Creating Coventry

by Creating Coventry Team

May 2021

Project 2: 5 SE Coventry Parks Update

Subtitle: Reno #1: Coventry Green Games Park

You may have seen the City’s sign in Coventry Green park, saying the playground equipment is being removed.

First, DON’T PANIC! We knew this was going to happen sooner rather than later, due to the equipment being in a bad way. That’s why we’ve been working with you, our community residents, over the last almost 3 years to come up with a replacement plan (see more details below).

Second, over the next week or so, we will be delivering letters to residents overlooking the park, to get your signatures of approval on a “sight line survey” so we can make these renos happen and the park isn’t empty for too long. Without these renos the park would be grassed over, as the City can’t afford to replace every playground in every community when they reach the end of their life, and they have already recently replaced two “tot lot” playgrounds for younger children in this area of Coventry Hills (#4 & #8 on the map). That’s where the Creating Coventry volunteers come in.

We will also be busy kicking off our fundraising and submitting grant applications, with help from our partners at Northern Hills Community Association and Vivo, to enable these renos to happen.

We’ve been asked, “What exactly is a Games Park and why was that chosen?”. That’s a great question! You may recall that in 2018-2019 we were surveying the community about what you wanted to see in the three parks in SE Coventry that are coming to the end of their life-cycles (#3, #5 & #6 on the map). You told us that Coventry Green “gazebo” park (#6) should become a space for socializing and playing games, with the other two planned for a climbing/parkour park (#3) and a natural play park (#5). Since then, we have been working with volunteer families who live near the games park and the climbing/parkour park, and their children created a “wish board” for each park of all the things they would like to see in them.

We would love to be able to put everything they asked for, but as our budget is not unlimited, we are working on a plan that includes as much as possible for the Coventry Green Games Park:

Outdoor ping pong table
Outdoor chess/checkers table
Custom seating, including a family swing
Accessible concrete multi-use pad that will be painted with giant game boards
A makeover for the gazebo, complete with solar lighting
Some landscaping, using native plant species

We would also like to include the multi-sport station that can be seen in the wish board design, but that will depend on how much we can fundraise and may need to be installed in a later phase.

And finally…

We will keep posting updates, so please make sure to “like” our Facebook page (@creatingcoventry) or follow us on Twitter (@CreatingCovYYC). You don’t want to miss out on the upcoming survey/poll about what giant game boards we should include in the design!

Thank you all for your support of our little band of resident volunteers trying to make our parks great places to spend time in. We know this has been so important to many over the past year.

August 2020

If you would like to help with any of these projects, please reach out to Moraig, Creating Coventry Lead, at creatingcoventry@gmail.com

Reach out to us via social media:

Creating Coventry – facebook.com/creatingcoventry/ and @CreatingCovYYC on Twitter
NHCA – @NorthernHills on Twitter, @NorthernHillsCalgary on Facebook & Instagram
Vivo – @VivoYourLife across all social platforms

PROJECT #1: COVENTRY SPORT COURT & RINK

We got word in July that the winter water supply for the rink was ready to go in this construction season! Woohoo! By now, they may have already started (fingers crossed). Because the awesome folks at Calgary Parks and Water Services got us a smoking deal from a local company (thank you!), it also means we can put in the raised planting beds with seating and create the sunflower garden plot this year, too. Another local business, Prairie Sage Permaculture, will be working on those garden pieces

The basketball court has been a huge hit! However, we’ve developed a bit of a garbage problem… If anyone in your family or circle of friends uses the court, can you please ask them to ensure they use the garbage can that is on the pathway by the court. Not only does this garbage make the park look awful, it’s also a health hazard, and disrespectful to the neighbours who live on the traffic circle. We all need to do our part to take care of our neighbourhood, please.

PROJECT #2: FIVE SE COVENTRY PARKS

Landscape architects have visited two of the parks this week and they went away with great ideas for planning the Climbing/Parkour Park (Park 3: Red Slide Park at 980 Coventry Dr NE) and the Games Park (Park 6: Coventry Green Park at 236 Coventry Green NE). As soon as they come back with some preliminary conceptual designs, we’ll share them with the residents overlooking the parks for feedback. When the final designs are complete, we’ll share them with the whole community.

The five parks in this project are:

Park 3: Red Slide Park at 980 Coventry Dr NE – will become a parkour/climbing park
Park 4: Husky Park at 303 Covington Bay NE – this is already a new playground, so will remain as is
Park 5: Coventry Close Park at 230 Coventry Close NE – this will become a naturalized space, for nature play, in addition to having places to sit, and a Little Free Library (if anyone on the Close is willing to volunteer to monitor it)
Park 6: Coventry Green / Gazebo Park at 236 Coventry Green NE – will become a games park, and it looks like we’ll get to keep the gazebo, as it’s still in good condition
Park 8: Purple Park at 152 Coventry Circle NE – this is already a new playground, so will remain as is

This summer/fall we hopefully will be opening the fundraising account with Parks Foundation Calgary for this project, so we can start to fundraise with the community to build these awesome community spaces, because the condition of the playgrounds in Parks 3 & 6 were rated as “poor” at the end of 2019. Once the equipment in these playgrounds is rated as worse than this, they will need to be removed for safety, so ideally, we would like to be able to rebuild as soon as possible. Once we have opened the fundraising account, we will share the link with the community and hope that we’ll raise enough to be able to apply for matching grants to get these built.

PROJECT #3: ACCESSIBLE & INCLUSIVE PARK

This project is a few years off, but there is hope that we may be able to fund at least half the project through some playground replacement funds from the City of Calgary. If there are any Coventry residents with a personal interest or background in accessibility and inclusive park design, and you’d like to volunteer to help design this project with our team, please reach out via email to Moraig at creatingcoventry@gmail.com.

PROJECT #4: PUMP TRACK

Brookfield worked with us and built a dirt pump track in Livingston last summer. It is now open again for 2020! We’ve included an image showing what it looks like and where it’s located.

At the moment we know it’s difficult to access this via bike from Coventry Hills, but thanks to the advocacy of the Ward 3 Councillor, Jyoti Gondek, and staff, with help from Parks Foundation Calgary and Creating Coventry, the City of Calgary is building pedestrian and bike friendly pathways across both of the Coventry interchanges over Stoney Trail at the time they’re being built, rather than having to wait decades for this to be done. These will not only provide access to the pump track on the south side of Livingston, but also connect us into the Rotary Mattamy Greenway pathway system, too. Win-win!

PROJECT #5: OFF LEASH ART PARK

Many residents have been calling (some of us pleading or begging) for an off-leash dog park in Coventry Hills for years. Confluence Park’s off leash area on Beddington Trail is pretty much only accessible by car and is too small to serve the area. The NHCA has been looking at this for years, and Creating Coventry took up the torch in 2017.

After several locations not being allowed (or too small, too boggy, or otherwise unsuitable) for an off leash park, we started looking at the transportation utility corridor to the north, that runs from the Harvest Hills Blvd N (Centre St N) interchange to the east side of Coventry where the new 11 St NE interchange is being built, along Stoney Trail (see our area planning map, below). We were working with our previous MLA to get permission from the Province to use this land when the election happened. Since then, we have been working with our new MLA, Minister Rajan Sawhney, to get a meeting with the people who can make this happen.

The BIG IDEA:

The area is very large and takes in Park 11 (Coville Park / 163 Coville Close NE). Ideally, we would like it to be:

Fenced, with three main entrances: on the west side, the east side, and where it intersects with the north-south utility corridor, at Park 11.
Planted with trees, bushes and naturalized grasses and plants.
Beautified with community-created art.
Split into sections, so there is a “small dog” area, a picnic area, and some natural play spaces at the entrances.
A wonderful park to walk in, for everyone – not just pet owners.
Connected to the two interchanges, so it becomes a “destination” along the Rotary Mattamy Greenway pathway system.

We know this is a *really* big idea, and will cost a lot for the fencing, so unless we can get a really, really, big grant for this (or maybe if things change, we might be able to apply for some of the public art funding from one of the interchanges; wouldn’t that be awesome?), we hope to create it in stages. Once we have permission from the Province to use the land, and a basic, concept plan has been formulated for the space, we will share this with the community and do a whole lot of resident engagement.

PROJECT #6: COVENTRY POLLINATOR CORRIDOR (aka “Bee Boulevard”)

If you live, or were walking, cycling or driving along Coventry Hills Way by Nose Creek School and the Coventry Community Garden on July 19^th, you may have seen some of the Creating Coventry team (volunteers in safety vests) weeding the Coventry Pollinator Corridor. We had specialists from the City’s Environmental Education team come out and help us create a “Weed Cheat Sheet” for volunteers, as although some of the species in there look pretty (like the yellow clover), they can be quite invasive and needed to be removed to allow the planted and seeded native species to grow and populate the space.

Look out for harebells, blue flax, salvia, sandfoin, goldenrod, yarrow, smoke plant, golden currant, common golden bean (lupin), prairie rose, autumn hawkbit, false indigo, coneflowers and purple prairie clover through the growing season.

We managed to get about ¾ of one of the medians done that Sunday and will be back to complete that and the other median throughout the summer and fall. If you would like to help, reach out to creatingcoventry@gmail.com

PROJECT #7: ACTIVATING COVENTRY

We renamed Project #7, because it ended up as a bit of a mish-mash of everything else that Creating Coventry does to help activate our community, parks and green spaces:

Wayfinding

We are still planning to wrap garbage cans in parks with maps of where all the parks, playgrounds and interesting places are in our community, to help residents find new and interesting places to visit, and to help connect all the different park amenities that the community has helped us to imagine and build. We will be working with a local artist to design the map over the next couple of years. Ideally, we would plan to fundraise for these and install them once Projects 1 is complete, Project 2 is underway, and we have worked with the community to plan for most of the other park spaces in Coventry (see “Community Co-Creation”, below).

Utility Corridor Activation

This includes mini-projects like the bright blue Coventry Picnic Table and gathering space, and much larger ones like advocacy with Ward 3 for Coventry’s orphan pathways to finally be built, such as the one in the north half of the north-south utility corridor.

Park & Pathway Activation

This includes small, fun events and projects that get Coventryites out and using our parks and pathways, e.g. the Activating Coventry summer events in 2018, and the #StencilAdventure project for Neighbour Day 2020 with our neighbours at Shoreline HOA, Vivo, and Livingston HOA. There are more of these projects to come this summer, so watch for them on our social media channels (facebook.com/creatingcoventry/ and @CreatingCovYYC on Twitter)!

Community Activation

The Annual Community Halloween Costume Swap and similar events are perfect examples of community activation (speaking of which: save your costumes! – we will be doing it again this year, as long as COVID19 isn’t still causing problems).

COMMUNITY CO-CREATION

Can you believe it’s been over three years since we first started on our journey to create a resident-led plan for parks and community spaces? In that time, we have engaged Coventry residents in:

Park use data collection
Creating a record of the things you want to see in our community parks
Creating the community parks master plan
Planting a pollinator corridor (1^st in the north, and only the 2^nd in Calgary)
Deciding what should go where in the aging playgrounds in SE Coventry
Deciding what we should activate the north part of the north-south utility corridor with, and what colour to paint it

…and now we want your input to decide what comes next!

This winter (2020-2021), we would like to reach out to you once more, to decide what else should go into the parks that haven’t already been planned, and which amenities are a top priority for residents in different areas of Coventry Hills. Please keep a look out for posts on our social media channels, and signs in the community parks. Our founding principle is to create #CommunityByCommunity, so we can’t do it without you!

Thank you to everyone who has supported our little gang of resident volunteers in all our endeavours! If you would like to get involved, even if it’s just to help weed the pollinator corridor or help out at an event, please email us at creatingcoventry@gmail.com or message us through social media.

History

#Creating Coventry – A community-driven plan to improve and connect our neighbourhood’s parks

When a representative from the City of Calgary alerted the Northern Hills Community Association (NHCA) that six of their playgrounds would need to be replaced, Moraig McCabe saw a bigger opportunity. All of Coventry Hills’ 14 playgrounds were built in just over a decade. Surely they’d all need to be replaced in a similar period.If the community developed a playground master plan, what possibilities could they open for deeper community engagement and better playgrounds?

In the next 18 months, Creating Coventry brought together community groups, partner organizations, and municipal stakeholders in a series of engagements to learn more about the residents’ hopes and dreams for these green spaces. They found that creating an up-to-date picture of the community’s priorities gave decision-makers confidence to support their requests. Having a neighbourhood endorsed plan in place can also put your community at the top of the list when funding opportunities arise.

The planning phase for this project was a joint project between the Northern Hills Community Association and Vivo with generous funding support from Calgary Foudation Neighbour Grants and the Canada 150 Social R&D Fund through the Community Foundations of Canada, McConnell Foundation and the Government of Canada.

Below you will find links to the various documents that were produced as part of the planning phase of Creating Coventry between June 2017 and March 2018.

Creating Coventry Planning Phase Report – analysis of the data and themes shared in the 10 engagements and 4 month of systematic observation.
Creating Coventry Planning Phase Report Appendices and Data – detailed data sets and facilitators guides for engagements.
Creating Coventry Journey Document – outlines the journey and learnings from the planning phase.

Throwback to #Activating Coventry free community events in summer 2018

8 parks & 8 events! Thanks to the funding from Ward 3, we are pleased to present a whole summer of fun on Saturdays in your Coventry Hills community parks!

Find more details on these 8 events here. Share it with your friends and neighbours! Let’s have some fun this summer!

We want to bring these parks to life. We know that our community has skills, expertise, and gifts they can share to make the next generation of park space a reality in Coventry Hills. Get in touch if you think you might be able to help. Whether you like planning, playing, photo-taking, writing, baking, chatting – the list goes on – there’s a way for you to get involved.