MEDIA RELEASE: "Culture Matters" was the core message that arts community leaders agreed on at a gathering yesterday at the H.R. McMillan Space Centre's auditorium.

Arlene Goldbard gave a really important perspective on arts advocacy and a framework for policy development at the Dialogue presented by the International Centre of Art for Social Change last Sunday.

I think this would be really useful reading as we move forward and try to engage our audiences and convince politicians and decision-makers.

We need to tell stories – we need to use our artistry and our creativity to engage our audiences to articulate why arts and culture matter.

This is my blow-by-blow of the morning panel discussion: New Directions for Advancing the Arts in BC: A Go Forward Strategy, moderated by Howard Jang, Executive Director of the Arts Club Theatre. I made every effort to duplicate the panelists’ comments exactly; however, I must still apologize to anyone who feels that they or their position was misrepresented.

Howard began the forum by quoting from Diane Ragsdale’s keynote address, in which she described a town hall meeting at a recent National Performing Arts Convention in Denver, Colorado, where the following issue was identified as the #1 challenge:

The Alliance for Arts & Culture is proud to unveil our brand new blog! Special thanks to the hardworking guys at Hired Guns Creative for integrating it so seamlessly (and beautifully) into our site. We hope you will make this blog a regular stop in your digital day. We will posting regularly on a variety of different topics, and updating it very often with breaking new of concern to the artistic community here in Vancouver and abroad.

So the Standing Committee on Finance has recommended that all arts funding by the province be restored to the levels of 2008/09. Good. Now what? Rest assured that this is significant, but it is not over. Minister Krueger “gets it”, but is that enough? Nobody knows if Minister Coleman “gets it” since he refuses to meet with anyone. Funny, I thought that was his job. 

I thought the Premier “got it”, and I hope these funding cuts are recognized as the big mistake that they are and he proves me right.

This is my overview of the session Arts Advocacy: Building Bridges to Strengthen our Sector, which took place at the Vancouver Arts Summit in the afternoon of June 26. Again, apologies to anyone I misrepresented.

This session was moderated by the Alliance's Amir Ali Alibhai, who wanted to come away with new ideas by the end of the session. He started out by posing a question that had been nagging at him lately. Often, he said, at events like the Summit there is a lot of discussion about the "arts community" - but what is this really? Is there an arts community? Do we work together enough, communicate enough, and gather enough to even call ourselves a community?

The panel consisted of Alan Franey from the Vancouver International Film Festival, Vivienne Taylor from Fashion High, Paul Sontz from Tourism Vancouver,  Jean-François Packwood from Conseil culturel et artistique francophone de la C.-B., Janet Leduc from the Heritage Vancouver Society and Elka Yarlowe and Music BC. Everyone introduced themselves and discussed the advocacy challenges for their individual disciplines. Unsurprisingly, issues and challenges were very similar across the disciplines - all the more reason that we should be working more collaboratively. But more on that later.