Webinar Recording: Community Garden Accessibility
Posted: April 27, 2015
Categories: Food Access / GoodFoodBites / News from Sustain Ontario / Webinars / Working Group News
A recording of the Community Garden Accessibility webinar that took place on March 11th, 2015 is now available for online viewing. Below you can access the webinar recording (password available to Sustain Ontario members, supporters, and event attendees) as well as view the slides from each presentation. This webinar was part of the Food Access Peer Learning Circle.
The webinar provided a discussion of accessibility requirement for public spaces as part of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) as well as examples from Waterloo Region of great work being done to make community gardens more accessible and inclusive. The impetus for this webinar came up from questions raised on the Ontario Community Garden Network list-serve about how AODA legislation would affect community gardens and what resources were available to help community gardens comply. For more information about Sustain’s Community Garden Network contact communitygardens@sustainontario.ca.
Our first presenter, Bonnie Yu, who is program advisor with the Public Education and Partnerships Unit at the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario, gave an informative overview of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and the five accessibility standards covered in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation. Most relevant to community gardens are the accessibility requirements under the Design of Public Spaces Standard that includes accessible parking, exterior paths of travel, outdoor public eating areas and play spaces. Bonnie’s presentation also offered a variety of free tools and resources to help community gardens comply. For example, the AODA Wizard is a tool for organizations to learn what they need to do to comply to accessibility laws.
Next, Carol Popovic gave a presentation on community garden projects in the Waterloo Region that have undergone considerable consultation and re-construction to become more accessible and inclusive. As a Public Health Nurse with the Region of Waterloo Public Health and part of the Healthy Eating and Active Communities project, Carol has been providing pivotal staff support to the Community Garden Council of Waterloo
Region since 2005. Much of the garden accessibility projects came out a collaborative Diggable Communities Partnership – Carol’s presentation emphasized the importance of partnerships (in their case with landscape architects at University of Waterloo and support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation) and community and accessibility consultation in designing and supporting the process and garden overhauls. From their work, the Diggable Communities Project has published a Barrier-Free Gardening Guide that details design and material ideas as well as the guidelines for good process.
The discussion and questions addressed specifics of AODA requirements, specifics regarding materials, and re-iterated the importance of consultation and partnership in any community garden project. We hope this webinar can support community garden groups in working with their municipalities, public health departments, and communities in making their gardens more accessible and inclusive. Thank you to the presenters for sharing their knowledge and ideas and to all the participants for adding to the discussion with questions and comments.
For those unable to attend, the slides from both presentations are available on SlideShare.net/Sustain_Ontario.
This webinar was part of a series of educational webinars and discussions of the Food Access Peer Learning Circle, a project of Healthy Food for All: Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems in Ontario. The Food Access PLC hopes to be an avenue to strengthen existing collaborative networks, support initiatives on a variety of food access topics, share tools, resources, and best practices, and come to a place of agreement for government and the network to move forward on. For more information on the Food Access PLC, please contact Bronwyn Clement, bronwyn@sustainontario.ca.