Resources

Articles, books, readings and other media for white and non-Black people to educate themselves about anti-racism.

Hire and support Black game developers.

Access resources, apply to speak or participate, or sponsor this inclusive expo and conference taking place in September. GDOC has a Twitter thread connecting mentors and devs of color here.

The largest Black-owned business & black entrepreneurs directory in Toronto.

Support Black-owned restaurants in Toronto. Community-curated list of businesses open during COVID-19 for delivery or pickup.

The Cartoonists of Color, Queer Cartoonists, and Disabled Cartoonists databases were created as a way to spotlight marginalized comics creators.

A database of artists from #DrawingWhileBlack on twitter! Filter for specific areas of work including but not limited to : Book Illustration, Character Design,Storyboards, Product Design, etc!

A fundraiser for the family of Regis Korchinski Paquet, organized by her sister Renee Beals.

A fund supporting Black therapists, so they can support others in their community with low/no cost mental health care.

Split a donation to a number of U.S. bail funds, or allocate specific amounts to individual groups.

Donate to the Black Legal Action Centre, which provides free legal assistance to low- and no-income Black Ontarians.

Donate to this Toronto-based not-for-profit organization that supports, showcases and promotes an appreciation of arts from across the African Diaspora.

Donate to CAFCAN, a not-for-profit agency whose primary focus is on building and strengthening the service framework for African Canadians through the use of psycho-social Interventional approaches.

Donate to TAIBU Community Health Centre (CHC), a multidisciplinary, non-for-profit, community led organization established to serve the Black Community across the Greater Toronto Area.

Donate to BWIM, a Toronto-based, survivor-led organization that empowers and supports the advancement of black survivors of sexual violence.

Donate to FoodShare Toronto, which has teamed up with #NotAnotherBlackLife to provide food to Black families self-isolating after attending the march on May 30.

Donate to this Toronto based charity dedicated to addressing the economic and social barriers that affect Black youth ages 14 and over who are not in employment, education, or training (NEET).

Donate to Showing Up for Racial Justice Toronto, and check out their anti-racism educational resources.

Donate to Black Women Film! to support their leadership, film camp, and mentorship programs. DMG has partnered with BWF for 3 years and wholeheartedly support this transformative organization.

This is fund for the community of Black Trans women that live in Atlanta and are sex workers and/or homeless.

The Black Health Alliance is a community-led registered charity working to improve the health and well-being of Black communities in Canada.

Black Youth Helpline serves all youth and specifically responds to the need for a Black youth specific service, positioned and resourced to promote access to professional, culturally appropriate support for youth, families and schools.

An initiative that will raise funds to enable a collection of Black artists to create and display their work at various galleries throughout the city.

Free meal deliveries by and for Black people in Toronto. Donate by sending an e-transfer to upliftkitchento@gmail.com. Use password upliftkitchento

The People’s Pantry is a Toronto-based grassroots initiative dedicated to safely providing and delivering free cooked meals and groceries to those who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis. You can also sign up to volunteer.

A template letter to help you demand action from your MPP and/or the Mayor on Toronto police services budget.

Anonymize photos taken at protests

If you are a white photographer, filmmaker or creator documenting protests and activists, use these resources collected by Authority Collective as a starting point for educating yourself ethical documentation of protest, holding police accountable, and supporting Black photographers.

A library of resources for photographers, videographers and activists engaged in visual advocacy.

CameraV: Capture and share verifiable photos and video proof on a smartphone or tablet, while keeping it entirely secure and private.

ObscuraCam: Share photos and videos while protecting the privacy of you and those you care about. Blur and disguise faces in your photos and videos. Information that could identify you as the cameraperson is removed from the files for added security.

The latest version of Signal for Android and iOS introduces a new blur feature in the image editor that can help protect the privacy of the people in the photos you share.

Great resource of tools for obscuring personally identifiable information in photos and videos of protest, archiving tools and more.

Describe your diagrams with a simple text language and automatically generate an image you can export.

Find a good time to meet with 2 or more people. Cuter than Doodle.

Talk-show style streaming facilitator, connects to twitch etc

Watch party / Streaming service

Yarn Spinner helps you build branching narrative and dialogue in games. It’s easy for writers to use, and has powerful features for integrating your content straight into your game.

Paste your text, find cliches!

As easy to use as a word document or bulleted list, and as powerful for finding, collecting, and connecting related ideas as a graph database.

Writing environment with a clean and intuitive interface, Markdown support, and projects/tagging.

Another Day is a writing app. Here are the rules: every day tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday, and what was yesterday is forgotten.

Excellent list of tools and resources for naming things, including brainstorming, vetting, cultural sensitivity, safety, etymologies and more.

Create flow charts and diagrams.

OCR software that runs in your browser.

Source-controlled collaborative text editor.

Powerful and flexible writing environment, with virtual corkboard, outliner, and full screen writing.

Mind-map based note-taking app for visual/spatial thinkers.

Bitsy is a little editor for little games or worlds. The goal is to make it easy to make games where you can walk around and talk to people and be somewhere.

Early-access platform that lets players and designers make, play, stream, and share tabletop role-playing games.

Visual novel engine with powerful scripting.

Amulet is a free Lua-based audio/visual toolkit suitable for small games and experimentation. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5, iOS and Android.

Draw an object, drag it onto the canvas, and add rules to make a game. Exports to web page.

Free and open-source engine for making 2D and 3D games. Excellent documentation, fully featured and multi-platform deployment options.

An open source framework for rapidly building immersive 3D experiences in Lua.

Open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine.

Open source tool for creating interactive narratives that easily deploy to the Web. Big community. Web and desktop versions.

Well-established desktop tool for creating works of interactive fiction. Programmable.

Plug-and-lay multiplayer networking for Unity

A fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games. Intentional limited. Lua. [Free licenses available to DMG members, contact us]

One of the most widely used cross-platform game engines.

The powerful scripting/markup language behind Heaven’s Vault, 80 Days and Sorcery. A language and editor. Unity plugin available.

A tool for creating dynamic stories relative to a reader’s place, time and location (via the Foursquare API), weather (OpenWeatherMap) and more (custom feeds for recent news stories etc).

A combination of an editor and a simple JavaScript library to create game without the cumbersome aspects of HTML5 development. Great for prototyping.

Open source, cross-platform 2D game library written in the Haxe Language and powered by OpenFL.

JavaScript game engine for making desktop and mobile html5 games.

PowerQuest is a Unity tool for creating 2d point and click adventure games!

A tool for drawing and collaging artwork to create small games.

Collage images into 3D worlds to explore.

A directory of weird game-making tools by Lee Tusman.

Draw in a frame, and link to another using a colour palette. Web-based, exports to HTML.

Make point-and-click adventures with your own text and artwork.

Free and open source web based tool for creating visual novels, interactive stories and text-based adventure games for the web.

Online Town is a video-calling experience that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and lets you walk in, out and around those conversations just as easily as you would in real life. It’s also fun.

Spatialized audio for up to 150 people. No download required.

Free and open source video meeting platform.

No-download, just-works video meetings tool for up to 4 users.

Video + phone meetings for up to 10 users – limited to 45 minutes. (Not affiliated with Uber.)

Em wrote a series of posts on the technical architecture and experiential considerations that went into the highly successful Roguelike Celebration conference in 2020.

Video + phone meetings tool for up to 250 users. Free, but consider the privacy issues.

Already using the standard plan on Slack? You can start a live video call with up to 15 participants.

A free tool (invite-only as of Aug 2020 – ask a DMG person for an invite!) to create virtual rooms and backdrops and immersive presentations.

Tool to allow audience members to interact with a presentation anonymously and visually.

Free and open source web conferencing, especially suited to classes and presentations. This is what DMG uses!

Online virtual RPG tabletop

Collaborative whiteboard program, mindmaps, etc.

Collaborative Drawing/Painting Program, medium functionality

A digital workspace for visual collaboration.

A community managed lightweight code hosting solution written in Go. It is published under the MIT license. Free/open source alternative to Github.

Lightweight web-based chat client that doesn’t require signup.

Collaborative Whiteboard Program, vectors

Collaborative Drawing/Painting Program, robust functionality

Web-based pomodoro app you can use with just your keyboard.

Use this tool to create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns.

Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open web standards (SVG). For all and empowered by the community.

Exit to Community (E2C) is an effort to develop alternatives to the standard model of the startup “exit.” Rather than simply aiming for an acquisition by a more established company or a public stock offering, could startups aim to mature into ownership by their community of stakeholders? Through policy research, popular education, and partnership with interested startups, MEDLab is exploring pathways for making the answer a yes.

Various non-commercial granting programs for organizations and individual artists.

Non-commercial media arts project funding for organizations and individual artists. Commercial projects are eligible but the primary intent should be artistic excellence, not profit.

Interactive Digital Media Fund programs include: Concept Definition and Production; Global Market Development; Marketing Support; and Industry Development.

Programs include: Commercial Projects (interactive projects with high revenue/mainstream potential), Innovation & Experimentation Program, Prototyping Program, and the Conceptualization Program

Visual Arts and New Media Individual Project Funding provides up to $15,000 to support development of individual Alberta artists, arts administrators, or an ensemble of artists by providing funding for a specific visual arts or new media project.

Creation, dissemination and professional development grants available for media artists in PEI.

This program assists independent professional media artists to create specific projects.

Creation grants for emerging and professional artists in all disciplines.

The Independent Artists program supports Saskatchewan artists to pursue their creative work and careers by funding creative, professional development or research projects, and the production and/or presentation of artistic works.

TOM is a unique online financial literacy program that brings together the psychology of trauma and our relationship with money.

Melissa Phillips reflects on what she’s learnt in the 12 months since co-founding Silver Rain Games

Game data analysis tool

Data on Steam and Valve sales: Regional pricing, lifetime CCU, Twitch viewers, etc.

A curated list of 50+ mobile game publishers that accept indie pitches.

Start from scratch or choose a template to design your community’s governance.

Downloadable resource library in multiple languages on understanding trauma, grounding techniques, consent, sexual violence, grief and coping.

A free suite of tools to help you manage chronic pain and flare-ups during the global health crisis.

Downloadable guide to protective measures, hygiene, alternative arrangements and additional resources.

During these times, it is more difficult than ever for marginalized people to access gender essential items. This Initiative is creating an opportunity for our trans* and queer community to support those among us most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Broken Pencil is offering eight $400 grants for zine creators whose livelihoods have been impacted by the pandemic.

Twelve-week wage subsidy for small companies who are ineligible for funding under the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS). Companies must be pursuing “technology-driven innovation.”

Grants up to $5k to either adapt their existing work or create a new work for digital dissemination to the Canadian public during the COVID-19 pandemic.

$1,000 grants for new small businesses or individuals with an idea for a new business (Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia)

The unprecedented new CBC Creative Relief Fund will provide $2 million in development and production funding for a diverse range of innovative, original Canadian storytelling. Note: Games/interactive projects will not be funded through this program.

A $200,000 grant fund providing individual grants of up to $5,000 to Canadians that want to launch a business

Science hasn’t yet revealed all the answers to what makes a good reusable mask. Here’s what we know, and what to do.

Mutual aid fund for Black folks in the GTA who, as a result of the pandemic, have lost income and are at a loss for how to fill their revenue sources, who now have unforeseen childcare costs, folks who have to find the money for children’s food now that schools are closed, artists, freelancers, and gig gig economy workers who have lost out on gigs, seniors and elders in our communities, disabled folks, folks who are facing daily challenges of capitalism and are living on or near the street.

Relief funds available to published/self-published authors who have lost or will lost $1,500+ in income due to COVID-19. Round closes June 15.

Resources and information compiled by DMG accountant Omer Riza.

This emergency survival fund supports LGBTQ2S artists, performers, and tip-based workers, as well as helps keep to Glad Day Book Shop open.

A community-made visual guide to applying for the CERB.

To assist Toronto artists in dealing with the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, Toronto Arts Foundation and Toronto Arts Council are introducing the TOArtist COVID Response Fund. The Fund will allocate up to $1000 to self-employed, individual artists resident in Toronto whose creative work and income have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently suspended.

CAMRF seeks to provide support for low-income artists and musicians whose livelihoods are being affected by the pandemic. Their goal is to disburse $200 to each applicant – still in fundraising stage.

The Toronto Trans Solidarity Network (TTSN) is a community fund and mutual aid network with the goal of providing some emergency help to trans folks in Toronto, so we can get through the next weeks and months of the COVID-19 crisis.

Takeout dinners on Tuesday evenings at 5:30; food bank open on Wednesdays

Directory of vendors and farmers in the GTA making deliveries to residences or depots. Many offer online ordering.

this group is erecting, stocking and inspiring others to build their own designated, raised wooden boxes to house non-perishable food items for members of the community struggling with food security right now.

The Food Bank and takeaway meals are available at 1884 Davenport. The Food Bank will run Mondays and Fridays, 12pm-3pm and The Drop-in will serve takeaway meals on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, 9am-10am for breakfast, 12pm-1pm for lunch.

Free takeaway meals 7 days a week on The 519 patio in front of FABARNAK Café: Monday to Friday: 1pm and 4pm and Saturday and Sunday: 12:30pm.

Dames Making Games is working to support community members in the GTA who are impacted by food insecurity during the COVID-19 crisis with donations of meals with the support of our friends at Santo Pecado Mexican Catering and members’ generous donations.

Due to COVID19, a number of food banks are closed. Use this program locator to find your closest bank.