At GreenUP, we constantly ask, “How can we advance sustainable action in our community?” This question drives our work every day, and we’re excited to introduce our 2024-2028 Strategic Plan — our guiding document in the years ahead.
At its core, GreenUP’s work is to inspire and empower healthy and sustainable action in our community. That work will be more effective when GreenUP is successful in acting in accordance with the five directions laid out in our new strategic plan.
Sustainability touches every aspect of daily life and GreenUP’s work reflects these many facets. From conserving native species and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to minimizing single-use plastics and promoting active transportation, we aim to support sustainable choices in our community.
This strategic plan is meant to reflect the broad areas of work for which GreenUP is known, and to provide more universal measures that we can use to direct our efforts.
Goal One: Deliver impactful programming that meets the needs of our community
Our first goal is focused on our programming and the people we serve.
The intent is to guide GreenUP in making consistent choices about how our organization invests our capacity and measures our success across our highly diverse programming areas.
Goal Two: Welcome community members into spaces that educate, inspire and engage
We recognize the very important role that our team plays in ensuring that whatever space we happen to be working in – physical or social – that our community is there with us to be educated and inspired.
GreenUP operates Ecology Park, our downtown office, and the Store & Resource Centre. Our program coordinators also facilitate education in schools, community gardens, businesses, and public spaces. We are committed to providing welcoming and educational experiences in every space we operate.
Our staff learn how to teach anywhere, and GreenUP wants to ensure that we provide welcoming educational experiences everywhere that we work!
Goal Three: Ensure sustained financial viability to achieve our mission
With over 30 years of experience, we understand that financial sustainability is crucial to achieving our vision of a healthy and sustainable community.
This goal emphasizes the need for continual focus on our financial health, ensuring we can evaluate our value and success.
Goal Four: Collaborate with government, business, and community stakeholders to achieve greater positive impacts on our climate
GreenUP knows that to mitigate and adapt to climate change, we must work together. Our fourth strategic goal speaks to the way we want to relate to others, and how we can collaborate to achieve our mission.
GreenUP is proud to enable our community to have conversations about our environment and to create relationships that support people and businesses in undertaking the difficult task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Through this goal of our 2024-2028 Strategic Plan, GreenUP aims to use our place as a community leader to leverage positive change and advance climate action across our region.
Goal Five: Demonstrate equity and justice in the environmental movement through our organizational culture
The fifth and final goal speaks to our culture at GreenUP. This priority directs our leadership to include a focus on justice and equity as we strive to inspire and empower environmental action in our community.
The climate crisis has disproportionate negative impacts on black, indigenous, and people of colour. Our staff and our board recognize how the environmental movement has disproportionately benefited populations who are white, educated, and with greater wealth. In order to address past injustice and work toward a better future for all members of our community, acknowledging this disparity is an important component of GreenUP’s current strategic plan.
Ensuring that GreenUP’s organizational structure – our policies and procedures, training and practices – are grounded in an equity-based approach is important to GreenUP. Through this goal, GreenUP also acknowledges our collective responsibility to uphold the treaties that our ancestors signed and to act on the Calls to Action made by Canada’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
The intent of this goal is to build an organizational culture that actively addresses reconciliation and environmental justice as fundamental components of an environmentally healthy and sustainable community.
Our leadership team is proud to share this new Strategic Plan with our community. We believe it demonstrates our commitment to investing our capacity to elevate success in our programs, enhance the spaces we work in, ensure the financial viability of our services, support the community we work in, and championing a positive culture in the years to come.
When GreenUP is successful in achieving each of our strategic directions our vision for an environmentally healthy and sustainable community will be more possible to fulfill.
Read the full 2024-2028 Strategic Plan at greenup.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Strategic-Plan-2024-2028_web.pdf.
We hope you will join us in committing to healthy and sustainable action in our community. Visit greenup.on.ca to learn more about all of our offerings, and how you can get involved.
