The Latin American community is a diverse and vibrant part of Toronto's multicultural artistic community. It is composed of people from very diverse ethnic backgrounds, socio-political experiences and artistic disciplines. Some of the elements that unite us are the challenges created by the lack of knowledge, disposition and funds to develop every aspect of the community's life. We are a relatively "young", divided and unwealthy community, from a "young", divided and supra-dependant continent. For a long time, this has been reflected in our inability to appropriately develop organizations and events that promote the vast array of creative production within our community. We have recently seen a tendency towards changing this dynamic. We believe the Festival is an important contribution and we celebrate initiatives such as the Toronto Hispano American Film Festival, Alucinarte and the many cultural events held in the city by different groups. There is much more we could do to promote our culture and arts. We believe one of our main obstacles to be the lack of a research and consultation process to determine two fundamental questions. First, in what conditions and context does our artistic community develop their work? And second, what are their specific needs? The Latin American Arts Fund was created by the Salvador Allende Festival organizing committee to help contribute to the development of Latin American artists and cultural workers. objectives: • To develop a research/enquiry process that will help define the needs of local Latin American artists. • To determine what long-term, financially sustainable projects could help meet these needs.   • To raise the required funds for these long-term projects.