Artscape Launches New Charitable Foundation
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In the winter of 2006, Artscape received charitable status for Artscape Foundation from Canada Revenue Agency. Since approval for establishing the Foundation was received, Artscape has been abuzz with activity and excitement about the new edition to the Artscape group of companies and the extension of Artscape's charitable activities.
While a number of plans and strategies have been hammered out, the purpose of the Foundation is quite simple. Artscape Foundation will support the charitable work of Artscape including its programming and educational activities and portions of capital projects that serve a charitable purpose.
The Foundation's board will be chaired by Glen Murray, acclaimed urbanist and former mayor of Winnipeg. On an operational level, the Foundation will be led by Dawood Khan, Executive Director. Both Glen and Dawood are passionate about Artscape and its mission and are dedicated to developing the resources necessary to sustain Artscape's role as a practitioner, educator and facilitator in the emerging field of creative community building.
The first order of business for the Foundation will be to raise the balance of funds necessary for the completion of Green Arts Barns. While Artscape has successfully raised a large portion of the total construction budget of the Barns, the Foundation's task is to engage the private sector and individual stakeholders. A Green Arts Barns Campaign Cabinet is being formed to assist with this process.
In the years ahead, the Foundation will provide much needed fuel to support the growth and development of Artscape and the explosion of interest in its work. Its creation is a major step forward in ensuring long-term organizational health and the realization of its full potential.
What is the Green Arts Barns?
The Green Arts Barns involves the redevelopment of the historic TTC streetcar repair facility in Toronto’s St. Clair and Bathurst neighbourhood. The Green Arts Barns is a community-driven project led by Artscape in association with The Stop Community Food Centre and in close partnership with the City of Toronto.
The Green Arts Barns will be a multi-faceted arts and environmental convergence centre, a home for experimentation and innovation where new ideas flourish. It is a place where people from all walks of life will come together to make their community a better place to live, work and play.
The Barns will provide below market rate live/ work spaces to artists, below market office and programming spaces to non-profit arts and environmental organizations as well as house an environmental education centre and greenhouse. The Barns will also feature a covered street where festivals, celebrations and public performances will be held.
The Green Arts Barns embraces environmentally sustainable design by responding imaginatively to the issues of brownfield redevelopment, water and energy conservation, and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The Green Arts Barns will be the first designated heritage site in Toronto to seek LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Canada certification.
Green Arts Barns Forges Ahead
If you have visited the site recently, you’ll know that serious work has begun on the Green Arts Barns. Environmental consultants Marshall Macklin Monoghan have been hired by the City of Toronto to manage soil remediation at the site which is being carried out by the Cannington Group. While this is the first that local area residents will have seen of construction crews and heavy equipment, the truth is that Artscape and its partners have been working diligently behind the scenes on this project and much progress has been made on it.
The City of Toronto and Artscape have signed a lease for the space, construction designs are almost complete and a building permit will be submitted by Artscape in early June. As well, all agreements and documents relating to the affordable housing component of the project have been completed. Over the last several months, a significant environmental testing and design work has been undertaken to support the numerous state-of-the-art environmental features of the project.
Artscape expects to break ground on the project in late summer of 2006. While in the beginning there were some who believed that the project could never be done, the Green Arts Barns is testimony to the power of ideas and the tenacity of hundreds of individuals and organizations who have helped bring them to life.
Green Arts Barns Campaign News
70% of Funds Raised!
The Green Arts Barns campaign is building momentum with an incredible $9.5 million having been raised for the project! This remarkable achievement is a result of the dedication and financial support of many people and organizations who have partnered with Artscape to realize the vision of the Green Arts Barns. Support for the Barns has been committed by corporations, charitable foundations, community associations, not-forprofit organizations and the support of all three levels of government. But as the official groundbreaking in September of 2006 nears, more money is needed to restore this heritage site and realize its full potential as an innovative arts and environmental centre.
How You Can Help
From the beginning, the Green Arts Barns has been a community-driven project, integrating the ideas, creativity, time and expertise of the community members. Now, more than ever, the support and generosity of the community is needed to assure the success of this historic community project. By filling out the Donor Reply Card below and submitting it with your donation to Artscape, you will bring this project one step closer to completion. We are on the cusp of reaching our $13.7 million goal and your dedication to improving quality of life in your community will be an inspiration to others.
Leading the Way
The George Cedric Metcalf Foundation was one of the first to partner with Artscape in support of the Green Arts Barns with a grant of $500,000. These monies are designated for use in the Green Barn and The Stop Community Food Centre. Pro Bono Law creates opportunities for lawyers to provide free legal services to those of limited means. In 2003, Pro Bono Law brokered a relationship between Artscape and McCarthy Tétrault LLP, the law firm that has been managing the complex legal issues related to the project. To date, their contribution is valued at more than $75,000. Also, TD Bank Financial Group has chosen to support the Green Barn component of the Green Arts Barns with a pledge of $25,000 through the TD Friends of the Environment.
Celebrating City of Toronto Leadership
The Green Arts Barns would not have been possible without the leadership and support of the staff and politicians at the City of Toronto. With the help of the City of Toronto, The Stop Community Food Centre and other countless partners committed to the vision of the Green Arts Barns, the city will become a more creative, livable, clean, green and environmentally sustainable place.
From Studio Provider to Creative Community Builder
Describing Artscape’s 20 year evolutionary path in an elevator conversation
This year, Artscape will serve and engage tens of thousands of people in Toronto, across Canada and internationally through more than 25 projects, programs, services and engagements. The range and scope of our work has grown so dramatically over the last couple of years, it is sometimes challenging for many of our diverse stakeholders to grasp exactly what Artscape is and does. Ideally, communications experts tell us, we should be able to tell our story in the time it takes to have an elevator conversation.
In short, Artscape has evolved from a below market rate studio provider into a creative community builder. We work as a practitioner, educator and facilitator in this emerging field of practice. Our work also spans a variety of spatial scales including creative buildings, districts/clusters and cities/regions. While the central focus of our efforts is in Toronto, our education, planning and consulting work extends across Canada and internationally and is among the fastest growing aspects of what we do.
Now if the above elevator description seems a little dry and technical, consider for a minute our new mission statement: “Artscape unlocks the creative potential of people and places”. At Artscape, we believe that creativity is probably the most misunderstood and underappreciated resource going. In most of the communities we work in, there is a wealth of creative people, organizations, buildings and businesses. But usually these players and places are pushed to the margins where they are disconnected from each other and the marketplace. And, rarely do we find communities that are working strategically to build or more importantly to sustain their creative milieu.
When Artscape started 20 years ago, we thought our job was about bricks and mortar. We have learned over 20 years that building a creative community is not simply about throwing a bunch of artists together in a building and waiting for the magic to happen. There are many other factors and dimensions involved and it’s clear that soft infrastructure, people, networks, leadership and psychology are as important as physical space.
Artscape’s evolution to a creative community builder has been shaped by the development of a much more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of creative places. Affecting change in something as complex as a creative milieu requires multi-dimensional strategies and approaches. To do this effectively means playing a diverse range of roles such as those indicated in the diagram below.
We believe it is important to be proactive and strategic in building creative places because there are so many factors out there that, as Jane Jacobs used to say, squelch creativity. Combating the “geography of nowhere” means overcoming poverty of aspiration and aversion to risk while counteracting the destabilizing impact of the real estate market on artists and the creative sector. The complexity of this may be a bit mind-boggling but we can assure you that cities and communities around the globe are waking up to the need to foster sustainable creative advantage. The key challenge they face is how to translate all the recent talk about creativity and innovation as drivers of growth and change in the new economy into projects and strategies that create vibrant, dynamic, authentic and economically thriving places. The multi-faceted nature of Artscape’s work makes it not only a one-of-a-kind organization in the world but one that is uniquely qualified to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the creative age. Our ambition is to be a global leader in building, animating, connecting, sustaining and understanding creative communities. While all of this may be a little long-winded for a regular elevator conversation, we’ve been testing the waters in freight elevators and the message seems to be getting through.
Artscape Programs & Services Update
Artscape, in association with the Creative City Network, hosts the Creative Community Building Workshop June 8 - 9, 200 6 in Toronto Mark your calendar for this year ’s Queen Wes t Art Crawl happening September 15 – 17, 2006!
The Retreat Centre provides new meeting and event facility rentals to non-profit, charitable, education & government groups along with private companies on Toronto Island
Artscape Lodge launches summer/fall seasonal rate package for artists
In The Development Pipeline
In recent years, the redevelopment of many of Toronto’s major cultural institutions has heralded Toronto’s cultural renaissance. Artscape helps reinforce this momentum with a second wave of Toronto-area projects that will enhance the City’s lived-cultural experience. Artscape’s development pipeline currently includes the following major creative community projects at a combined capital cost of more than $85 million.
IDEA Village
IDEA Village is a plan to re-develop the land and buildings at Artscape’s headquarters at 60 Atlantic Avenue in Liberty Village into a multitenant creative sector convergence centre. In 2005, Artscape partnered with TEDCO and the Liberty Village BIA to hire Architects Alliance and Metropolitan Knowledge International to develop a conceptual model and business case for the project.
Givins/Shaw School
Artscape has entered into discussions with the Toronto District School Board and the arts community about the re-use of this surplus school located on Shaw Street north of Queen Street West. Significant interest has been generated by arts organizations to become tenants in this 70,000 square foot building if a viable redevelopment scenario can be worked out.
Re-Mix Project
Artscape is currently looking for a home for a new project called Re-Mix, an initiative that provides arts-based training and mentorship for at-risk youth. The program will be modeled on a non-profit arts organization named IC Visions that has successfully operated a similar program for five years in South Etobicoke. Re-Mix is expected to be operational by the fall of 2006.
Hummingbird Centre
Artscape has been selected as the preferred proponent to partner with Castlepoint Realty Partners and the Hummingbird Centre for the Performing Arts in providing 40 affordable housing units in the new 47-storey high rise development slated for the site designed by Daniel Libeskind.
Community Connections
Artscape is currently working with the City of Toronto and the Regent Park Neighbourhood Initiative to develop a feasibility study for a new cultural centre in Regent Park, as well as assisting in the development of plans for a cultural precinct on the site of the Guild Inn in south Scarborough.
In 2005, Artscape launched a consulting practice in order to share its expertise on multitenant centres, creative community building and creative clusters and districts with other communities. Clients of Artscape’s planning and consulting services include: Governors’ Island Preservation and Education Corporation (New York), Central Salford Urban Regeneration Corporation (Manchester), Downtown Village Development Corporation (Sudbury), Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, City of Kingston, Peterborough Arts Umbrella, Kincore Holdings (Kingston), City of London, City of Kitchener, City of Brampton, Haliburton County, St. Catharines and Area Arts Council and Toronto World Expo Corporation.
Art Transcends Borders
In the spring of 2006, Artscape welcomed the 11 international artists selected to participate in the seventh term of the Gibraltar Point International Artist Residency Program. The residency program is designed to cultivate a global dialogue among artists and further their professional development, providing them with a subsidized opportunity to live and work at the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Toronto Island for one month. The competition occurs on an annual basis and is open to Canadian and international artists from a variety of disciplines who are engaged in the research or creation of new work.
“It was one of the best summers of my life – intense, adventurous and with ongoing connections with collabor a tors. Artscape is filling such a necessary gap in the needs of the artists of today.” Elizabeth Langley, Dancer and Choreographer, from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2005 Term Alumnus
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