We really do participate with the community. Apart from partnering with our colleague museums and community museums—of which there are a handful, and they are very good—we also partner with the businesses and the business improvement areas that sponsor us. The Downtown Rideau BIA sponsors our Winterlude ice sculpture. The ByWard Market BIA helps us with our joint programming and marketing. The Kichesippi Beer Co. sponsors our receptions and, because we're going to be 100 next year, is doing a 100th anniversary Bytown Museum beer next year.
We partner with The Haunted Walk for their school programming in haunted walks. We partner with the Department of Canadian Heritage and deliver their youth program called “Click!”. We partner with Ottawa Tourism, and they bring down their familiarization tours, etc. The fam tours are the tour operator tours.
As I said, we have a community gallery. One of my pride and joys is our youth council for those 16 to 23. Forget writing essays—we let them do blogs and podcasts. We let them redesign an exhibition in the museum. In actual fact, we've made presentations at national and international conferences about it because everybody is asking how we pull it off, but we're also going to be in the Ontario government's new history textbook as an example of how to engage youth.