The Classic Theatre Festival Relaunch Campaign supports our return to live theatre in the summer of 2022, at the historic Arts Court Theatre in downtown Ottawa. It also helps sustain our ongoing training and mentoring programming to provide a new generation of theatre artists the skills needed to gain a foothold in this always vibrant arts sector. The Classic Theatre Festival is a project of our charitable parent company, Burning Passions Theatre, which employs theatre to build and transform communities - working at professional and community levels, through productions, training and mentorship – while providing artistic opportunities for everyone from at-risk youth to veteran Ontario talents. Founded in 1998 to highlight stories of women and youth, we enact our vision through platforms integrating our commitment to artistic excellence within a broader social canvas: our signature project, the professional summertime Classic Theatre Festival, has since 2010 staged plays from Broadway and the London Stage featuring strong roles for women and new generation theatre artists, and providing employment and training opportunities for rural youth. We also produced five seasons of historic walking plays that highlight injustices focused on colonialism, poverty, male violence, mistreatment of veterans, and racial profiling.  In 2021, we expanded our rural youth theatre training program beyond its focus on performance/dramaturgy for new generation artists to incorporate online technical theatre training and mentorship: video and lighting, set design, and technical direction. The Festival served as a major rural economic driver, but following the pandemic closure, relocated to Ottawa to re-open in 2022. We are particularly interested in continuing some of our signature Festival programs to complement our award-winning mainstage productions, including reaching out to traditionally marginalized communities and equity-seeking groups to provide hundreds of free tickets annually through our Save-a-Seat program to make us more accessible. We also seek out refugee rights, anti-racism, and anti-poverty groups to stage benefit performances. Pre-show talks will continue to relate content of our shows to contemporary socio-economic realities and challenges, and post-show dialogues will keep us in touch with audience concerns and challenges that help inform our programming choices. Core values of artistic excellence combine with community, accessibility and accountability, publicly acknowledging and acting on the privilege of working and living in unceded traditional Algonquin territory.