When I joined The Laneway Project, I had a pretty clear picture of what the next few years would look like. We would grow the team, launch multiple community-led projects across the city, and continue refining a model that could help transform laneways one neighbourhood at a time. That vision hasn't changed. If anything, I believe in it more today than I did when I started.
What I didn't anticipate was how difficult it would be to build the organizational capacity to get there. One of the realities of the nonprofit sector is that funders are often excited to invest in projects, but much less likely to fund the people needed to deliver them. It's a challenge many organizations face. You can secure funding to build something but still not have the staff needed to implement, nurture, and scale it. That's the position we've found ourselves in over the past few years.
For a while, I viewed that simply as a limitation, but over the last few months that’s shifted. During our Laneway coLabs application process this year, one application stood out. It came from a group of residents with deep expertise in city-building. Among them were professional urban planners, including one of Toronto's best-known voices on urban issues, Blair Scorgie (if you don't follow him on social, you should), as well as Ariana Holt, who co-founded The Laneway Project alongside Michelle Senayah in 2014. It was an exceptionally strong application. They had a clear vision for their laneway, strong relationships with one another, and the skills to navigate a complex community project.
As our volunteer selection committee discussed the application, we kept coming back to the same question: Do they actually need a coLab?
That wasn't a criticism of the application. Quite the opposite. It was so strong that it raised a different question about equity. Our coLabs model is intentionally intensive. It is designed for communities that need support bringing people together, building consensus, navigating challenges, and turning ideas into action. If a neighbourhood already has many of those ingredients, is our most intensive offering really the best use of our time and resources? Or should our limited resources be directed toward communities that would benefit most from them?
At the time, we selected another neighbourhood for coLabs, but I couldn't shake the question. As our staffing realities persisted, it stopped feeling like a hypothetical. It started feeling like an opportunity to learn and ask a new question: What if communities don't all need the same level of support?
We are working on a new assumption: communities with strong local leadership and expertise don't need us to facilitate every workshop and guide every step of the process. They need funding, technical advice, access to our network, and support when they encounter barriers. And, I honestly don't know if that's true. It’s a question worth answering.
So today, I'm excited to share that we'll be launching a new pilot in Leslieville to find out.
Leslieville will become the first neighbourhood where we test a lighter-touch model of support. Instead of using our full coLabs process, residents will take on more leadership themselves. At the same time, The Laneway Project provides funding, technical guidance, implementation support, and access to the lessons we've learned over the past decade. The goal isn't to do less for the sake of doing less. It helps us align our support with a community's existing capacity and understand where we add the most value.
If this works, it won't replace coLabs. Instead, it will give us another tool. We'll be able to offer intensive support to communities that need it most while creating a different pathway for neighbourhoods that are already well organized and ready to lead. That would allow us to support more communities without compromising the quality of our work.
And if it doesn't work, that's valuable too. One of the biggest lessons I've learned over the past year is that building an organization isn't about rigidly sticking to the plan you started with. It's about paying attention, asking good questions, and being willing to test your assumptions. Constraints have a funny way of forcing that kind of clarity.
I'm looking forward to sharing what we learn.