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Arts & Culture: Vision and Value through New Collaborations

Great Toronto Summit 2011 Breakout Session

The Challenge: The Greater Toronto region is home to approximately 8,500 arts and culture organizations, employing over 150,000 people and generating around $9B for the region’s GDP.1 While the region is already world-renowned for its many arts and culture activities, momentum now exists to build on the strengths of the sector and increase the profile of arts and culture both among the region’s population and globally. To achieve this, increased coordination, collaboration, and cooperation among arts and culture organizations and players in other sectors is required. To do this, a framework to allow sector participants to address the sector’s issues and challenges relating to arts and culture in a unified way is needed.

Find the backgrounder for Arts & Culture: Vision and Value through New Collaborations here. (Short version also available.)

Arts and Culture Roundtable proceedings document available here.

Moderator: Garvia Bailey, CBC

Speakers

  • Jeff Melanson, Executive Director & Co-CEO, National Ballet School
  • Rahul K. Bhardwaj, President & CEO, Toronto Community Foundation
  • Che Kothari, Executive Director, Manifesto, and Co-Creative Director, HighTop
  • Francine Perinet, Director, Varley Art Gallery of Markham



Questions for Discussion:

  1. How should the vision for the Toronto region’s arts and culture sector be defined? (see Appendix A for initial perspectives)
  2. Which of the three opportunities for action should be pursued? Or should a different action be considered?
  3. What are the two most important opportunities/issues to catalyze cooperation among sector participants? Is the required change incremental or dramatic?
  4. The arts and culture sector in Toronto is comprised of a diverse set of individual organizations, associations and stakeholders. They are large and small, non-profit and for-profit, comprised of many different disciplines and are geographically diverse. Given this complexity:
    • How can the dramatically different perspectives and models of the region’s arts and culture community be unified?
    • How should collaboration and cooperation be governed? Is a looser, more grass-roots structure favoured? Or is a more formal, centralized structure needed?
    • Can an existing organization coordinate and drive the effort? Or is a new body required?
  5. How should any proposed initiative be funded?