Login / RegisterLow ticket sales put future of Vancouver International Children's Festival in jeopardy
If ticket sales for the 2011 Vancouver International Children’s Festival don’t improve, this year will mark the festival’s last. That was the urgent warning given today at a news conference by the festival’s board chair, Tom Stulberg, and executive director, Katharine Carol.
In a plea for support, Stulberg explained that after 34 years, the festival’s mounting deficit, the result of federal and provincial funding cuts, have increased the festival’s deficit to $140,000.
“We are sitting with a cumulative loss from the previous two years of extreme government cuts, in my opinion, that is going to kill us,” said Stulberg. “Our debt is over twice our line of credit. We have enough money to produce a show this year and do a great job. But unless we sell more than the 60 percent of seats we budgeted, we won’t have enough money to meet the demands moving into the fall and spring of next year.”
In a cost-cutting measure, the festival was relocated to Granville Island this year, a move which appears to have scared off the ticket-buying public.
“As a result of our move, we are seeing lower than expected pick-up on ticket sales,” said Stulberg. “Without ticket sales we truly are doomed.”¦ So far, we’ve sold only 50 percent of our seats. We need to get that number as close to 100 percent as possible.”¦ If we can sell 100 percent of our seats we can pay off 40 percent of our debt. And that is what we need to guarantee stability and sustainability in the future.”
He added: “If we can convince 1,000 people to donate 100 each, then we’re out of the woods.”
Carol noted that the festival was only notified yesterday (May 18) that it would be receiving 50 percent of the gaming grant money it had received in previous years.
“A 50-percent loss impacts our ability to decrease our deficit, as our fundraising efforts now continue to be focused on covering our presentation expenses rather than taking care of our deficit,” she said.
“I would like to personally invite residents of the lower mainland who love this festival to come out and support us,” urged Carol. “Purchase tickets, purchase a festival site pass or make a donation. If we can sell all our tickets this year we’ll put the festival in a stronger position to deal with our deficit and continue to move forward into the future.”
She added that the number of available seats on Granville Island is half what there was at Vanier Park. “We have 50 percent less tickets to sell,” she explained. “The festival has traditionally sold around 70 to 80 percent of its tickets. So to sell 100 percent of them is not as unrealistic as it potentially sounds. ”
Festival tickets can be purchased at www.childrensfestival.ca.
What on earth does it take for our so-called Families First government to put its money where its mouth is?
When the Kelowna Women's Shelter, the Children's Festival and scores of other vital community organizations are dead or dying due to gaming cuts, but our government is spending $563 million to put a butt-ugly roof on our stadium, their priorities could not be more clear.
Please write your MLA (google MLA finder) and Christy Clark and tell them to reinstate full gaming grants and eligibility TODAY.
If the board can't make the fest affordable, members need to make tough decisions: use less international talent and rely on the abundance of amazing local performers; bring in bigger sponsors and thank them properly; or run the fest in the evenings, so that working families have a fighting chance of getting there.
While arts funding is a small part of this story, the real fest-killer is that a longtime, major Vancouver nonprofit is so completely out of touch with the families (and schools) it's supposed to serve.
My suggestion is that $10 is the absolute maximum you chould charge for a ticket - with $5 being a better goal. That's still $20 for a family to see one short performance, and is still out of reach of many Vancouver families.
If the VICF goes under, I hope it opens a space for a more financially realistic, and frankly a more fun festival to open in its place.
This verges into corruption when you take into account that what's left of the BC Gaming Funds program (started to justify massive gov't investment in gambling) has been promised to children's programs. Does VICF not fit this mandate? Are they reducing the amount of gaming funds further while expanding the number and size of casinos?
The Festival has evening shows this year check out their website - www.childrensfestival.ca
Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings
But on the other hand, any nonprofit that relies on the province for the funding to keep it alive, especially after the last two or three years of budget / gaming cuts, is naive at best. Seriously, there are no donors in this province that could be cultivated to keep the festival alive? Maybe stop writing grants you know aren't likely to be funded and start cultivating donors, or try to attract working families so they'll support the festival. After spending a fair amount of my adult life working with nonprofits in the States, I've always been amazed at how naive Canadian nonprofits are w/r/t government funding. Don't want your funding to vary according to the whims of the provincial government? Cultivate other funding sources. I find it hard to believe that donors would turn away a long-established organization targeting families.
Let’s not forget the millions being spent on that ugly roof at BC Stadium. Why is that project being privileged over the 78,000 jobs in the arts in BC, over arts and social service programs to children, youth and battered women?
Private sector funding has gone down significantly due to the economic crisis. Most BC-based corporations are more concerned with lining the pockets of their investors than in ensuring the health and growth of a civil society. There are exceptions to that rule but far too few, the exceptions being TELUS, Vancity, Coast Capital Savings and perhaps a very few others. The big banks could do much better but are all focused on Toronto where their corporate offices are located or on larger, splashier events. After all, their philanthropy has more to do with marketing that charity.
BC and Canadian arts organizations should *never* be compared to the U.S. Our tax system here does not give private sector or individual donors a very good tax break at all compared to the U.S. In the U.S., it’s dollar for dollar – here at best it’s 27%. That’s it. And it’s not as if artists and others from the charitable sector haven’t been lobbying for better tax breaks for DECADES with no concessions from either the Chretien Libs or Harpers CONS.
Also there is the problem of not many head offices of large corporations being based in Vancouver or anywhere in BC for that matter. In addition, there is not a real spirit and culture of philanthropy coming from the vast majority of those in the BC private sector. Sure there are exceptions but they are rare.
The corporate sector, with their massive tax breaks have not stepped up to the plate to fill the void. The federal and provincial governments with their patronage of the private sector, has given great privileges to those corporations. It’s not artists and those in the charitable sector that have a real sense of entitlement - it’s the directors and officers of the large corporations with their $200,000 salaries per year and their disproportional tax breaks.
Most Artistic Directors and General Managers of professional arts organizations that I know, many in their 50s and 60s, survive on incomes averaging around $30,000 or less, work 70 – 100 hours a week, no benefits, no real holidays. And we are serving a culturally divese, multi-generational community, and serving it with love and enthusiasm.
Let’s be pragmatic when we look at what has happened here. Comparisons are ridiculous in an age in which BC artists have suffered the *largest cuts of any sector and any arts community* in this country.
Your experience south of the border may suggest that there is a deep well of donors here in Vancouver for the Children's Festival. Please believe those of us who have spent decades fund-raising in the non-profit sector here--there is not.
Vancouver probably has one of the lowest head-office rates per capita in Canada. You can pretty much count the number of major head offices here on the fingers of two hands--at most. That means that support from the corporate sector is just not as robust as in other cities. It is the same with our philanthropic sector. We are a city where the usual suspects are expected to fund the VAG, the opera, the ballet, major theatre, all the small and large arts organizations, to say nothing of the health, social services, and education sectors. These stalwart supporters have been incredible, but the well is running dry. As the cuts are felt everywhere, strength is draining away from our communities.
The depth is just not there. The issue goes broader than gaming grants, but I have focused my comments there because of the shocking situation surrounding that area.
Alberta takes in slightly more revenue from gaming than we do ($1.4 billion compared with our $1.1 biillion), yet manages to provide almost 3 times as much funding to their non-profit sector than we do--some $323 million compared to our paltry $120 million. On a per capita basis, Alberta's gaming grants fund non-profits about $4 for every dollar BC does.
Alberta has honoured the traditional entitlement of non-profits to a percentage of revenues derived from the gaming sector. Alberta non-profits have a guaranteed entitlement to gaming revenues (around 24%), while the BC government basically raids funds from the sector to fund its own vanity projects, like a retractable roof on BC Place Stadium.
There is much more to be said here about the federal and BC Arts Council situation. The bottom line is that the BC government has fallen for the tax trap--the notion that taxes must be endlessly cut. This leaves them no alternative but to become reliant on gaming revenues for basic services. It strains public policy by making the government a gambling pusher who bullies the smaller non-profit sector out of its lunch money.
It is imperative that the public push back hard on this disastrous policy.
If the Festival is unsustainable it should die and someone who can make a viable go of it will come along with a better plan to make it work.