[GREN-Exec] Greenbelt Projects and Funding Update

[Kevin Thomason]

Hi GREN Executive,

I hope that you have been keeping well and staying safe.  It has continued to be an extremely busy time as I continue work on our new house, Doctors Without Borders and lots of activities on the environmental front with the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance and the Greenbelt West Coalition.

The Ford government has continued their rampage working to intimidate and throttle every environmental group that has ever spoken out against them.  Pretty much all Trillium Funding has been cut-off and the Greenbelt Foundation is too scared to provide funding to most provincial environmental groups anymore, lest their own funding be terminated.  Many groups have folded and many others are on the brink.

Thankfully, GREN has never had much funding so cuts have little impact on us.  However, we have depended on many other groups over the years who have provided expertise, materials, communications, co-ordination, and many other things that we have relied on.  It is our turn now to help them and ensure that they survive the year ahead and continue to do great work on a myriad of environmental issues.

Thus, things are going to be reversed and rather than provincial groups getting funding that is distributed to local groups, local groups will instead get funding that will can be used to purchase services from the larger provincial organizations like Environmental Defence and Ontario Nature to help keep a strong, united environmental community in the province.

The Ford government is ramming through a lot in their final year of their mandate and critical issues such as our Regional Official Plan, MCR’s (Municipal Comprehensive Reviews), Greenbelt expansion, and other decisions that will determine long-term land use planning are coming in the months ahead.  We need to ensure that there are the co-ordinated campaigns, resources, maps, analysis, etc. available that will be required.

The plan is that regional groups such as GREN, Environment Hamilton and the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition will receive funding from the Greenbelt Foundation that can then be used to help support other local groups and/or fund provincial efforts.  So for example, GREN could get around $30,000 that we could then divide out to local groups like Hold The Line Waterloo, the Guelph Moraine Coalition, Ella Haley’s Sustainable Brant, etc.  We could also use some of the funds to fund Environmental Defence to develop provincial mapping or such.  We could also use some of the funding for our own projects.

While this is new for GREN, we need to step forward and do what we can to help ensure other groups survive and the Ford government damage is as limited as possible.  This should be quite manageable for us and will help to provide us with resources too.

Short of issuing one invoice for $1,200 to EcoSpark for some initial GREN funding there isn’t much for us to do at this point other than to await the response from our earlier funding applications.  I can work with Greg on the EcoSpark invoice.  We can have an Executive conference call at any time to discuss things further.  

Hopefully this all makes sense.

Please let me know any questions or ideas.

Cheers,
Kevin.

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Kevin Thomason

1115 Cedar Grove Road
Waterloo, Ontario Canada  N2J 3Z4

Phone: (519) 888-0519
Mobile Phone/WhatsApp: (519) 240-1648
Twitter: @kthomason
E-mail: kevinthomason at mac.com

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