Built together. Judged the best in the region.
The website we built with Maple Glen Housing Co-operative won Best Co-op Website at the 2026 CHFT Awards, across Durham, Toronto and York Region. The same evening, Maple Glen took Achievement of the Year for the playground build we worked on alongside them. Two awards in one night, from one community that decided the better version was worth the effort.
Awarded to Maple Glen Housing Co-operative, for the site we designed and built with them.
Awarded to Maple Glen for the KABOOM! playground build and what it gave the community.
A co-op and an agency, working on the same thing
The site was entered against every other co-op website across Durham, Toronto and York Region, and it came first. We designed and built it. Maple Glen shaped it. Neither half of that sentence works without the other.
A housing co-op is run by the people who live in it. The board is volunteers. The staff are few and stretched, and everything gets done around the actual business of housing families. A website is rarely the most urgent item on anyone’s list, and most co-op sites quietly show it.
Maple Glen decided theirs was worth doing properly, and then did the part that agencies cannot do for a client: they turned up. They answered the awkward questions, made decisions instead of deferring them, and told us plainly when something was wrong. We brought the craft. They brought the community, and the judgement about what it needed.
The second award tells you where that comes from
Achievement of the Year went to Maple Glen for the KABOOM! playground build. We were part of that too, and we wrote about it at the time, before there was any award attached to it, in Eight Years Without a Playground. Then One Day.
Read the two together and the pattern is hard to miss. A community spent eight years asking for a playground. Several hundred people turned up and built it in a single day. The same organization then decided its website should be as good as the rest of what it does.
Co-ops and nonprofits are told constantly to settle for the adequate version. This one declined, twice, and has two awards on the shelf to show for it.
What it might be worth to another organization
A nonprofit weighing up whether to spend money on a website is making a hard decision. Every dollar spent on a site is a dollar not spent on the mission, and plenty of agencies will take that dollar and hand back something forgettable.
What we can offer against that is not a promise. It is a co-op in Durham Region whose site was judged the best of its kind this year, who can be asked what the process was actually like, and who will tell you the truth about it.
Our thanks to everyone at Maple Glen Housing Co-operative. It was a good project, it is a better community, and we were glad to be in it with you.
If your site is the thing you keep meaning to deal with
We work with co-ops, nonprofits and small organizations across Canada and the UK. A first conversation is thirty minutes and costs nothing, and if the honest answer is that your current site is adequate, we will say so.