Archives: Grants (page 40)

Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation (CERA) will study existing service gaps at the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) to identify strategic responses available to frontline workers. It will work with a committee of community partners from across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to develop and deliver tools and training to build legal competency in frontline workers on LTB matters. Five in-person trainings will be delivered in the GTA and a training webinar will be available online. CERA will provide phone support to assist frontline workers with individual client case management. CERA's primary project partners are Dixon Hall Neighbourhood Services, East York East Toronto Family Resources, and LAMP Community Health Centre. This initiative will work to prevent evictions and homelessness among vulnerable renters facing hearings at the LTB.

Community Advocacy & Legal Centre will create a series of virtual workshops using an action research methodology that healthcare professionals can access on-demand and provide justice & health forums for interested communities across Ontario. Workshops will build healthcare professionals' capacity to identity, refer, and address legal issues. Forums will introduce this new vision for access to justice and collaborations with trusted intermediaries that will better reach vulnerable and low-income populations and, in particular, rural communities.

Community Legal Education Ontario will conduct an environmental scan around the regulation of smart legal forms designed for public use (both in Canada and internationally) and their impacts through an access to justice lens. Partners include the University of Ottawa. This research will benefit both service users and service providers by identifying relevant considerations for stakeholders for the regulation of this rapidly changing field in Ontario.

Community Legal Education Ontario and Community Law School (Sarnia-Lambton) Inc. (CLSSL) propose to develop learning activities that will be piloted by CLSSL through at least one local literacy organization that trains and tutors adult learners, adapt the learning activities for province-wide distribution to the literacy sector, and conduct outreach and roll-out the learning activities to literacy organizations across the province.

Community Legal Education Ontario will build a model for evaluating online interactive tools, specifically the Guided Pathways tool. Partners include Cyber Justice Laboratory. The purpose of the project is to create an evaluation framework for online legal information and support tools. This grant will benefit service providers as well as clients utilizing interactive online tools in support of their legal needs.

Community Legal Education Ontario and the Association of Community Legal Clinics of Ontario will collaborate to build engagement and capacity in community legal clinics across the province to train and support trusted intermediaries in their communities. The project aims to establish more consistent community engagement by community legal clinics and improve levels of assess to justice by expanding the use of trusted intermediaries in their respective communities.

The Northwestern Ontario Women's Centre, in partnership with the Thunder Bay and District Coordinating Committee to End Woman Abuse, will develop and pilot a high risk navigation model/response system protocol in Thunder Bay for women and children facing violent perpetrators. The partnership will also develop and deliver training for trusted intermediaries in gender based violence theory and practice, and in turn, they will provide training for legal system professionals through workshops and an annual professional training day. The project will increase collaboration between community-based advocates and the justice system to intervene in incidents with the most severe potential consequences.

The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC) will establish the Trusted Intermediary Education Project, a professional development training for the OFIFC's Community Justice Program (CJP) Coordinators who facilitate culture-based diversions for urban Indigenous communities throughout Ontario. The proposed project will provide CJP Coordinators with curriculum to train volunteers to support with the diversions process, best practices for program outreach, and training on developing effective memoranda of understanding. The program aims to establish more consistent levels of facilitation with increased effectiveness and improved outcomes for clients.

St. Stephen’s Community House will evaluate the effectiveness of community mediation and coaching, as practiced in the 12 services of the Ontario Community Mediation Coalition, in resolving immediate conflicts and especially in improving the ongoing capacity for communications and future conflict resolution in and among clients using these services. Partners include the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution. The program evaluation will benefit both service providers and clients in giving and receiving community mediation services.

University of Ottawa will examine how technology can be used to mitigate a barrier to the public effectively accessing justice: court form complexity. It will build on the academic researchers’ previous work evaluating the accessibility of paper-based court forms to examine the benefits and identify remaining challenges to making court forms easily accessible and usable for the public, with Community Legal Education Ontario's (CLEO) Guided Pathways used as an example. Partners include Western University and CLEO. This grant will benefit academics, service providers, as well as service users.