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Connecting Region Funding Grant Awarded
The Community Legal Clinic recently learned that it had been awarded a significant grant by the Law Foundation of Ontario. Our Clinic partnered with three other legal clinics, Peterborough, Grey-Bruce, and Lake Country (which covers Muskoka and Parry Sound), to apply to become a candidate for the Connecting Region. The funding opportunity originated from a Law Foundation of Ontario report released in January 2009 called "Connecting Across Language and Distance: Linguistic and Rural Access to Legal Information and Services". The Connecting Region Report recommended that a group of legal and non-legal organizations work together to test strategies to improve linguistic and/or rural access to legal information and services in a region of the province (the "Connecting Region"). The Connecting Region will provide a model for a coherent system which will support people at every stage of the legal continuum: recognizing that they have a legal problem and understanding how the law might help; getting information to understand the problem; obtaining appropriate referrals and summary advice; and connecting with a lawyer or other legal professional for advice and representation. Our plan for developing broad-based support for a Connecting Region requires a series of local meetings with our community partners. These meetings will form the basis for a regional conference to be held in Orillia where decisions about a regional mandate, communications, operations and an initial course of action can be decided. Our work will be recorded to share with others and the plan that is developed will be delivered to the Law Foundation of Ontario in March, 2011.
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