About Little Forests
Let’s make magic. Let’s re-enchant our cities. Let’s plant Little Forests as songs, poems, love letters to the land. Experience the wonder & delight of a deepening relationship with the magnificent living, breathing organism known as Earth.
Our vision
Transform Kingston into a nature positive, equitable City in a Forest by 2030.
Our mission
Little Forests are collaborations between plants, soil, organisms, climate, geology, land and people. Together with our collaborators, Little Forests Kingston is working to bring 3-30-300 tree equity to Kingston: every child can see 3 trees from their window, live in a neighbourhood with at least 30% quality canopy & live within 300 metres of a quality greenspace. We believe Little Forests in every neighbourhood – linked by ecological corridors — are powerful catalysts for bringing climate, social and multispecies justice into our city. Little Forests emerge from and are planted with diverse communities, creating inclusive spaces that offer refuge & the possibility for a transformative relationship with the natural world. Little Forests are seeds that fuel the transformation of the surrounding neighbourhood.
Our theory of change, like the forests on which we model our thinking, is based on living systems thinking. While our focus is Kingston, through our collaborations with our partners we believe our model could become a "wise practice" seeding citizen-led urban afforestation across Canada, spreading change through a mycelial network of organizations, with each node or place replicating and adapting to evolve their own response. And, like a keystone species, we see Little Forests as keystone interventions seeding transformation in each neighbourhood and within each organization.
Our values
- Reciprocity. "Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. We pay attention, we plant, we steward, and we extend the invitation to others: come, notice, bear witness, enter the exchange.
- Reverence. For all our kin in their entangled, messy, beautiful manifestations: from our invisible microbial relations, to the ones we've labelled pests, to the ones whose names we don't yet know.
- Deep time. Rooting our actions in the lifespan of Oak, witness to three generations of humans, thirty-five generations of Blue Jay, and two hundred and fifty generations of Hornless Oakworm Moth.
- Re-storying. Listening for what the land already knows: stories broadcast by Chickadee feeding her young with insects sheltered by Oak, stories threading between Oak's roots and her mycelial kin, stories written on and in our bodies by an invisible urban microbiome. Then sharing those stories forward, shaping who our city becomes.
- Love. Acknowledging the profound intelligence of Earth: in Trout Lily who shares her carbon with young Sugar Maple through the spring, and Sugar Maple who returns the gift come fall; in Gall Wasp whose ancient chemical conversation with Oak builds her a home, and whose home in turn draws Ant to guard it; in Blue Jay, planting forests she'll never see mature, and Oak who feeds generations of Blue Jays not yet born.