Features Profiles
National municipal competition in its 16th year, emerges into leading networking organization

Communities in Bloom, a Canada-wide program which fosters civic pride,
environmental responsibility and beautification through community
involvement, has marked its first 15 years and is showing no signs of
slowing down.

In 1995, the non-profit program was launched with 29 participating communities of various population sizes from coast to coast. Fifteen years later, more than 800 Canadian municipalities have become involved in the program at one point or another.

Founding president Raymond Carriere said the program borrowed from concepts which had long proven themselves in Europe. A similar program launched in France in the 1950s encouraged communities to beautify themselves so that they would be more appealing to tourists. Initiated by its ministry of tourism, the French program awarded “blooms” to the participating municipalities in a fashion similar to hotels achieving star ratings.

“In France, if you’re a parks director and your town has a four-bloom rating, you’ve made it, and you’d better be darn sure you keep it,” Carriere said.

Another European program launched in the 1950s—Britain in Bloom—began purely as a beautification program, but has since evolved into one whose primary focus has been directed at environmental issues.

The third European influence on Communities in Bloom was a program called Tidy Towns of Ireland.

“Tidy Towns gave us a lot of information,” Carriere said, adding Ireland’s ministry of tourism wanted to implement a program that would encourage its towns to achieve a state of cleanliness. Last year, the program celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Blending the concepts of beautification from France, community engagement from Great Britain and tidiness from Ireland, the foundation was laid for Communities in Bloom. But the Canadian program’s start initially came in Quebec.

Quebec in Bloom was founded in 1980 by the province’s ministry of agriculture as a means of boosting Quebec’s horticultural industry. Carriere said in its heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s, about 500 communities participated in the provincial program. It proved to be the catalyst toward the creation of horticultural departments within municipalities’ parks departments.

At the time, Carriere was parks director in Saint-Laurent, a suburb of Montreal, and many of the Quebec participants took the provincial competition a step further by challenging their counterparts in France.

“But we thought, ‘why not challenge other provinces?’” Carriere said.

Other than rural beautification programs in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, supported respectively by their provincial horticulture society and department of agriculture, no such programs existed anywhere else in Canada.

This triggered the idea for Communities in Bloom in the fall of 1994, Carriere said.

Key sponsoring groups immediately became involved to help launch the national program. The National Capital Commission was instrumental in getting each of the provincial capitals involved,  and served  as host for the inaugural awards ceremony on Parliament Hill. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities helped to promote the program. Nutrite, which had been involved with the Quebec program, expanded its support for the national program. The Toro Company became involved to not only sponsor Communities in Bloom, but the ensuing international program which spun off from the Canadian program.

“The biggest hurdle was to convince people that this just wasn’t about flowers,” Carriere said. “It’s about engaging your community.”

Elected officials and parks directors from 29 Canadian municipalities were adequately convinced of the program’s motives in 1995, Communities in Bloom’s first official year.

“Once we got a few communities after the first year, we went from 29 communities and then it doubled and grew exponentially every year. What made the program a success was providing the communities with a showcase of what they do, to celebrate their pride.”

The program has expanded to include an international challenge in which Canadian winners will challenge the winning municipalities from Europe. The challenge this year includes communities from the United States, Belgium and Scotland.

Carriere, who served the program on a volunteer basis in its formative years and eventually was hired full time once it became self-sustaining, said he believes Communities in Bloom’s greatest success is its evolvement into an organization from its roots as a competition. He compared the program to that of provincial and national associations for golf course superintendents which provides its members with a means of networking with one another. Previously, parks managers had only their provincial associations to provide such networking opportunities, but Communities in Bloom has grown to the point where national networking is pursued.

“If a parks manager from Moncton wondered if his counterpart from Victoria had a particular challenge regarding a sports field or for his urban trees, he didn’t really have that network. Communities in Bloom created that network.”

Carriere said Communities in Bloom’s national symposium on parks and grounds, which began in 1998 and has been held in conjunction with the program’s national awards ceremony, helped to create that network.

“Communities in Bloom has created a national network of information exchange.”

Participating communities are provided evaluation forms at the end of the session. The documentation is often used by these municipalities to defend their budgets, to get new projects going, or to get special certification.

Participating communities are judged according to eight criteria: tidiness, environmental action, heritage conservation, urban forestry, landscape, turf and groundcovers, floral displays, and community involvement. The addition of environmental awareness to the criteria borrowed from the European programs has given the program considerable credibility, Carriere said.

Communities in Bloom has actually been doing something about the environment over the past 15 years and isn’t just talking about it, he added. Through its national symposium, the program has been promoting such proactive measures as compositing, integrated pest management, reuse of materials, and planting proper trees in their proper place.

“Communities in Bloom is a way of doing your share for the environment in a very practical way that everyone can do. Instead of talking about it, you can do something about it.”

In 2000, Communities in Bloom began a partnership with the Canadian Tourism Commission to provide municipalities with the tools they needed to promote themselves. Those measures have been aided by the program’s printed magazine, its website and its educational symposiums.

“We’ve always endeavoured to make that happen. We have a section on our website where we showcase all the communities with links to their tourism sites or community sites, and in our magazine.”

Carriere said a comment he often hears is that people from different parts of the country will want to visit a particular municipality based on what he reads about it online and the photographs he sees.

The number of communities which have participated in the program over the past 15 years has included each Canadian province and its territories.

“The numbers are something we’re very pleased with, and that it’s so widely spread. We’ve achieved our goal that we set out in the beginning.”

Community involvement is one of the criteria for which a participating municipality is judged, and it has worked to bolster volunteerism after judging has been completed. Carriere said there have been cases of people who had previously been unaware of some of the good things their communities have done, and the program has inspired them to become involved themselves.

The program may not get an entire metropolitan city involved, but it may involve one of its districts, he said.

Communities in Bloom isn’t about doing just one thing, Carriere added. It’s a series of actions which tend to vary from one community to another.

“It gets the community involved. That’s without a doubt.”

The many volunteers from each participating community form the core of the program, he said, and the level of volunteerism extends to the panel of expert judges. The volunteer judges dedicate two to four weeks of their summer toward visiting the various communities entered in the program.

“It’s a job, but they share their expertise.”

The judges’ backgrounds have included retirees from the ranks of landscape architects, parks supervisors and university professors. One of the judges who will be visiting Canadian communities with populations of 25,000 and less this summer was both a former director of horticulture for Disneyland and a former president of the American Horticultural Society.

After four years as a full-time employee of Communities in Bloom, Carriere has returned to the level of volunteer, continuing his involvement in the program. He said he sees the program’s foreseeable future as becoming more of a blend of an association or organization as well as a competition.

“The competition will always be there.”

The goal of the program will continue to be the same at the end of the day, he said…to promote greenspaces.

“Within the context of climate change and environmental concerns, all those involved in the Communities in Bloom program can be proud of their efforts, which provide real and meaningful environmental solutions and benefit all of society,” Carriere said.

In 2002, a sister program of Communities in Bloom was launched to celebrate communities’ efforts during the off-season. WinterLights Celebrations has recognized participating communities for their winter efforts in visual presentation, festive season celebrations, winter pleasures, goodwill programs, and tourism and promotion. Starting next winter, WinterLights Celebrations will continue as a program, but without the competitive element. Some of its features are to be incorporated into the Communities in Bloom program to showcase what municipalities do with the greenspaces during the winter months.