Smart Waterloo Region

Nurture trains and supports youth teams to take over the care, maintenance, and future design of school gardens. This includes: 

• Learning about ecological food production in a hands-on, peer-to-peer environment

• Receiving mentorship from local community members

• Self-organising to conduct citizen-science projects on ecosystem health

• Creating food forest designs that improve inclusivity and feelings of belonging

• Addressing local food security by harvesting and delivering their produce to partner organisations

In order to provide up-to-date results, the SWRILIE chatbot pulls information from nearly 700 websites. Chief among them is 211 Ontario, an online directory of social services, programs, and community supports.

In November 2017, the Government of Canada launched its Smart Cities Challenge. Informed by community engagement, the Smart Cities Challenge is a two phase funding competition open to all municipalities across Canada. The Challenge empowers municipalities and residents to think big about their future, encouraging communities to use technology and data to overcome their most pressing challenge.

Once launched, our community, the Region of Waterloo, three cities of Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo and the four Townships of Woolwich, Wellesley, Wilmot and North Dumfries, came together to take part in the Challenge.

After months of public and stakeholder engagement, the community selected our challenge area: Healthy children and youth!

In February and March 2018, we engaged our community to select our challenge. We asked our community  to select one of three challenge areas: affordable housing, social inclusions or healthy children and youth. These challenge areas were based on extensive community engagement done by the Wellbeing Waterloo Region initiative. Through an online survey, public consultation centres and stakeholder roundtables, we reached out to residents, community and government organizations, the private and tech sectors and post-secondary institutions for feedback.

Based on all of the feedback collected, our community chose “healthy children and youth” as the challenge area to focus on. Narrowing our focus, we decided that Smart Waterloo Region would address child and youth wellbeing in Waterloo Region. Our challenge statement was:

We will become the benchmark community in Canada for child and youth wellbeing by using early intervention, youth engagement and a connected-community framework to create adaptive, data-driven programs and scalable learning technologies that improve early child development, mental health and high school graduation rates.

Then, we worked with the Children and Youth Planning Table of Waterloo Region to better understand child and youth wellbeing. We also worked with the local tech sector to see what tech solutions exist to address this challenge. Engaging our tech sector led us to new and exciting partnerships – and we learned that there are many tech solutions to improve child and youth wellbeing in our community.

After this outreach, the Region and area municipalities worked together to submit our final Smart Cities Application. We were then selected as one of the top 5 finalists in Canada!

Unfortunately, Smart Waterloo Region wasn’t selected for the Smart Cities Challenge. However, the community saw value in our mission and rallied together to support us. It’s because of generous funding from the Region of Waterloo, the seven area municipalities, and the Lyle S. Hallman Foundation, Smart Waterloo Region Innovation Lab was able to survive and get to where we are today.

To learn more about Smart Waterloo Region Innovation Lab and our projects, visit swril.ca.