Funding Update

We’re excited to share that ALAS has been awarded a two-year Responsive Grant from the Law Foundation of Ontario (LFO), beginning March 2026.

LFO’s Responsive grants support community-led projects that improve access to justice in Ontario, including work that advances legal education, legal research, and services with legal content. Grants can support projects for up to $250,000 per year for up to two years.

This funding means we can strengthen and grow ALAS’s core programming, so more artists across Ontario can access timely legal information, practical support, and clearer pathways to next steps.

What this grant will support (2026–2028)

Over the next two years, we’ll be focusing on:

1) The ALAS Legal Clinic
We’ll continue to offer summary legal information to artists’ real-world needs, including contracts, copyright questions, payment issues, workplace concerns, and more, so artists can better understand their options and make informed decisions.

2) Legal education sessions
Public-facing sessions that translate legal concepts into plain language, designed for working artists across disciplines, and relevant to the realities of creative work.

3) Our legal resource database
We’ll keep developing and updating our resource library so that artists, legal professionals, and arts organizations can more easily find reliable information, templates, and explainers in one place.

Together, these programs help reduce confusion before it becomes conflict, and support more sustainable relationships between artists, presenters, producers, commissioners, and institutions.

Why this matters: artists and access to justice

Artists are running businesses, signing agreements, licensing work, collaborating across sectors, and navigating complex power dynamics, often without the legal infrastructure that other industries take for granted.

This grant helps us keep doing what ALAS does best: connecting artists to legal understanding and support, without gatekeeping language, and without assuming people already know the system.

It also supports the intersecting community around this work: lawyers, law students, and allied professionals who want to contribute their skills in ways that are practical, ethical, and rooted in community need.

Updates to come

One of our goals with this funding is to share progress in a way that’s easy to follow and easy to act on. Over the next two years, you can expect periodic updates on:

• Clinic improvements and what we’re learning from recurring issues

• New and refreshed resources added to the database

• Upcoming education sessions and topics

• Ways artists and legal volunteers can participate

(If you’re arriving here from our newsletter, welcome. This page will be updated as the work unfolds.)

Stay connected / calls to action

• Artists in Ontario: Keep an eye on our clinic and education pages for upcoming dates and resources.

• Lawyers & law students: If you’re interested in volunteering your time and skills, we’d love to hear from you (clinic support, session support, resource review, or other roles).

• Supporters: Sharing ALAS with your networks helps more artists find us when they need support.

Thank you to the Law Foundation of Ontario for supporting access to justice work in Ontario.