Kingston is about to embark on a cultural planning process. I hope that by the end of it, we can find a way to explode the current way of thinking in this city about the value of our cultural assets and specifically, the exponentially concentrated value of small-group, experimental, even non-commercial, not-for-profit, practitioners. These groups attract the “creative class”. I’ll bet that if one did a survey of what was most important to an innovative, visionary, creative individual considering where to make their home, one would find that places like The Sleepless Goat, The Artel, Modern Fuel, The Skeleton Park Music Festival, reelout etc., along with vibrant neighbourhoods, greenspace and other such community features are more of a draw than some of the larger, more expensive cultural projects/organizations that receive the lion’s share of municipal funding. We should consider how we can cultivate the grounds for many more small, robust, experimental grassroots cultural organizations and start-ups…I’m not sure if other people share this way of thinking but if we want to truly blossom as a destination for the ‘knowledge economy’, we need to think creatively about how we invest our municipal dollars to get the highest cultural return. Separately, while it is a great start that the city is finally funding the arts with annual operating and project grants, looking at the numbers, only 54% of applications were funded, and far less than 50% of the monies requested was actually granted. This demonstrates that the available pool of money is not sufficient to sustain even the organizations that already exist, never mind demonstrate capacity to provide resources for continued growth in the number and diversity of arts organizations locally.
That’s just my two cents :)….
Talk soon,
Lenny