Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for the invitation to attend, and specifically Mr. Shields, who invited us here today.
We're happy to be here. Rosebud Centre of the Arts is located in a small hamlet of just 92 people, northeast of Calgary on the way to Drumheller. It's home to Rosebud School of the Arts, a post-secondary arts training institution and Rosebud Theatre, a professional live theatre. We have additional dining services for patrons who attend our theatre performances to enjoy a meal before attending the show.
Our scope of operations in a typical year involves around $3.5 million, and of that $3.5 million, roughly $2.5 million would come from theatre revenue through ticket sales and dining services.
Our professional productions run from March to December. We have as many as five in a year, along with two student productions, and we attract up to 35,000 or sometimes 40,000 people to our hamlet of 100 people. They are predominantly from the Calgary area, but people from all regions of Alberta do travel to our community. We also have accommodations, gift shops, a museum, galleries and resident artists.
We have a staff of about 20 people, but we employ up to 150 people part-time, again predominantly residents from the region.
We're the largest employer in Rosebud and one of the largest in Wheatland County. We're a socio-economic driver in the area. The work we do generates business for businesses and employers around us. We're part of the provincial arts and education tourism fabric, partnering with Travel Alberta, other post-secondary institutions and other arts organizations in Alberta.
Uniquely, we're a guild school. We follow a mentorship and apprentice educational model, which is unique in Canada. We receive no provincial funding for our education, and our public funding for the arts is less than 2% on an annual basis.
Bearing all of this in mind, you can understand how COVID really hit us hard, as it did, I'm sure, for many other arts organizations that you've heard from. Our theatre operations were closed entirely in 2020. We were attempting to run another show here for Christmas, but just today that show too was suspended due to COVID conditions in Alberta.
We're experiencing an over $2-million loss in revenue from ticket sales. More specifically, we're experiencing over 30,000 patrons not coming to our community. That has ripple effects outwards on other businesses and entrepreneurs in our region in terms of the accommodations, the retail sector and all the employment that goes along with the work that we do.
We are thankful for the CEWS program, which did support our operations to a degree this year, and I'll have more to say about that in a moment. However, by and large, we have been unable to access the emergency funding or regular funding that's been made available through the Canada Council for the Arts or Canadian Heritage.
In particular, one of the biggest challenges for arts organizations has been the administration side of things to manage through COVID. Certainly on the arts side, there's been less work for artists, but on the administration side, the amount of work has been greatly increased in terms of budgeting, managing human resources and dealing with communications and stakeholders.
One of the gaps in the federal aid programs is that unless you are already registered with the Canada Council for the Arts and recognized, you do not have access to the emergency funding provided by Canadian Heritage, and the CEWS program is insufficient to support arts organizations when there is no corresponding revenue coming in to help offset costs.
We look forward to discussing more of these issues with you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.