Imagine living without air conditioning during a heat wave. A senior with limited mobility, social connection, and income may have no choice but to endure the sweltering heat inside their one-bedroom apartment. Add a power outage to the equation and it’s only a matter of time before refrigerated food spoils. Without a gas range, moreover, they can’t cook meals. And if they weren’t digitally literate, accessing help would becomes yet another painful barrier.

This isn’t a scene from a distant future. It’s a present-day reality for many residents in the Kingston-Galloway Orton Park (KGO) neighbourhood in Toronto. KGO is one of Ontario’s most socially and economically vulnerable communities. The neighbourhood has the highest concentration of social housing in the province, with over 30% of residents living below the low-income cut-off. Many residents live in buildings from the 1970s without air conditioning, insulation, or adequate ventilation, surrounded by concrete and asphalt. The resulting urban heat island effect only intensifies their risk during extreme weather events.

In a landscape where climate emergencies are accelerating, the people who are most vulnerable are often the least equipped to prepare for, respond to, and bounce back from a crisis. Sahar Vermezyari, Director of East Scarborough Storefront, a community hub and backbone organization that works collaboratively to connect people with the resources and services they need, understands these risks intimately. She works at the intersections of climate vulnerability, poverty, and equity – and she and her team are determined to shift the narrative.

With support from Gore Mutual Foundation, the Storefront partnered with Catalysts’ Circle, a community-focused consultancy led and founded by Anne Gloger, and with researchers from the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy to launch Bouncing Forward.

Bouncing Forward is an initiative designed to help the KGO community prepare for, respond to, and bounce forward from climate-related emergencies.

The initiative is not just about planning; it is about building resilience through a Connected Community Approach.

“Mitigation is often something that is put on communities like KGO even though they’re not the ones contributing greatly to the climate crisis and are already resource strapped,” Vermezyari says. “To put this kind of onus on marginalized communities is unfair and inequitable.”

Instead, Bouncing Forward puts power back in the hands of the community. “We need to ensure that folks who are most vulnerable to negative impacts have a say in how they respond to climate emergencies,” Vermezyari adds.

Integral to the initiative is recognizing and supporting communities as instrumental players in their own resilience. This is a foundational pillar of the Connected Community Approach, co-developed with leadership and guidance from Gloger, which is gaining traction nationally. “We don’t think that we have the answers to everything,” says Vermezyari. “But we do know the answers lie with the community, and we facilitate processes for people to come together to look at the challenges and come up with possible solutions.”

Gloger goes on to say, “Gore Mutual’s grant allows for planning ahead and makes Gore Mutual a pioneer in the world of funding. Keep in mind that most funding opportunities go to direct services, while the work of place-based systems change and foresight often gets lost in the shuffle. This is also the first time a funder has invested in a CCA community-centred resilience and the collaborative ecosystem approach to resilience planning. And that’s groundbreaking.”

Indeed, Gloger’s vision for hyper-local resilience strategies rests on sustained, long-term, and highly relational investment. “A resilient KGO needs funders like Gore Mutual who see the importance of foresight work and are willing to invest in it,” she says. “It requires a paradigm shift in funding for the sector.”

This paradigm shift goes beyond East Scarborough. A white-paper brief will be produced for the City of Toronto’s Environment, Climate and Forestry Division to outline the learnings from the Bouncing Forward initiative, with the goal of influencing how policymakers and funders integrate collaborative approaches into their own efforts.

Because the project is as much about local impact as it is about systems-level change. The City of Toronto and the Red Cross are already paying close attention. In fact, a co-hosted event with the Red Cross this fall will explore how the Bouncing Forward approach can be replicated and scaled across other communities.

“This is about connecting the dots between what Bouncing Forward has gleaned in East Scarborough and the applicability of the learnings from other communities,” says Vermezyari.

On the local level, Vermezyari and her team facilitated a steering committee made up of representatives from six East Scarborough entities, four nonprofits and two resident leaders, to facilitate a deep understanding of local resources and needs as they relate to climate emergencies. It’s about collaboration. “We don’t want to own everything, we don’t think that we have the answers to everything,” says Vermezyari. “But we do some things really well – we convene, we connect people, and we facilitate processes for people to come together to look at the challenges and come up with possible solutions.”

They’ve also been gathering preliminary data through surveys, asking people in their network to recall a recent emergency. Who did you reach out to? Did you get what you needed? What were the challenges? The answers to these and other questions are helping them gather relevant information. The data shows that people rely on personal networks and community centres for emergency response, that a multipronged response through mutual aid and collaboration is needed to meet the varying needs of different groups of people in the community and that reliable information remains a critical gap in emergency response.

And they’ve led their first two community co-design sessions focused on preparation and response, with one more upcoming looking at recovery and bouncing forward strategies. “We’re inviting anchor institutions like the Toronto Zoo and University of Toronto, Scarborough campus as well as resident leaders to inform this plan,” says Vermezyari.

That focus on co-operation is essential. “We’re building the social fabric that’s important to preparing for these kinds of emergencies,” she shares, explaining that even as the plan evolves, the relationships remain central. “When we need to action a plan, everyone will know their role and will have had a part in developing it.”

From heat-wave preparedness to civic participation, from systems design to local action, Bouncing Forward is reimagining what equitable climate action can look like.

But perhaps most importantly, it is proving that when communities lead, and when funders bridge the divide by supporting collaboration instead of merely outcomes, then real change becomes possible.