonate with you and that the designer can use for inspiration. If you have some time before the meeting tomorrow add your ideas to the board. We’ll also spend 15 minutes reviewing the board (with some time to add additional ideas).

Delegations to City Council

Last week we had fun brainstorming, preparing and practicing delegations to City Council in response to the Intensification, Redevelopment & Climate Change Report.

We had planned on doing up to 8 delegations (5 minute presentations) to Council. Normally only a few people present however, over 15 delegations (not including all of ours) were submitted for the 15th and so, guided by the advice of Julie Salter-Keene & Lisa Osanic, we decided to postpone most of our delegations.

You can watch them on Youtube starting at 1:04:58 when I presented on 3-30-300 tree equity and City in a Forest. Hazel, a Grade 9 student from KSS presented starting at approximately 1:26:16. The Councillors loved Hazel’s presentation & the perspective she brought, which they seldom hear. And the 3-30-300 rule I presented generated a lot of questions and really resonated with some of the Councillors. Here are the slidedecks for most of the remaining delegations.They’ll be presented in March when Councillor Lisa Osanic brings forward a motion on tracking each tree planted & each tree lost.

Why bother doing delegations you might ask? Bruce Bursey, President of Portsmouth Community Association, also delivered a delegation and followed up with an email to Commissioner Brad Joyce who replied that he trying to reframe the conversation from “we can’t plant trees because” to “how can we get trees there” and is keen on doing a pilot to engage the neighbourhood community to see how they can get more trees planted. That’s a big win!

Reversing biodiversity loss by 2030

City of Kingston doesn’t have a biodiversity strategy. Siena will be making the link between biodiversity, tree cover and social equity in her March delegation, sharing this graphic from The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments.

A new term for biodiversity I’ve been seeing lately is ‘nature positive’. “A nature positive approach enriches biodiversity, stores carbon, purifies water and reduces pandemic risk… a nature positive approach enhances the resilience of our planet and our societies.”