Last November, SEDRA ran our first annual “Elevating Insights” speaker series online (“A Virtual Conversation on High-Rise Community Planning”) with guest speaker Oren Tamir, Director of Community Planning at the City of Toronto.
This year, we invited residents to join a virtual interview with Andrea Bake, Senior Project Manager, Toronto Parks Development team, as we explored the impact of changes in the South Eglinton Davisville neighbourhood.
Andrea spent the hour-long webinar highlighting some of the upcoming opportunities and ongoing challenges creating, protecting and maintaining our green space in Midtown. She touched on many areas including plans for future parks, how we work with developers to protect our green space and highlighted how you, as a resident of the area can have a say in park design and maintenance. If you would like to see her presentation, you can access it here.
Andrea Bake is currently a Senior Project Manager with the City of Toronto’s Parks Development team. She learned to love nature growing up spending summers at Point Pelee National Park helping Naturalists catch marsh insects and went on to get her BSc in biology with a focus in wildlife biology at UWO. She later went on to get her Master’s in Forest Conservation from UofT focusing on development impacts to woodland caribou. She started with the City in Urban Forestry working on the Asian Long-horned Beetle project as well as identifying locations and species for residential tree plantings. She began her planning career with the Parkland Acquisition group within Parks and Recreation and eventually moved to Parks Development, securing new parkland through development applications. Outside of work she and her husband are striving to grow an arboretum on their property and she spends her time gardening, both vegetables and native perennials.