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artsVest in Oakville

ArtsVe$t, the pilot program that The Council for Business in the Arts in Canada (CBAC) ran in Oakville, Ontario, last year, was so successful that Ontario's Ministry of Culture and the federal Department of Canadian Heritage are both currently examining how the program might be expanded to other communities

ArtsVe$t was a matching fund program designed to encourage new business support of the arts through sponsorship and community investment. Its purpose was to assist arts organizations to improve their financial capacity through the development of sustainable business partnerships.

Modeled on the highly successful British "New Partners" program, run by the CBAC's UK counterpart, which has injected £140 million of new money into arts funding since its inception, ArtsVe$t was designed and administered by CBAC. The Ontario government, through the Ministry of Culture, provided lead funding, and additional support came from the Department of Canadian Heritage and The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation.

By running the pilot in one community, CBAC and its partners sought to measure the effectiveness of the program as a potential model for future incentive programs in other communities.

The Town of Oakville, with a population of 147,000 about 40 km west of Toronto, was a natural choice for the pilot. Oakville has a broadly diverse array of arts organizations active in the town, many of which are mirrored in communities across Canada. Fifty of these groups are members of the Oakville Arts Council and include public and private art galleries, a symphony orchestra, a performing arts centre, a children's choir as well as amateur drama and music groups, along with summer jazz and classics festival organizations. The town is also home to 260 head offices ranging in scope and scale from the Ford Motor Company, TDL Group Ltd. (Tim Hortons), Zenon Environmental Inc., Goodrich Landing Gear to private money management firms.

As an incentive to Oakville businesses $50,000 was put on the table, in the hope that they would match it. Instead, Oakville's arts groups found business partners who committed nearly twice as much in cash and in-kind - flowing a total of $140,000 in new funds to the arts in just six months.

Research at the start of the project showed that only 33 of the 260 businesses headquartered in Oakville were core supporters of the arts in town. But with the ArtsVe$t challenge, The Festival of Classics, Oakville Arts Council, Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts, Oakville Children's Choir, Oakville Galleries, Oakville Symphony Orchestra and the Southern Ontario Chamber Music Institute successfully recruited a total of 18 business sponsors, 13 of which had never before provided donations or sponsorship to the arts.

An economist and business professor who evaluated the program concluded that a conservative estimate of its total 'multiplier' effect was 4 times the initial investment. Stephen Preece of Wilfrid Laurier University, conducted a thorough quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the matching program. His key findings were that:

1. the number of business sponsors of the arts in Oakville increased by 40% in one year;
   
   
2. individual arts organizations saw increases in their revenues from business that ranged from a 15% increase to a 220% over the previous year;
   
   
3. an investment of just under 10% of the existing corporate funding resulted in an overall improvement of nearly 25% to the baseline.
   
   

"The support of six-term Mayor Ann Mulvale, the Oakville Arts Council and the Oakville Economic Development Alliance cannot be underestimated in the success of the pilot", according to CBAC President & CEO, Sarah Iley. "Our recommendation to the federal and provincial governments is, therefore, that any expansion of ArtsVe$t should be positioned as a multi-local program, requiring the kind of commitment from local partners that we were so lucky to have in Oakville."

Since it's inception in 1974, the CBAC has worked to make partnerships between business and the arts more effective by providing leadership in advocacy, research, promotion and education. ArtsVe$t is the first program by which CBAC has provided direct funding to the arts.