Solutions

After three terms on Council, I've watched too many good ideas die in the chamber. So I stopped waiting.

Kingston has real problems. Housing people can actually afford. Food on tables that have been bare for too long. Neighbourhoods where people do not know each other. Council has tried. Sometimes Council has even tried hard. But the scale of what Kingston needs has outpaced what the council chamber alone is willing or able to deliver.

So I started building outside the chamber.

What I learned in Finland

Last year I went to Helsinki to see how a country that once had one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe became the only European country where homelessness is going down.

What I found was not a clever policy or a single program. It was a different way of thinking about the relationship between government and the people it serves.

In 2008, Finland abandoned the "staircase model" — the idea that homeless people had to prove they were sober and stable before earning a roof. They flipped it. Housing came first (but not by itself). Stability came after, supported by services that followed the person rather than waiting for the person to find them. Long-term homelessness dropped by 68%.

But the deeper lesson was about posture. Finnish municipalities treat dignity as a hard constraint, not a soft value — no program is allowed to require people to beg, perform, or prove they deserve help. They co-design solutions with the people who will use them, not for them. Community-led solutions are supported. Government takes a servant posture — its job is to remove barriers and back what communities are already doing. In Finland government is not a gatekeeper on every good idea.

Co-design. Community participation. Community-led solutions. Government as servant. Dignity. And keeping people housed and off the street rather than cycling them through shelters, emergency rooms, and jail cells.

I came back convinced these principles work. I also came back convinced Kingston wasn't going to adopt them just because I thought it should. So I started doing the work where I could — in the community, with partners, on projects designed around these principles from day one.

The three projects below are pieces of one strategy: permanent affordable homes, the food systems that keep people in them, and the neighbourly infrastructure that turns housing into community. Each one can stand on its own. Each one would go further, faster, with Council behind it.

This is what I mean when I say I'm a builder. The work doesn't stop at City Hall.

Limestone City Co-operative Housing

Founding President and Board Chair · lcch.ca

LCCH is a $100M+ co-operative housing project — Canada's first to integrate non-profit co-op housing with a commercial-scale vertical farm. The plan: 250 attainable units, nearly off-grid, net-zero emissions, designed to last 200 years, housing roughly 400 to 500 residents.

Co-operative housing means residents collectively own their building. There is no one taking profits out, no rent escalating to whatever the market will bear. The vertical farm means food security is built into the foundation — fresh produce grown on-site, year-round, with members contributing volunteer hours. Together they address the four problems I see in Kingston: housing costs, food insecurity, climate emissions, and the loneliness that comes from people not knowing their neighbours.

In February 2024, Council unanimously committed the City-owned site at 900 Division Street to LCCH for twelve months while we secured grant funding. We built the partnerships — Planetary Harvest, Bendale Property Management, 3 Peaks CPA, Our Livable Solutions, Luke's Place Kingston, Extend-A-Family Kingston. We secured a letter of engagement of around $100 Million covering up to 95% of residential development costs through private financing. We announced the project to the city.

In March 2025, Council voted not to proceed.

The project did not die. We are looking for new sites and finalizing partnerships. The model works — and Kingston needs it more than ever, and a new council may be more helpful.

Kingston Food Rescue

Co-founder · kingstonfoodrescue.ca

Kingston has surplus food and Kingston has hungry people. Both at the same time, every day. Kingston Food Rescue is the technology and the volunteer network that connects them — restaurants and grocers tap one button when they have food to give, drivers see nearby pickups and accept, and the food gets to community fridges, shelters, and Belle Park before it can spoil.

I co-founded KFR with two partners — one with deep frontline experience in winter shelter operations and survival outreach, and one with decades of public-systems design experience inside institutions where failure carries real human cost. We were inspired by Feed the People, a Kingston volunteer effort that proved during COVID that surplus food and hungry people don't have to exist side by side. You just need volunteers willing to move fast and a system that gets out of their way.

The system is built to be reliable and useful. Today KFR delivers to Belle Park and is expanding across the city. Producers, drivers, storage hosts, and places of need are all welcome.

Good Neighbours Co-Housing

Co-Founder · goodneighbourscohousing.ca

Kingston has empty bedrooms and people on waitlists. The math is solvable.

Co-housing is different from co-operative housing. Residents have their own homes, but the homes are designed around shared spaces, shared meals, and the kind of everyday neighbourliness that builds communities. The trick is that compatibility comes first — match people on values and habits before they share a roof, and the rest follows.

GNCH builds on three co-housing models already operating in Kingston: a covenant-housing community for seniors aging in place, a mixed-income shared household running for over six years, and HomeMADE Housing for senior women now expanding into Kingston. GNCH exists to give them firm legal footing, support new Kingston-grown approaches, and help every model scale.

Every GNCH home includes a Weathering Centre — a community storage and volunteer hub that doubles as a food-rescue node and a shared cause for residents. It is built on what we know about how chronic stress wears people down, and what protects against it. Compatibility-matched community, stable affordable housing, and ongoing social engagement are not amenities. They are protective infrastructure that builds common cause and community supports.

The pattern

Three projects. One strategy. One pattern: I saw what Kingston needed, looked at what Council was doing, and decided the gap was big enough that I had to start building myself.

I am proud of this work. I am also clear-eyed about its limits. Volunteer-driven projects can do a lot — but they cannot replace what a city does when it puts its full weight behind a solution. Co-operative housing scales when the City commits land. Food rescue scales when the City coordinates infrastructure. Co-housing scales when zoning bylaws make it possible without fighting for every variance.

That is the case for re-electing a councillor who works for you and who builds. I will do the work whether Council follows or not.