Absolutely, and thank you for giving me the time to do that.
Number three is really about empowering arts organizations to reimagine what it means to be sustainable. As you can imagine, in coming to Calgary from the United States, the funding model is completely different. In the United States, we are at risk at being perhaps overly dependent on the private sector, whereas here the perception might be that we are overly dependent on the public sector. One of the things that we want to come out of this is to be able to diversify our revenue streams as much as possible, so that when pandemics do occur, the rug is not pulled out from under us.
One of the ways in which Arts Commons is attempting to tackle this is by the development of what we're calling the Arts Commons transformation project, which is an expansion and modernization campaign that consists of building a new extension to our facility and almost doubling our square footage, because our facility has been operating at capacity literally since the year we opened in 1985.
It would do a couple of different things. It would allow us to monetize and commercialize activities in a way that then allows us to bring that money back into our local economy and back into our local residential companies. As you know very well, Arts Commons, much like Lincoln Center, is based on this idea of an ecosystem, where we need to be talking about economies of scale and we need to be talking about shared resources.
A performing arts centre like Arts Commons allows organizations such as Theatre Calgary and the Calgary Philharmonic and so many other community-based companies to access a world-class venue and tap into audiences at a fraction of the cost of what it would normally be, but that business model requires Arts Commons to sustain that practice. The ability to increase our square footage allows us to generate more commercially based earned revenue to then pour back into our ecosystem.
The only last thing I'll say on it is that this has been a project that has been in the works for many years, but there has been a unique opportunity, given the investment in infrastructure, to revisit this right now. In the near term, this would create over 3,000 jobs in construction and would add hundreds of millions of dollars to Alberta's GDP. In a time when the arts sector is normally seen as hemorrhaging money, this is an opportunity for the arts sector to give back in times of crisis.
We have launched the RFP for design consultants around the world and locally, and what we are hearing is that people are chomping at the bit to work on this, because it would be the world's first performing arts centre to be designed since COVID hit. It would be a manifestation of what we are learning in terms of HVAC, security and health, and in terms of how people navigate through space and what it means to have a flexible performance and cultural centre.
It's a great opportunity. As for the timing, it's one of the silver linings that has come out of this for us. In the long run, it will lessen our dependency on government funding, because we will have the ability to monetize and activate this new building and our increased square footage in brand new ways.