CityHive was founded in 2017 based on a need. 

When Tesicca and Veronika looked at decisions that were being made in our cities — on housing, affordability, climate change and beyond — they saw that young people weren’t participating. It made them think: 

What do decisions, strategies and plans in cities miss when we leave out 35% of the population? How does that affect the demographic that will be inheriting all those decisions? 

How much more just, resilient, and sustainable could our cities be if youth had a seat at the decision making table?

With a lot of hard work, belief and trust from first partners, and input from youth and decision makers — CityHive was born. 

We never could have dreamed that we would grow and achieve what we have in the last 5 years: A full team of incredible young staff and Board members. 500+ youth who’ve directly participated in 2+ month cohort programs. Another 2500+ youth engaged in civic engagement processes. Beyond that, we’re also proud to be an organization that centres learning, relationships and responsiveness; that is committed to prioritizing underrepresented youth and youth who’ve been systemically marginalized by civic systems; that is working on embedding equity and justice into everything we do; and that carries a vision for a climate-friendly, just, and joyful future in cities.

And we’re just getting started.

This year, we took time to do a deep impact measurement and collaborative, community-informed strategic clarity process. With our experience and learnings from our programs over the last 5 years, and this new-found clarity, we know more than ever what we need to do to continue to make sure youth are a part of shaping our cities. That includes:

• Continuing to work with institutions, like municipal governments to design and implement meaningful youth engagement processes, and to build their capacity to keep doing so
• Build youth civic literacy, because in BC’s curriculum, youth never learn about cities (ie like what the heck do mayor and council actually do? how does planning and development happen?) or civics (ie why should I even get engaged? what difference can I make?)
• Support youth as civic changemakers, so that youth not only know how their cities work but also have a strong understanding of how they can become engaged and have opportunities to flex their civic engagement muscles

How do we do this? We do this through running civic education (ie Cities 101) cohort programs, K-12 civic ed programs, our civic action hub, dynamic and fun (hello tiktok) civic engagement communications, innovation labs and by working with cities/institutions to run meaningful youth engagement processes. We ensure our programs are low-barrier by offering stipends for transportation, childcare, and technology.

But to do this, we need your help. 

Providing quality programming  takes resources and funding. While we’ve been able to build some amazing partnerships to make that happen over the years, we have goals to raise more funds so that we can grow and expand our programs to reach another 10,000 youth in meaningful ways by 2026.

To do that, we have opened an Impact Fund at the Vancity Community Foundation, so for the first time ever (!!) we are able to accept donations and offer charitable tax receipts!

This is a big moment for us, and this is where we turn to you. We are so grateful for the amazing community of supporters and champions that we are surrounded by, and are asking for contributions from those that are able. We know there are so many generous people in our community who recognize the value of the work that we do. If you are not in the position to contribute, would you share with others in your network?

We know there are so many generous people in our community who recognize the value of the work that we do. Help us connect and get the word out!