What kind of youth-designed tools work to creatively gather meaningful, actionable youth input to strengthen Hamilton’s Climate Action Strategy update?
Project Description: The City’s Office of Climate Change Initiatives is working on updating Hamilton’s Climate Action Strategy (HCAS). The City is seeking community input as part of the revisions to the Community Energy and Emissions Plan and the Climate Change Impact Adaptation Plan.
City Staff is looking to improve how to gather community insights, especially from youth living in Hamilton. This project will engage CityLAB students to develop creative engagement tools that can be used to solicit input from community, specifically youth aged 14 to 29 years.
Hamilton youth have varied lived experiences and climate change can be a scary topic to talk about and plan for. Understanding this, through this CityLAB project, students will make new, entertaining, and respectful tools to gather youth ideas and input. To do so, the students can:
explore what other municipalities use to elicit youth input and feedback;
look at other industries or sectors for creative youth engagement ideas, and
take the elements they think would be most successful in our Hamilton context.
City Staff is open to and hoping for very creative tool development. Possibilities may include games, escape rooms or other team-building puzzles, facilitation using toys like building blocks, visual art or other creative expression, in addition to other ideas the students will discover through their research.
The objective should be that the tools are easily replicable, affordable to put on, easy to set up, and that the data gathered is clear and usable. Students will test these tools and gather preliminary data with trusted partners like HamON Youth.
City Staff: Lynda Lukasik, Healthy and Safe Communities Department
Deliverables: Primary research, secondary research, design, app development, event or workshop
Project Start Date/ Availability: Fall 2026
Location: City Wide
City Strategy Priority: Community Engagement and Participation, Healthy and Safe Communities, Clean and Green