Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship

The Innovation

 Evergreen operates as both a social business and a hybrid nonprofit venture. Its mission is to bring communities and nature together for the benefit of both. Started as an experiment to plant trees in 1990, the organization has rapidly grown in its impact on schools, communities, businesses and governments that work together to create and benefit from a healthy, natural sustainable society. At present time, the organization has partnered with 3500 school and 500 community projects and has reached over 1.2M school children.

Evergreen is a recognized international leader in ‘green city’ movements, in large part because its community partnerships enable it to effectively measure up to the scale of its ambitions. One of its most recent successes occurred when the City of Toronto handed over management of a park - including the clean up of a brownfield site - to Evergreen’s social business, Brick Works, envisaged as a self-sustaining C$55M ‘triple bottom line’ facility that is revitalizing a collection of 19th century industrial buildings into an eco-community centre. Evergreen played a pivotal role in engaging a broad set of private and public community stakeholders (Toronto District School Board, Outward Board, YMCA, Food Share, etc) in developing and supporting this idea.

Background

With issues such as climate change and environmental sustainability at the forefront of public concern and heated international debate, the need for Evergreen’s work has never been stronger.  Evergreen has been able to align resources and efforts of private, public and non-profit organizations to combat urban environmental issues and to promote environmental action at the community level.

In bringing these communities together, Evergreen increases the presence of public nature spaces in an urban context. This approach is particularly vital in large Canadian cities, including Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, which have recently experienced significant urban sprawl. The existence of green landscapes contributes to making the cities truly livable and also to creating a practical and achievable blueprint for environmental sustainability.

The Strategy

Evergreen’s strength is facilitating and bridging community partnerships to promote environmental development. The eight-person management team, made up of various urban planning, management, marketing and finance professionals, has built an effective and replicable model to forge corporate partnerships with a community interest and resources on the ground.

This model has been applied consistently to the organization’s four main programs:

•          Learning Grounds – Projects to green school grounds. In 2006, Evergreen contributed the work of 15 staff and C$300K in grants to 132 schools to transform school grounds. Programs span Canada and include a long-term project to green school grounds in Cuba.

•          Common Grounds- National service to protect natural and cultural landscapes, restore degraded environments, and protect spaces for open recreation, education and enjoyment. In 2006, the organization awarded the work of 15 staff and C$420K in grants to 86 groups for community gardening and ecological restoration projects of publicly accessible land.

•          Home Grounds- Consulting activities and information resources specially designed to encourage environment-friendly residential lawn care practices.

•          Brickworks – A C$55M initiative to redevelop 19th century industrial buildings in Toronto into a mixed use environmental education and leadership centre. Designed to cover 100% of operating costs through leasing of office space and event rentals, conferences, parking and admissions. The complex plan for the site, which will be ready by 2010, involves a local food merchants and a seasonal farmers market, community gardens, office space for social enterprise organizations, arts programming, youth leadership training facilities, a restaurant, a place to study geological and natural history, exhibits on the future of green cities, a children’s discovery centre, and community conference facilities.

The Entrepreneur

 Geoffrey Cape is the visionary founder and leader behind Evergreen’s national organization. Over the past 17 years, Geoffrey has played an active role in building a supportive culture of innovation that is well-recognized and attracts talent.

Geoffrey capitalized on his interest in the environment and his abilities to innovate and to make things happen. At the age of 25, Geoffrey built upon his experience in the real estate industry when he recognized an opportunity to focus his efforts on the unbuilt landscape in cities- the green spaces. Starting out with planting trees, Geoffrey applied great energy to grow his organization to its present size with over 70 staff and nearly 2000 volunteers. 

As an avid supporter of urban issues, Geoffrey Cape is one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40, and a recipient of numerous other awards, a testament to Geoffrey’s success as a leader in urban innovation.