Toronto's Public Space Incubator initiative

Park People is a regional and national Canadian organization promoting active use of park spaces. (One of the things they do is publish a set of technical assistance guides for citizens aiming to do events in parks, such as showing movies or presenting a community picnic.)

Rendering of a community café in Thorncliffe Park, Toronto.

A current initiative is the Public Space Incubator project, a competitive grant program providing funds for the accomplishment of placemaking projects ("5 new projects receive grants to shake up underused public spaces," Toronto Star) in Toronto parks.
From the article:

Park People’s manager of policy and planning Jake Tobin Garrett said the group received more than 70 letters of intent for the grants, which were narrowed down to the final 25 applications from which the five winners emerged.

“We knew we would get a lot of interest in this, but we were surprised to receive so many applications,” he said of the program, which was made possible by $340,000 in funding from the Balsam Foundation and renowned urban planner and architect Ken Greenberg and his wife, Eti.

The main objective of the challenge was to solicit ideas that could shake up how we generally view public spaces, Garrett said, noting the effective use of shared space is becoming more important as more people move into the city and into smaller condos and apartments.

A comparable example would be London's grant program for community bicycling projects, Cycling Grants London, which provides 10,000 grants to increase cycling in the part of under-participating groups ("Grants to encourage more Londoners to take up cycling," TfL).

More communities need to consider making some funds available to community-initiated programming, in order to stoke innovation.