Thank you, Chair Fry.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for this opportunity and for putting the arts sector's recovery front and centre.
As Chair Fry mentioned, my name is Alica. I'm the executive director at the Nia Centre for the Arts. We're a charitable organization that has a mission to support and showcase art from the Afro diaspora in supporting descendants of the African continent.
For the past 12 years, we have been offering arts-based programs and services for Black artists to help them launch their careers as well as connect to new audiences through exhibitions and community cultural events. Now, with the support of Canadian Heritage, we are transforming our 14,000-square-foot facility in Toronto into Canada's first professional multidisciplinary centre that's dedicated to Black artistic traditions, which is slated to open in the fall of this year. We started construction in October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic.
We know that arts spaces, as many of my colleagues on the call today have spoken about, are an important part of recovery, because they are places where communities come together, because they are places where we help folks to make sense of all that we've experienced over the past three years and because the centre, like many other arts organizations, will function as a creative and economic driver. As we present different disciplines, we connect young people to job opportunities, we draw audiences to new neighbourhoods and we support regional and, one day, hopefully, international tourism.
On the issue of recovery, I think, as many have stated, that the federal government has done an incredible job of pivoting and creating new and innovative programs that specifically support artists. While there have been significant investments in the arts sector, oftentimes administered through the Canada Council and Canadian Heritage, these programs have not necessarily benefited arts organizations that are in the midst of building or that started building before or during the pandemic because eligibility often requires that an organization show a drop in revenue, whereas for many arts organizations that started construction, the revenue they're worried about, like ours, is about future revenue. We're going to experience a decrease in ticket sales that is anticipated due to capacity limits, and we are going to experience less space rentals as people are not necessarily as confident about coming together and being inside the centre.
While we know that many organizations across the country are on the precipice of renovating and opening new spaces and adding to important infrastructure, we also know that the sustainability of those spaces is at risk.
The other key issue is particularly for Black arts organizations. We know that over the past year many Canadians have made donations to Black arts organizations. Research that came about last year showed that only seven cents of every philanthropic dollar was going to Black arts organizations. With that information, many Canadians made a donation, but that has increased revenue for folks in the 2020-21 year, so again, it would make us ineligible for some of the recovery programs that the government has already initiated.
The other issue is around the administration of these funding programs through organizations like the Canada Council. Nia Centre is one of the few Black arts organizations that is supported with core operating funding through the council, but historically, Black arts organizations haven't been funded through such organizations because we're not necessarily seen as traditional arts infrastructure. When we think of traditional arts and high arts, we think of opera, theatre and ballet, yet in the past decade we've seen incredible artists come out of our city and put Canada on the world map. By the way, of course, I have to mention Drake and The Weeknd.
If we're going to continue to celebrate and see Black artistic traditions push Canada out into the international sphere and push forward key artists who are putting our country on the map, we need to invest in Black arts organizations and Black artistic traditions. That's going to require us to make stronger connections between our communities and our existing arts infrastructure.
I'll leave it there and just echo the need to invite audiences to return to indoor spaces, of course, as many of my colleagues on the call have said previously.
I'm looking forward to the question period.
Thank you.