HELPING HAND
Highland Arts Theatre gets $40,000 from province.
Artistic director Wesley Colford has been vocal in his call for more public funding for the arts, specifically for his own Highland Arts Theatre.
That message may be starting to get across to government, as it was announced Monday that the theatre has received $40,000 through the province’s Summer Theatre Festival Expansion Program.
That came on the heels of an earlier $25,000 culture innovation grant it received toward a summer student program.
While the money was publicly announced Monday, it was received earlier and supported busy summer programming at the theatre, located on Bentinck Street in downtown Sydney.
“This is the reason why we were able to put forward an enormous offering this summer, it was basically a supplement for our summer festival and because of that we were able to do four of our greatest hits but also four of our most expensive shows all summer for the public, which was a tremendous smash and we’re so grateful
for that,” Colford said in an interview.
The Highland Arts Theatre is now the second-largest theatre in the province, behind Neptune in Halifax. It received 94 per cent of its $700,000 revenue in 2017 from ticket sales.
It’s been an important year for the HAT and other arts organizations in the strides that they have made in their advocacy for funding support, Colford said, although there is a long way to go.
“Hopefully it bodes very well for future development as we continue to develop that relationship,” Colford said.
The money for HAT was among a hodgepodge of provincial grants totalling more than $100,000 announced by Derek Mombourquette, Sydney Whitney-Pier Liberal MLA and Minister of Energy and Mines.
The grants ranged from a low of $2,350 for the Inverness County Centre for the Arts toward a pilot project called Envisioning the Creative Future to $50,000 for the Cape Breton Business Partnership for a pilot project addressing barriers to successful entrepreneurship for Indigenous women in Cape Breton.
Mombourquette said many of the projects supported by the grants involve trying to tackle poverty in the community. They include a project to addressing
barriers to entrepreneurship facing Indigenous women to enhancing a youth employability workshop pilot.
The MLA said it’s important that community groups know that the grants are available and that they are able to apply for them.
He said the HAT has also developed into an important anchor for downtown Sydney and a driver for the creative economy in the downtown.