Building community resilience at Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park
What it is
The Community Virtual Hub (CVH) is a digital communication, navigation, coordination and preparedness tool being designed with and for the residents of Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park — two of Toronto's densest, most multilingual tower communities. It's being developed alongside a Local Preparedness Kit as part of Sprout's broader work to strengthen community resilience from the ground up.
The CVH is not a replacement for emergency services. What the CVH does is connecting neighbours to each other and to trusted information — every day, not just before, during and after emergencies.
Why we're building it
Emergency tools that only get used in a crisis don't get used well. If the CVH sits dormant between disasters, no one trusts it, no one knows how to use it, and the information in it goes stale exactly when it matters most.
That's why the CVH is designed around two equally important functions:
- Everyday resilience — service navigation, a community asset map, and preparedness resources that residents turn to year-round
- Emergency and recovery coordination — alert receipt, alert raising, and partner coordination when something goes wrong and when recovering from disruptions
The Hub is a digital backbone for a human network, not a replacement for it. Building ambassadors, floor networks, and connection specialists stay at the centre of how the community stays informed and supported.
How it's being built
The Community Virtual Hub is grounded in a co-design process led by residents themselves. A Community Experts Board — made up of residents' council members, volunteers, and community ambassadors — guides the project's direction and reviews its design.
We're building on open-source foundations: open-EWS for multi-channel alert dissemination, and ADMS for structuring community asset data. This lets us focus our energy on what's unique to Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park, rather than reinventing infrastructure that already exists.
Our partners
This project is made possible through funding from United Way of Greater Toronto, as part of a Resilience Hub Pilot, and is being delivered in partnership with:
- TNO (The Neighbourhood Organization)
- City of Toronto
Grounded in real experience
This work is shaped by real events — including the 2025–2026 Thorncliffe Park apartment fires, which displaced residents and exposed how difficult recovery and coordination can be in dense, multi-owner buildings. The CVH is being built to help communities navigate exactly these kinds of situations, with clearer information, faster connections, and stronger networks in place before the next crisis hits.