Neighbourhood Organization User Guide
This is a step by step guide that will allow you to register with The Lab and submit projects.
Eligibility
Your organization exists within a local governing structure like a Community Association, Community Benefit District, or Business Improvement Area. Depending on where you are located, the name of your local structure may be different. You can also be a nonprofit, charity or social enterprise. Ultimately, your organization has been established to meet the needs to local residents.
Our registration process has been split into two sections. If you already have a project in mind, you can fill out both sections at once. Otherwise, you can register your organization and fill out the project form when you have a project in mind.
Register Your Organization
The first step is to fill out this form to register your organization. This will create your account on our platform.
The second step is to fill out this form to provide background information about your organization. This gives our Community Partner a fuller picture of your neighbourhood.
Once your organization has been registered, you no longer need to fill out these forms unless information changes.
Register Your Project
Once you register your organization, you can submit as many projects as you would like. You can fill out this form to submit a project.
You can wait for one of our Community Partners to become interested in one of your projects or you can be proactive and find a Community Partner for your project. If you find a Community Partner, contact us at onboarding@imaginecities.com to let us know.
If you are looking for inspriation for a neighbourhood project, take a look here.
When to Submit Projects
You can submit a project at any time. When a project will be picked up is dependent on the schedule of the post-secondary.
Post-secondaries typically pick up projects in the fall (September), Winter (January) or Spring (June). Some post-secondaries have all 3 terms available and others have only 2.
While projects are picked up in the fall, winter and spring terms, post-secondaries prepare for each term month’s in advance. For instance, to be available for the fall term (September) you need to have projects in our system by May.
If you would like to learn about schedules of specific colleges and universities, click here.
Resources to Develop Your Project
We have developed a number of resources to support your effort to create projects for our platform.
The world is changing fast and there is an incredible amount of work being put into better understanding how to build thriving neighbourhoods. We collect and share this work through our search engine across 18 of the most critical research categories.
Through our research, we find skills and tools used by innovators across the world. We package these skills and tools into learning guides: step by step guides that allow you to learn and apply the skill or tool to the work in your neighbourhood.
Project Ideas
We’ve put together a list of ideas that that we’ve come across that may
Worksheets
We have developed several worksheets to assist you in developing your project. Our worksheets have been developed using the Google Suite. To optimize the use of these worksheets, we recommend creating Google accounts. You can also download these sheets in a format that works in Microsoft.
We’ve developed a Project Plan Worksheet to assist you in developing your project. When you submit your project, this worksheet will be attached for post-secondary students to review.
While there is no expectation that you will have a budget, we have developed a worksheet just in case you have one. We have also developed a calendar for you to build over approximately 3 months (we estimate that this is the amount of time students will have to work on your project).
High Quality Projects
Students have the freedom to pick up your project or not .Simply creating a project may not be sufficient for it to be picked up by a team.
Their desire to pick up your project is dependent on a number of factors such as:
- a well defined problem and solution;
- a solution that they can realistically complete in time they have (if you have a project that is longer, consider splitting the project into two or completing part of the project yourself);
- the impact the solution will have on the residents of your neighbourhood, usually measured (i.e. this will increase access to art space by 15% by December 2026);
- the quality of other projects available on our platform;
- the skills students will develop through your project.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Can I submit a project that spans two school semesters?
A. At this time, you cannot. This is because the students are committed to these projects for one semester. Our suggestion is to split the project and submit both to the platform.
Q. Will Imagine Cities assist with transportation to get students working remotely to our location?
A. We wish we could, but we don’t have the funding to support this request. We are a nonprofit organization and need to use our funding as efficiently and effectively as possible. We suggest indicating on the platform that your project is local and not remote. If we don’t have a school on our platform that is local to you, let us know and we’ll try to bring them onto the platform.
Q. Can we recommend schools and courses to add to the platform?
A. Yes! Send us an email to lab@imaginecities.com providing details of the post-secondary and course(s). If you have a contact at the post-secondary, that would be even better!
Feel free to forward them our Community Partner User Guide.
