Provincial arts group boosting culture right here

ArtsVest offering up $50,000 in grant money

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Jim Algie

Council for Business and the Arts president Billie Bridgman hopes to boost small-town culture across Canada with a pilot project in Owen Sound designed to help local arts organizations find new business investment.

The council’s move from big cities to regional centres in Ontario through its ArtsVest program has paid off already in places such as Oakville, Peterborough and Prince Edward County. Bridgman figures it’s a good model for the rest of the country and has begun lobbying federal officials for money to help extend the concept.

In Owen Sound, ArtsVest has $50,000 for potential matching grants to 11 projects. There’s a new stage for the Celtic Society’s annual autumn festival, a poet laureate for the Owen Sound and North Grey Union Public Library and new exhibits and education programs at the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery. To collect council funds, local arts agencies must find business partners to chip in matching dollars.

The 32-year-old Toronto-based council was started by the Royal Bank of Canada, Great West Life, London Life and Canada Life to help boost corporate support for the arts. The agency remains involved with such large arts-granting companies, but they tend to support national-scale organizations.

Bridgman, who lives near Durham, wants to diversify and build regional arts investment.

“We still work with the large organizations but I think that there’s a great deal of potential for local business to work with local culture to the tremendous benefit of both,” Bridgman said in a recent interview.

A classical singer by training, she’s also former artistic director of Comus Music Theatre and was an early executive of the Toronto Arts Council’s studio development company, Artscape, which manages a growing portfolio of affordable working and living spaces for artists in Toronto. She has also worked as an Internet technology developer for the Bank of Montreal, an alpaca rancher and an arts fundraiser.

Owen Sound is among 10 centres picked for the $650,000 ArtsVest pilot project funded by grants from the Trillium Foundation and Ontario Ministry of Culture in a bid to get arts organizations to find new ways to involve business in their activities.

It could involve exposure for employees or the use of art in retail spaces to attract attention. ArtsVest is also about adjusting the approach of arts groups to the search for financial partnerships.

“It’s not about ‘Give me a cheque,’” Bridgman said. “This is about what are your business objectives? . . . once the arts groups get this, they see themselves as active components and valued assets of the community. It’s not elitist, it’s not begging, which a lot of us have felt for many years.”

Owen Sound is well known for cultural activity, Bridgman said, citing organizations such as Owen Sound Little Theatre, Georgian Bay Symphony and the city-owned Thomson gallery.

The region is also home to an unusually large number of visual artists.

“The critical mass of artists and arts organizations is extremely high in Owen Sound and it has a long history of art. The organizations are well established and that tells us that there is a cultural community here, it is stable and that it also has a basis of support or it wouldn’t be here. Owen Sound was a logical choice,” Bridgman said.

Cultural investment is an important part of economic development in communities where manufacturing jobs have contracted or vanished.

“We know that manufacturing is leaving or dying,” Bridgman said.

“The jobs of the future will not be on the line, they will not be in big warehouses. The jobs of the future will be intellectually based. People will work from home, they’ll be culturally-driven. It’s aesthetics, design — those are the things that we have to capture if we’re going to stay a competitive nation.”