Thank you very much.
I'd like to begin with a bit of personal background so you know who I am. I'm the director of the Aga Khan Museum. I've been the director since 2012. The museum opened in 2014, so as a museum we've been open for the last three and a half years.
My own personal background is that I'm actually a Greek archeologist. I've been an academic for most of my life. I was born in America. I did most of my professional career in the U.K. before coming out to Canada six years ago to take up this post, so my experience with museums is from the U.S., from the U.K. quite extensively, and of course now in coming into Canada as a new entrant into this wonderful ecosystem of culture.
The Aga Khan Museum is one of the newest museums in the country. It was opened in 2014, and its specialty is the art and culture of the Muslim world, which is a very unusual specialty. It is actually the only museum of Islamic art in all of North America. It was founded by His Highness the Aga Khan because he wanted to create a cultural institution that allowed people to understand the diversity of the arts and cultures of the Muslim world across 1,400 years. As a museum, we're here not simply to showcase wonderful works of art: in particular, we are here in order to tell people stories about the multitude of cultures that make up the Muslim world and how it connects the cultures that surround it across time and space.
As well, we are a very unusual museum because we're not simply about objects and visual arts. We're also about the performing arts. As a museum, we're a hybrid between objects and performances. The reason for this is very simple. When it comes to the arts, you cannot draw a distinction between what is visual and what is living. You have to look at all of it if you want to talk about the cultures from which these objects and these musical and literary forms come.
As a museum, we have I think many challenges in common with the museums you'll face across this country. Of course, being a new museum, we have the important challenge of trying to establish our identity in terms of what makes this museum unique among its peer groups, but also what makes it unique among international institutions.
Despite the fact that we're a museum based in Toronto, Canada, we're a museum that very much views itself as an international museum. Most of our exhibitions are drawn from objects and expertise from throughout the world. I'm very pleased to say that when it comes to the 15 exhibitions we've created, 10 of them, I believe, have been created with expertise coming from outside the country into Canada. I think this is very important, because when you're looking at an area that is absolutely new, you have to be part of a wider international community.
Establishing our identity has been one of the challenges. Also, of course, one of the major challenges has been marketing our museum and making those marketing dollars work. I think the one thing you'll hear time and time again from all smaller cultural institutions is that funding remains one of our greatest challenges.
Even though this museum was founded by and created with a gift that His Highness made to create the building and to gift the collections to the museum, we actually do fight for every single penny that we spend as part of our budget. The capital costs may have been part of a gift, but our operating costs really do come out of our fundraising efforts. Only 25% of our operating income comes from earned income, while 75% comes from fundraising and donations. I'm pleased to say that we've been able to achieve quite a good target for fundraising over these years, but when it comes to sustaining institutions of this nature, funding remains the primary challenge that we all face. I think this is emblematic of smaller museums throughout Canada.
Look at the smaller museums in this country. There are so many of them. When you count up the number of provincial, federal, and municipal major museums, there's just a handful. There are perhaps 20 that you would name within that colossal category of big museums. When it comes to smaller museums, there are hundreds, if not thousands. I believe I saw a statistic that talked about 2,000 smaller museums in this country.
What's important about these museums is that they actually do provide diversity, ideas, and stories and they also represent the many communities of which they are a part or in which they are situated.
All of these smaller institutions face an uphill battle when it comes to funding their operating expenses. Most of these museums receive very little government funding to operate, yet they have a very important role to play in the ecosystem of heritage and the arts within this country. I think one of the great things about these smaller museums is that you actually find that some great ideas are coming out of these smaller museums because you have this diversity and the multiplicity of talents. I look at my peer group within Toronto—the Textile Museum, the Gardiner Museum, the Bata Shoe Museum. These museums punch above their weight, in terms of coming up with ideas, but also drawing in international talent and ideas and collections into this country. They reflect their specialties and again, I think that one thing you will find with these smaller museums is that they are specialist museums. However, due to their specialities, they have focus and that focus is wonderful because, not only do they have focus in their subject matter, they also have focus within their communities since they do represent communities and they have wonderful followings. I think that the health of the smaller museum sector in this country is wonderful, in the sense that the ideas are there, but funding remains the biggest challenge.
As museums, I've mentioned that 75% of our operating budget comes from grants and from fundraising, with less than 1% of this coming from government funding of all sorts. Part of this is that, as a museum, we have to be in existence for either three or five years to even apply for government funding, in many cases. We're just starting to cross that threshold. One of the things I will say about government funding is that it does provide very important funds for museums to create these programs. The funding that is actually put forward is very much appreciated. As a criticism of government funding for smaller museums, it tends to be very much based on projects and the short term. When you have project-based and short-term funding, while it may help to enable these programs to take place, the one downside is that they do not help with the planning of a museum in the long term. It's short term. It's not growing a museum in its capacity or helping it fund itself in a long-term horizon.
If creativity is to be fostered, if it's to be nurtured in this country, and if good practice is to be perpetuated and even innovated, I do believe that the funding model for smaller museums and institutions needs to be looked at very hard. We need to look at ways in which funding can actually enable these museums to look at the long term and not simply at the project-based short term. I think that is going to be one of the biggest challenges as you look at how smaller museums work with government funding in the future.
Thank you very much.