A couple of days ago, Lisa and I were mapping North Ontario, looking for community art centres. Lisa found a great one up in Atikokan, near Quetico Provincial Park several hundred miles between Thunderbay and Fort Francis. I called up the founder Jennifer Garret of: Atikokan Intergenerational Centre for Arts and Alternatives (www.atikokanarts.ca) and we got into a long conversation about community art centres surviving funding cut-backs. They had just lost a major government arts funding grant, and were facing closure. This thriving community art centre is a vital community hub for hundreds in a town that has been largely stripped of employment due to industry mining and pulp mill closures. The art centre is mostly run through volunteer efforts. I led Jennifer to the Imagine Canada website that is a wonderful fundraising resource, among other things. Not-for-profits and registered charities from across Canada can access the Canadian Directory to Foundations and Corporations. (Go to www.imaginecanada.ca then to the “Engage” section, then “Programs and Services” and you’ll find: “ The Canadian Directory to Foundations & Corporations is Canada’s largest and most accurate bilingual fundraising database. We have more than 3,100 foundation listings, more than 150 corporations and over 90,000 indexed grants” (quoted from their website).
The price to access this database for a year is about $350. I’d say it’s worth every penny. I found with fundraising for ArtHeart and Home for Creative Opportunity, our government funding was always limited. We barely ever raised more 9% of our annual revenue from Government grants. We learned quickly to diversify, and raise donations from the private sector: corporations, foundations, individuals and through events.
This directory has a “search” component so that you can type in key words like: arts, north, education, social justice, poverty, children, etc. and find foundations in your region supportive of your work/cause. I love that I can access this directory from Toronto, Jennifer could access it from Atikokan, and my friends from St. John’s Newfoundland can also use it to find fundraising sources for their community arts projects/orgs.
