Camphill Communities in Canada: A Guide to Ontario and BC

🕑 15 min read

Glenora Farm's residential houses each serve three meals a day around big farm-style tables, and the people sitting at them don't sort neatly into staff and clients. There's a house coordinator, a volunteer couple who came from Colorado with no background in disability support, a woman whose specialty in the weavery is bath towels, and sometimes a coordinator's child. The table is the first thing to understand about the Camphill communities in Canada, because everything else (the weavery, the sugar bush, the sheep, the festivals) grows outward from it.

This guide covers the four Canadian Camphill sites one by one: where each sits, what its days actually look like, how it is funded and who can join it. We checked every community, address and policy against the organisations' own websites and annual reports in October 2026, because older lists online include communities that are in Vermont, branches that aren't Camphills at all, and volunteer programs that have since closed.

What a Camphill Community Is

Camphill is an international movement of communities where people with developmental disabilities and the people who support them live, work and learn together. Camphill Communities Ontario counts more than 118 residential communities for children, youth and adults in 22 countries. Most of them share a vocabulary that sounds odd at first and makes sense once you've seen a household. The adults with disabilities are called companions. The people who live alongside them, whether paid staff, year-long volunteers or long-term members, are called coworkers.

Glenora Farm puts the idea plainly on its own website: its members "live, learn and work together as companions, rather than as professionals and clients." The phrase does real work. In a group home, staff arrive for a shift and leave. In a Camphill house, the coworker eats breakfast at the same table, shares the chores and is there at the festival in December.

Daily life has a rhythm. Glenora's companions work a morning and an afternoon workshop each weekday, usually keeping the same morning workshop and rotating through others after lunch. Cascadia's day centre in North Vancouver runs Monday to Friday. The seasons are marked with festivals, and the two BC communities prepare and celebrate them together.

How Camphill Reached Canada

The story starts in Vienna. Karl König, born there in 1902, trained as a physician at the University of Vienna and came to Rudolf Steiner's work through Goethe's scientific writings. Ita Wegman invited him to her clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland, where he met Tilla Maasberg, who became his wife and co-founder. After the annexation of Austria in 1938 he left for Britain with a small group of young doctors, teachers and artists. In 1939, near Aberdeen in Scotland, that group began living with children who had developmental disabilities, and the first Camphill took shape. König returned to Germany in 1964 and died at Brachenreuthe near Überlingen in 1966.

Canada came four decades later, and it came twice, from two directions.

In Ontario, Camphill Communities Ontario began in 1986 as a home and school for children on a farm near Angus, in what is now Essa Township in Simcoe County. Its own history describes how it "evolved into an adult-centred community as the residents aged." The children who arrived in the 1980s grew up there, and the community grew up with them.

In British Columbia, the Cascadia Society's history page tells the West Coast version. In 1984 Charles and Adola McWilliam, long-time coworkers in the Camphill schools, answered an invitation and set up the Ita Wegman Association and School on the North Shore of Vancouver, named for the same doctor who had once hosted König in Arlesheim. The school class was carried through to Grade 8 as part of the Waldorf School. In 1990 a day program for six adults opened at Knockmaroon House in West Vancouver, and by 1992 there were three houses close together. The founders had always wanted a rural community too, and in 1993 they acquired land near Duncan on Vancouver Island. The Ita Wegman Association moved there to become Glenora Farm, and the urban work on the North Shore became the Cascadia Society for Social Working.

Camphill Communities Ontario: Nottawasaga and Sophia Creek

Camphill Communities Ontario (CCO) is an accredited not-for-profit supporting adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Simcoe County, and it works from two settings an easy drive apart. Nottawasaga is the rural one: an expansive property in Essa Township near Angus, with houses, workshops, gardens and a working sugar bush. Sophia Creek is the urban counterpart, a set of homes and apartments spread through Barrie.

The sugar bush near Angus

Making maple syrup has been a Camphill tradition here for close to forty years. For more than thirty of them the community tapped about 120 trees each season with traditional taps and buckets. A few years ago it added 1,000 line taps, and the expansion turned syrup into a real social enterprise. Supported adults now work at every stage: forest management, collection, boiling, product development, sales and marketing.

CCO reports that the operation captures 1.7 tonnes more carbon dioxide than it emits, through careful forestry, a reverse osmosis system that cuts wood-fuelled emissions in the sugar shack, and reusable stainless steel and glass for production and packaging. The community has also partnered with Lakehead University's Departments of Sustainability Sciences and Biology, Education and Graduate Studies on two research projects. One looks at how the maple operation can adapt to climate change, and the other studies well-being across the day programs.

Each March, CCO runs a Maple Festival. In 2025 it was held on March 15 and 16 at Drysdale's Tree Farm in Egbert, with sugaring demonstrations, a sugar bush tour, horse-drawn wagon rides, maple taffy and a pancake breakfast in a heated greenhouse. Check CCO's news page each winter for the coming year's dates and location.

The market garden

Nottawasaga also runs a 5-acre market garden with two greenhouses, worked on biodynamic principles that skip chemical fertilizers in favour of soil health. The list of crops reads like a Simcoe County farm stand: potatoes, carrots, beets, garlic, onions, squash, tomatoes, greens, cucumbers, herbs, lavender and haskap berries. Residents eat from it, and the surplus goes to local markets, with the sales returning to the programs. An Ontario Trillium Foundation grant upgraded the greenhouse so the garden program can run all year.

Day programs and homes in Barrie

The day programs go well beyond the land. CCO runs a woodshop, pottery, mosaic, fibre arts and a fine art studio, along with cooking and life-skills work in its homes and cafés. In Barrie, the art studio is at 7 Florence Street and the day program café is at 87 Toronto Street. On housing, supported adults can share a home with three or four friends, or live more independently in apartments attached to one of the larger houses, where support is available around the clock.

Behind CCO stands Camphill Foundation Canada, a public foundation established in 2000 to fund what government money doesn't cover: capital projects, program development, sustainability and extraordinary needs. You'll see both names on local donor lists, and they work as a pair.

Glenora Farm, Near Duncan on Vancouver Island

Glenora Farm is the rural half of British Columbia's Camphill story, and it is the one people search for most (about 390 searches a month in Canada, more than "Camphill" itself). The Ita Wegman Association operates it as a biodynamic farm south of Duncan, at 4766 Waters Road. It belongs to the international Camphill movement and the Camphill Association of North America, and calls itself one of two Camphill communities in Western Canada.

This is a working farm, and the animals give it its character. Glenora raises a small herd of Dexter cattle and what the farm calls "a not-so-small herd" of East Friesian dairy sheep, for meat and wool, with dairy planned. Each spring it sells some registered purebred East Friesian ewes. The farm team of companions and a few coworkers does the daily work of feeding, fencing, mucking out stables and building compost heaps, rotating pasture and growing its own hay.

Weavery, candles and a vegetable CSA

Inside, the workshops turn out things you can buy. Glenora hand-dips candles from 100 percent pure beeswax, sold by length and colour through an email order line. Its weavery produces scarves, baby blankets, ponchos and towels, and the felting workshop makes pictures. A three-acre organic vegetable garden feeds a small community-supported agriculture program of 10 to 20 members. A full share costs $500 for a 20-week season running mid-June to mid-November, with pickups at the farm on Tuesday or Friday evenings, and the produce also sells through Cow Op, the Cowichan Valley's online farmers' market.

How a Glenora house is arranged

Glenora's residential homes follow an extended-family pattern: two House Coordinators, two Short Term Coworkers, several companions and sometimes children. Every residential companion has their own bedroom. Companions take part in the Cowichan Valley Special Olympics and other local groups, so life isn't confined to the farm gate. Glenora also offers a day program for adults who live elsewhere.

The Cascadia Society in North Vancouver

Cascadia is an urban Camphill, and that changes its texture. Its homes and day centre sit in the Lonsdale area of North Vancouver, where companions use local shops, recreation centres, concerts and plays, and walk in parks a few steps away. Some live in Cascadia's own family-style homes. Others come in from group homes or their parents' houses, Monday to Friday.

The day centre is built around artisan workshops: handweaving, candle making, pottery, mosaics, baskets and art cards, alongside painting, music and some drama. Cascadia's weavers work in natural fibres on everything from small Inkle looms for belts to six-treadle looms for patterned cloth. Its own description of the weavery mentions that weaving trains spatial orientation (left and right, up and down) and sharpens the perception of colour and texture, and that one companion often spends quiet moments simply running his fingers over the finished pieces.

Cascadia has a garden program too, raising herbs for tea and cooking plus vegetables and fruit, and its garden crew keeps the grounds of the centre and residences. Its recent annual giving campaign set a $20,000 goal for a new kiln for the clay workshop, an extra wax melter for the candle studio and a thank-you event for coworkers and volunteers. The year before, donors restored the basement of Kaspar House after serious flood damage.

The Four Canadian Sites Side by Side

If you came looking for a Camphill in Alberta, Quebec or the Maritimes, you won't find one. Some online lists mix in Anthroposophical Society branches in Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal and Halifax, which are study and community groups for adults interested in Steiner's work, not residential communities. Others list Heartbeet Lifesharing, which is in Hardwick, Vermont. The Anthroposophical Society in Canada counts three Camphills in Canada, in Ontario and British Columbia, which matches what we found.

Volunteering at a Camphill in Canada

Many readers find this page because they want to spend a year in a Camphill. The honest answer in 2026 depends on which community you mean.

Camphill Communities Ontario states on its volunteer page that it is not currently accepting foreign volunteers or foreign employment, because it no longer has live-in accommodation. Local volunteers are welcome, and the page asks people to email the community to talk about it.

Glenora Farm still offers Short Term Coworker placements, usually a full year, with other lengths considered case by case. Short Term Coworkers receive room and board and a monthly stipend, live in a household with House Coordinators and companions, and help in the homes, on the farm, in the three-acre vegetable garden and herb garden, and in workshops such as weaving, candle dipping, music, art, cooking and games. Glenora takes applications through its own inquiry form and through the Camphill Volunteer Portal at camphill.org/volunteer. People who want to stay longer can become Carrying Coworkers.

The Cascadia Society takes volunteers in its life-sharing homes and asks them to apply through the same Camphill Volunteer Portal. Its day centre is at 351 West 19th Street in North Vancouver.

How Camphill in Canada Is Paid For

"How are Camphill communities funded?" is one of the questions people ask Google most often about Camphill. In Canada the answer is mostly provincial money, topped up by donations and the communities' own enterprises.

Camphill Communities Ontario's 2023 annual report gives the clearest picture. Total revenue was $5.8 million, and $4,774,893 of it, about 82 percent, came from Ontario's Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services. Room and board brought in $417,849, grants $268,854 and day programs $87,787. The separate Camphill Foundation Canada reported $1.76 million in revenue that year, almost all of it contributions, which it uses for housing, repairs and new programs.

In British Columbia, adult developmental services are funded through Community Living BC (CLBC). Glenora Farm's 2026 annual report describes CLBC's periodic monitoring visits and lists expanding its CLBC contracts as a 2026/27 priority. Both BC communities also depend on donors: Glenora accepts cheques made out to "The IWA," and Cascadia runs an annual giving campaign.

The enterprises (syrup, candles, CSA shares, woven goods, art cards) bring in modest money. Their larger value is the work itself, because each one gives a companion a real job with a real customer at the end of it.

The Steiner Thread: Curative Education

Every Canadian Camphill names its source openly. Cascadia and Glenora both write that they "hold the image of man" (Glenora now says "human beings") as described in the Western philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and the principles of anthroposophy and the international Camphill movement. To see what that means in practice, go back to a lecture hall in Dornach, Switzerland, in the summer of 1924.

Between June 25 and July 7 of that year, Steiner gave twelve lectures to doctors and curative teachers, now published as Education for Special Needs: The Curative Education Course (GA 317). The course grew from work Ita Wegman's clinic and a small group of young teachers had already begun with children who needed special care. Steiner's starting point was that a disability affects how a person's spirit can work through the body and soul, while the spirit itself stays whole. The educator's task is to work with the instrument, patiently, so the person behind it can come through more fully. You can read more in our glossary entries on curative education and Ita Wegman.

A fair objection deserves its full weight here. Many families want a well-run home for an adult son or daughter and have no interest in a spiritual philosophy, and some worry that a spiritual worldview could get in the way of good, modern disability support. The Canadian communities answer that worry with how they actually operate. CCO is an accredited provider funded mainly by the Ontario government, and it uses Personal Outcome Measures, an established tool for asking people what matters in their own lives. Glenora goes through CLBC's monitoring reviews. Nobody living or volunteering in these communities is required to believe anything. What remains of Steiner is mostly an attitude: the person in front of you is a whole human being, and the work is to make room for that person to show up.

The other Steiner threads are easy to see once you know them. The gardens are biodynamic, from his 1924 Agriculture Course. The BC communities began with a Waldorf school class, and Canada's Waldorf schools are listed in our directory by province. The festival year, the handwork and some of the therapies (the wider movement includes eurythmy and anthroposophic medicine) come from the same body of work. For the man himself, start with our profile of Rudolf Steiner and why he still matters.

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