Sweet Success at our Annual Kids’ Main Street

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Last Saturday was a sweet treat in the TSA calendar as we held our third annual Kids’ Main Street workshops, a program that invites the youngest designers in the family to learn about city building and showcase their creativity through edible architectural creations.

Held over two different sessions at the Centre for Social Innovation: Spadina, Kids’ Main Street saw 27 children and their families join us to build an edible main street, with each participant designing and building their very own mixed-use, multi-storey building façade. The event was as fun as it was educational, as we encouraged the kids to think about what makes a vibrant street experience and to translate their initial table sketches to completed cookie realities through the design process. The end result is a festivity of colour, textures and imagination with just about every use you can think of: from a fire station to a costume store, as well as cafes, restaurants, toy stores, and of course a myriad of ice cream shops! Each with plenty of apartments for all the gingerbread citizens that live in this tasty, walkable metropolis.

Now that the icing is all dry, these creations have been stitched together into a digital main street featured in this year’s TSA Gingerbread City showcase.

We want to take a moment to give a big shout out to all those who have made this initiative such a sweet success, specially our hard-working volunteers and staff who not only ran this weekend’s workshops but also did all the planning, baking and whipping required for this program! Thank you as well to our lovely photographer Yianni Tong. We also want to say thank you to this event’s Program Sponsor, Pro-Demnity Insurance, as well as to the Centre for Social Innovation (the perfect main street setting for this event!), for their support of this program.