I think there needs to be agile funding to support extenuating circumstances. There is obviously operating funding at the Canada Council for the Arts, but it comes up only every four years, I believe, and it was also suspended due to the pandemic. That program is in a particularly challenging moment and we won't be able to access it for a number of years, so how do we capitalize upon this momentum?
One of the things that I think could be most helpful for organizations is support for development: support to empower us to raise our own funds. We're really an example of this. We have had around maybe $100,000 in grant support to get to what we've done, and maybe $130,000 over the last year and a half. We are looking to end this with a $1.3-million operating budget.
If we had a development staff member specifically focused on raising funds, it wouldn't be an afterthought to everything else that a lean organization has to do to try to keep raising money, and we wouldn't have to keep coming back to the federal government for everything.