Welcome to the Community Asset Collection (CAC) project being developed by the Social Development division at the City of Toronto. The first phase of this project is designed to collect information about places of worship across the city in order to assist planners and community workers with community outreach, needs evaluation, crisis response, and other City and community-based initiatives, such as the Summer Safety Plan.
Places of Worship refers to active faith-based institutions or gathering spaces in Toronto that support religious, spiritual, or faith community life. These spaces may also serve broader community functions, such as offering meeting space, food support, youth or seniors programming, newcomer support, cultural activities, or other community services.
Why refresh this dataset now?
The existing Places of Worship dataset was compiled in 2008 and needs to be reviewed, validated, and updated. The Social Development division has historic experience collecting this type of information because of its community-sector relationships and ability to support respectful outreach.
What we are building
A fuller reference dataset that can be useful across Social Development, other divisions, and community partners.
- Point location - Validated address and geographic placement
- Faith / denomination - Core classification aligned to standard groupings
- Community space - Whether space may support convening or community use
- Community programs - Whether programming exists that may inform partnership or outreach
Benefits of the data collection
- Updated places of worship locations can be mapped together with Census data on populations by religion
- Collected info on community space and programs can be used for outreach and collaboration with religious organizations
- Point locations can be analyzed by planners for hotspots, inequities, future programs
- Community workers can link their resources to tailored places of worship to better help the local neighbourhood
Once collected the full dataset will be available to City staff, the community, and the public via the City of Toronto's Open Data Portal. Privacy is very important to us. No personally-identifiable information - other than what is already public - is being collected. If you have any concerns about this data collection process, please contact us. Please direct all questions to spar@toronto.ca and someone will respond to your inquiry within 3 business days.
