The City is collaborating with the local Church-Wellesley Village community to develop a new vision and improvement plan for Barbara Hall Park. The plan will articulate a community-driven vision for how Barbara Hall Park should evolve in the medium term and will set the direction for future park improvements.
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The timeline is subject to change.
Register to join the conversation about potential enhancements to the AIDS Memorial and its immediate surroundings, and how to tell the story of the park and its significance to HIV, AIDS and 2SLGBTQ+ communities in the new park design. In keeping with the community’s wishes, the memorial will not be moved and any enhancements will only proceed if there is strong community support for them.
A summary of the meeting will be shared on this page.
Level of Engagement
This project has been classified as a Collaborate project based on the International Association of Public Participation Public Participation Spectrum. This means we aim to partner with the public and stakeholders in each aspect of the design process, including the development of design options and the identification of a preferred design.
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This project has a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) made up of representatives of the Church-Wellesley Village Community. The CAC’s mandate is to provide a forum for feedback, guidance and advice to the project team at key decision points during the community engagement process. The CAC will meet approximately one to two times per phase of the project. The CAC is not a decision-making body and does not speak on behalf of the entire community. Members of the CAC include representatives of the following organizations:
Download the CAC Terms of Reference.
This phase of the community engagement process started in January 2023 and included stakeholder interviews to better understand the issues and opportunities associated with the park. Interviewed stakeholder groups included:
Review the draft drivers of change and learn more about this phase.
The draft drivers of change were confirmed in summer 2023. Visit the Community Engagement Phase 1 section to review the finalized drivers of change.
This phase of the community engagement process started in May 2023. In this phase, the City worked with residents and stakeholders to define a renewed overall vision for the park, including a series of guiding principles and big moves which will guide the development of design options in Community Engagement Phase 2.
Download the Community Engagement Phase 1 summary.
This section is organized as follows:
These are the opportunities and challenges driving the need for a change to the park’s design.
Barbara Hall Park has diverse users with varied needs. In many ways, the space is expected to be “everything to everyone”: a space for the everyday, while also being a place for reflection, mourning and celebration, and where people come to access the services of the 519 Community Centre. In the past, the park accommodated all of these uses quite well, but this has not been the case more recently. There is a lack of cohesion between the different park elements, and the park struggles to accommodate the huge number of users who visit during the annual Green Space Festival.
The park is the green heart of the Church-Wellesley Village – a highly prized oasis of green within the community that is also its central gathering place. The raised lawn, garden beds and canopy trees are all highly valued by nearby residents. However, the park lacks an appropriate range of seating, is not properly lit and the pathways are not wide enough to accommodate heavy use. The programmed spaces present maintenance challenges that the community would like improved. The park has a lack of flat surfaces which make it difficult to program.
As the home of two significant LGBTQ2S+ memorials, the Toronto AIDS Memorial and the Trans Memorial, Barbara Hall Park is an important community space for grief, reflection and activism. There is a strong desire to maintain these memorials as places where people can grieve or reflect quietly. However, there is a feeling that these memorials are not properly or clearly identified or maintained and they are sometimes vandalized. In addition, the AIDS Memorial does not resonate strongly with HIV-positive youth, who feel it should also inspire hope and celebrate the lives of those people who are currently living with HIV.
The lack of clear sightlines throughout the park and the presence of dark corners present safety challenges and often attract undesirable activities, like drug use and drug dealing. Particular areas of the park, including the area to the south of the 519 and the northeast corner of the park, lack good lighting and/or programming and can feel particularly unsafe.
A vision statement is a short description of the ideal future park. It inspires everyone toward a common understanding of the project’s overall goals. The vision for Barbara Hall park is:
A revitalized Barbara Hall Park will be a place to gather, celebrate, and heal. It will be an inclusive and welcoming space that is the green focal point of the City’s 2SLGBTQ+ community in the Church-Wellesley Village. As home of the AIDS and Trans Memorials, the park will offer calm and quiet space for reflection and mourning of those lost, while also celebrating the history and resilience of the 2SLGBTQ+ community through heritage interpretation, art and culture. The park design will ensure it is a place where everyone in the surrounding community feels welcome and comfortable while centering needs of the most vulnerable. Barbara Hall Park will be a highly accessible, functional and cohesive space that is easy to program and is animated throughout the year with community-focused programming for people of all ages, ethnicities, abilities, and incomes.
Guiding principles are high-level directions that reflect the community’s most important values and ideas for how the park should look and feel. They help guide how the park should be designed so that the vision statement can be achieved. The guiding principles for Barbara Hall Park are:
Big moves are the main priorities for the design of the park. They are specific directions to the design team that flow from the vision and principles and help to make them a reality. In no particular order, the big moves for Barbara Hall Park are:
Most feedback can be found in the Community Engagement Phase 1 summary.
From April 17 to May 1, an online survey collected feedback from 580 respondents on the draft vision statement, guiding principles and big moves for the park.
The project team hosted an in-person community workshop on November 16 and an online community workshop on November 23 to discuss how the AIDS Memorial should be handled in the park redesign and to explore the community’s needs and expectations more deeply.
Download the AIDS Memorial Community Workshops summary.
From October 8 to October 24, staff from The 519 conducted an intercept survey with 40 community members in the park who were experiencing poverty, homelessness, severe housing precarity and/or other forms of marginalization. An intercept survey is a short, in-person survey conducted in public spaces by approaching people on-site.
On October 12, the project team met with the CAC to share the draft vision, guiding principles and big moves for review and feedback.
During the summer of 2023 the City continued to engage with a number of stakeholders through private meetings and small focus group sessions, in order to advance the draft vision, guiding principles and big moves. These included conversations with:
On May 15, the project team held a community workshop at the 519 Community Centre to develop a new vision for Barbara Hall Park. In addition to the local Councillor and project team, more than 40 community members participated in the workshop.
Download the May 15, 2023 workshop summary.
On May 9, the project team met with the CAC for the first time and were given an opportunity to meet one another, share why the park is important to them, and learn about the process.
From April 21 to May 7, an online thought exchange activity collected 341 thoughts and 7,926 ratings from 281 participants on the vision for the park improvements.
Review a summary of the May 2023 thought exchange activity results, including the top thoughts and themes.
In this phase of the community engagement process, the City and its design consultant will work off the outcomes of Phase 1 to develop two to three design options (called concept options) for the park improvements. These will be presented to the community for feedback, with the input collected used to develop a preferred design for the park.
The anticipated community engagement activities in this phase include:
The anticipated outcome of this phase is the selection of a preferred design option.
From March 14 to March 28, an online thought exchange activity gathered ideas for how to honour and celebrate the unique heritage of Barbara Hall Park and its importance to 2SLGBT+ communities in the new park design. The thought exchange received a total of 254 thoughts and 7,387 thought ratings from 258 participants.
A summary of the thought exchange feedback will be posted on this page.
In this phase of the community engagement process, the City will share the preferred design with the community. Once the preferred design is confirmed, it will be used to guide future park improvements.
The community engagement activities anticipated in this phase include:
The anticipated outcome of this phase is the refined preferred design.
Barbara Hall Park currently includes the following amenities:
The 519 Community Centre is also located within the park. They host events in the park throughout the year, including their signature Green Space Festival, held during Pride Week.
The park is not currently working well, with maintenance, safety and other issues that impact its enjoyable use by the community. The City has begun a process to develop a renewed vision for the park that addresses these concerns. This process, which will be rooted in collaborative community engagement, will lead to the development of a preferred plan to revitalize the park, including cost estimates that will be used to secure future budget for construction.