The Meadoway

In 2013, our Foundation worked with Park People to launch the Weston Family Parks Challenge—a $5M initiative to encourage innovative and sustainable city parks projects. Twenty-six projects were supported, including the successful Scarborough Butterfly Trail, an innovative trail and meadow restoration project in the Gatineau Hydro Corridor.

In April 2018, our Foundation, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), and the City of Toronto jointly announced a ground-breaking city-building initiative to transform 16 kilometres of underutilized land into one of Canada’s largest urban linear parks. Expanding on the Scarborough Butterfly Trail, The Meadoway will restore biodiversity, connect Canadians to nature, and act as a pilot for restoration projects across the country.

Stretching from the Don River Ravine in downtown Toronto to Rouge National Urban Park, The Meadoway will become a vibrant expanse of urban greenspace and meadowlands as it develops over the next three years. It will connect four ravines, 15 parks, 34 neighbourhoods, over 500 acres and more than 1,000 diverse species of flora and fauna. The Meadoway will connect schools, businesses, hospitals, and underused parks and trails across Scarborough for the benefit of locals and visitors alike.

Our Foundation has pledged up to $25 million to help Toronto realize The Meadoway. Read more about its progress at themeadoway.ca.

Weston Family Prairie Grasslands Initiative

The Weston Family Prairie Grasslands Initiative is a five-year collaboration to celebrate, steward and protect one of Canada’s most ecologically valuable and threatened ecosystems. Nearly $25M has been committed to five organizations to accelerate the implementation of sustainable practices and achieve landscape-level impact: Nature Conservancy of Canada, Ducks Unlimited Canada, Saskatchewan Stock Growers Foundation, Grasslands National Park (Parks Canada) and Meewasin Valley Authority.

Each organization brings additional funding and in-kind donations for a total of $70M going toward this collaboration over the next five years. The Initiative aims to improve species-at-risk habitat, enable wildlife movement, expand the amount of land protection in the prairies and ultimately increase long-term ecological and economic stability. Dozens of partners will support this work that will affect nearly four million acres of priority native grasslands in one of the largest conservation efforts in Canadian history.

We’ve now launched the call for applications for the second phase of the Weston Family Prairie Grasslands Initiative. (Now closed)

For more information, please refer to the links below:

Media Release

FAQs

Qu otes

Meghan MacDougall

Meghan MacDougall joined the Weston Family Foundation in 2016 as Program Director of Northern Science and Knowledge, before moving to her current role in 2019. She is responsible for the oversight of all programming related to Environmental Stewardship.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Meghan spent over a decade working with a variety of state and federal agencies in the US, managing conservation programs for critical wildlife habitat and farmland, and led strategic investments to help preserve and enhance open space for the State of Colorado.

Meghan received her Bachelor of Science degree at Michigan State University.

Environmental Stewardship

What We Do

Environmental Stewardship has been at the heart of the Foundation for more than three decades. Early conservation projects like Waterton Park Front, Old Man on His Back, Manitoba Tall Grass Prairie, Musquash Estuary and Backus Woods taught us the importance of science-based conservation and engaging communities to ensure long-term outcomes and impact.

As a part of our Healthy Ecosystems Strategy, we aim to enable organizations and private landowners to be good stewards of our most valued ecosystems across Canada. To achieve this, we look for opportunities in intact wild lands, agricultural lands, and urban greenspaces to protect species at risk habitat, restore degraded landscapes and engage Canadians in the natural world around them.

Landscape photograph of Waterton Park in Alberta, Canada. — Waterton Park Front, Alberta

What We Fund

Although our work is continuously evolving, currently we have three priorities for our funding:

Key Biodiversity Areas
Increased protection and improvement of highly-threatened, ecologically important biodiversity areas
Sustainable Agriculture
Increase in acres of agricultural lands managed with sustainable and ecologically-based practices that support biodiversity
Biodiversity research and education
Increasing our understanding of contributions to ecosystem health, and increasing the number of Canadians who understand and value biodiverse ecosystems