Activating Community Leadership
Professor Aditi Mehta leads a long-standing collaboration between the University of Toronto’s Urban Studies Program and the Toronto Community Centre of Learning and Development (TCLD) to run Activating Community Leadership in Regent Park, a 10-week community leadership course for 20 residents from Toronto’s Downtown East. The students are often new immigrants to Toronto, many of whom are also parents navigating work-life balance.
To inform the program’s approach, Dr. Mehta investigated effective adult civic education initiatives. The course teaches students how Toronto’s civic system works, from understanding municipal governance to learning community organizing strategies and practical skills like grant writing and communications. In seminars with U of T faculty and local non-profit leaders, students explore community concerns such as food sovereignty, COVID-19 impacts, and neighbourhood safety. Throughout the course, students work on an individual project that demonstrates their learning and culminates in the presentation of an idea and an action plan on how to improve some aspect of their community.
With funding from the School of Cities and Centre for Community Partnerships, Dr. Mehta and former graduate research assistant Kaela Sanborn-Humm have explored ways to expand the curriculum to other under-served neighbourhoods. They published a guide on how to scale the initiative and a website to share the course with the broader public, and are currently designing a pedagogical research program to evaluate the course's effectiveness and inform future iterations of community-based adult education programming.
Visit the web pages for individual courses by year:
2023: https://q.utoronto.ca/courses/326317