The Jane Finch Environmental Justice Project advances opportunities for community rights to secure, self-determined quality of life.  The Project focuses on a densely populated community in North-West Toronto with the lowest equity scores across all neighborhoods in Toronto. The Jane Finch community is home to a dynamic ethic/cultural mix of
predominantly immigrant, working class Canadians.  Over the last three decades, our community has become a highly racialized space deeply affected by poverty.

More recently, it has also become the target of urban investment strategies, some of which threaten to increase the cost of living and displace already marginalized people from their homes and community. There are numerous environmental hazards embedded in our community, for instance contaminated sites (also known as brownfields), gasoline/diesel/jet fuel storage facilities, perilous building conditions, and buried pipelines.  From an urban planning perspective,
residents experience problems such as barriers to public transit, health impacts such as elevated rates of asthma and diabetes, temperature extremes within residential towers, difficulty accessing quality affordable housing, and limited access to healthy, culturally-appropriate food.  The Jane Finch Environmental Justice Project seeks to address these and other issues through collaborative urban planning at the community level, which is then linked to policy and decision-makers at the municipal level.