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RENAISSANCE CITY: THE NEW DONOR CLASS
THEY'RE YOUNG, DIVERSE AND BRASH. AND THEY'RE THE LAST ONES WITH ANY CASH LEFT TO GIVE. BUT THEY'LL ONLY DO IT THEIR WAY
SARAH HAMPSON
Two huge inflatable male figures by artist Max Streicher hover over the dance floor at Muzik, a newly renovated party palace on Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition grounds. Hey, like oversized sex dolls!
But wait -- maybe the balloon-men installation is ironic. Below, moves a thirty- and forty-something BlackBerry-and-cleavage crowd. The men strut inflated egos: There's media-made pretty boy Ben Mulroney. And the women? Pillowy, where it counts.
Think what you want. Contemporary art is all about interpretation, getting the viewer stimulated, engaged. Which is exactly the point of this event, the Art Gallery of Ontario's second annual Massive party (ticket price: $125 per person). It's an "audience builder," according to AGO development staff -- and an integral part of the seduction of potential and future donors.
The Search for Untapped Money could be the title of the behind-the-scenes drama now going on in Toronto, as cultural institutions work to complete capital campaigns for building projects that have been underway since 2002, when the federal and provincial governments awarded $230-million a set of high-profile projects and kicked off the race for Toronto's private money. Even with the announcement in March of the provincial government's phase-two funding of $49-million over the next three years and an anticipated top-up from the federal government still to come, these institutions need to access their final millions from private pocketbooks.
The results, so far, have been fascinating from a sociological point of view. The outreach for additional, first-time donors has caused a new Canadian establishment to emerge. This new age of philanthropism confirms what has long been known in theory: that Canadian society, diverse in age and ethnicity, is changing.
Families and individuals already known for their philanthropy (think Eaton, Tanenbaum, Weston, Jackman, Ivey) -- the so-called "usual suspects" -- have come forward and exceeded expectations, partly because participation has became a status symbol. "There's a subtle twinge one gets when you see your peers make very large donations," observes Maxine Granovsky Gluskin, a director of the AGO, who has given over $3-million with her husband, money manager Ira Gluskin. "You think, hmm, I want to be part of that club."
Still, it's that big-gift group that is suffering from donor fatigue. "They're tapped out," says one expert.
"The institutions that have diversified their donor bases most are in the best shape now and will be in the future," notes Bonnie Hillman, managing director of Arts & Communications, a public-relations and consulting firm that has worked closely with some Toronto arts institutions on fundraising efforts.
Getting a younger set, the nineties money crowd, to cough up the dough is not easy. As one long-time fundraiser puts it, "Cultural institutions aren't on their radar. They want cars, houses, big jewellery. Private school for their children. If they're supporting art, they're putting it on their walls."
The Me Generation is unphilanthropic relative to their wealth, according to Hillman, who adds that after the capital campaigns are over there is still the need to build endowments to ensure long-term viability for programming. "Feasibility studies show this generation rejects their parents' value system. They want to do things their own way, and that often means not supporting the institutions their parents [supported]."
Many of the major cultural institutions are courting this Prada-clad crowd. At the ROM, there's the Young Patrons' Circle, with 210 members, whose first annual fundraising party, PROM Unchaperoned, happens April 22.
The AGO's New Founders initiative is a cleverly named program that immediately tells potential patrons they won't be sitting in a room with their mothers' friends. At the Massive party, key organizers of the event (as well as the waiters) wore wigs of fuzzy pink clown hair -- this ain't the blue-rinse set, get it? The New Founders program sought to bring in 100 new philanthropists under the age of 50, at a minimum donation of $50,000 per philanthropist. The carrot? Small dinner parties and exclusive tours of exhibitions before they open to the public. It has been a success: The AGO has 120 New Founders so far.
Ken Zuckerman, a 43-year-old commercial and residential real-estate developer who cultivates an edgy image with his long, messy hair, beard stubble, untucked shirttails and blue-tinged glasses, is a member of the AGO's new establishment. At the Massive party, he gamely participated in Pearl Van Geest's Kiss Paintings. He applied lipstick and added his kiss mark to a white canvas. Nothing stuffy about that. "I want to make a difference," he says to explain his philanthropy while wiping off his poorly applied lipstick. "But I'm not just giving money. I'm getting involved. I want to comment on what the AGO is doing."
That sentiment, the desire for interaction, for comment, is part of what the AGO has addressed in its efforts to reach out to the wider community. "We haven't been a leader in opening ourselves to other points of view and interpretation," concedes AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum. That will change with programming, he says. (Toward the goal of $254-million for its Frank Gehry-designed transformation, the AGO has so far managed to raise $183-million.)
Each institution among the Gang of Seven -- the AGO, the Royal Ontario Museum, Roy Thomson Hall, the Canadian Opera Company, the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, the Royal Conservatory of Music and the National Ballet School -- has discovered the same truth: What an institution offers determines who gives.
Across town, on the same evening as the AGO's Massive party, another celebration was taking place at the Royal Ontario Museum -- but there, the mood and the crowd were markedly different. The reception in the historic rotunda hall was filled with members of the city's Asian community, who had come to witness the official opening of the museum's Chinese galleries.
A sedate affair of scheduled speakers, along with a taste of Chinese entertainment, dancers and later, a musician playing an er-hu, an ancient Chinese instrument, it had the feel of a diplomatic cross-cultural exchange. Which, shrewdly, it was.
The ROM, more than any other cultural institution in the city, has reached into ethnic communities to help bring the museum within $42.5-million of its $244-million goal. Why? Because it is in the business of building cultural bridges. Fundraisers understood that diversity was part of the ROM mandate and that inclusion and participation in the new -- i.e. not exclusively WASP -- Canadian society was an incentive to immigrant groups.
"We are a universal museum," explains David Palmer, the president and executive director of the ROM's board of governors, the body that oversees fundraising initiatives. "We have the unique advantage of reaching out to communities and saying, 'There's a part of you inside these walls.' " The announcement, in 2003, of a $30-million donation from Chinese-Jamaican businessman Michael Lee-Chin, founder of AIC mutual funds, signalled that a new multicultural establishment was making its mark on the city.
Lee-Chin, whose name will adorn the Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystal, is a part of the ROM's New Century Founders, a group formed to recognize philanthropists who have made donations of $5-million or more.
One of the seven New Century Founders is Shreyas Ajmera, owner of Seenergy Foods, who was born in India and has lived in Canada for 30 years. Until now, he has only given money to community and religious groups -- including a Sikh temple. He was invited to become a ROM governor in 2004 and recently gave the museum $5-million. "It's the first time I've disclosed my name," he says.
The first step for the ROM in finding the city's quiet or hidden money involved the creation of a special ROM Renaissance volunteer team, an ethnically diverse war room of fundraisers, including 53 cabinet members and 14 executive members, headed up by Hilary Weston. The campaign strategy was to have members of the group identify potential donors in their respective communities.
Enter Rita Tsang, a businesswoman who had come to Toronto from Hong Kong in the seventies to be a student at the University of Toronto. After a couple of meetings, the president and CEO of Tour East Holidays signed on as a cabinet member and agreed to head up the Chinese initiative, which so far has raised in excess of $2-million among the local community.
"The fact that [the cabinet] was chaired by Hilary Weston was a big draw," Tsang says. "She is an icon. And to be working with a cabinet of such high calibre [was also an incentive]. Society is changing, and we should be part of that dynamic." Asked if her community may have felt excluded in the past, or intimidated, she replies that "it depends on the individual." That the initiative came from the ROM makes it easier for the Chinese to participate. "It means the [Chinese] community itself is not having to break the ice," Tsang explains.
Meanwhile, at the other institutions, heads of fundraising campaigns look for their own sources of donors who believe in what they are doing. As one development officer succinctly put it, "You can't make people give unless they want to."
At the Canadian Opera Company, where the capital campaign is $14-million short of its $181-million goal for the new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Wendy McDowall, head of COC fundraising efforts, says that their "new" philanthropists came from an existing database of annual subscribers and modest supporters. "They weren't the usual suspects, but rather people who stretched to make six-figure donations." Part of the challenge for the COC is that many people see opera as an acquired taste. "It's people who have educated themselves about the art form that have surfaced. They want to make this happen."
The Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art has just over $3-million to go, to reach its goal for an ongoing $20-million renovation project. The campaign has been "dogged in its approach," says Alexandra Montgomery, the Gardiner's fundraising executive director of fundraising. Up until 1996, the Gardiner was managed by the ROM. "We had never done a major gifts program." They hired an outside consultancy, Elizabeth Wilson and Associates, to discuss strategy. The result? Like the COC, they discovered that their "new" benefactors were people who had been involved with them in the past. All top three private gifts to the museum were anonymous, Montgomery adds. "That speaks to the nature of the institution. Ceramics is a private kind of passion."
Over at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Peter Simon, president, has found that education is the most effective card to play. A new breed of philanthropist grasps "that the human resource is Canada's biggest resource," he says, noting that RCM's Learning Through the Arts program is heavily involved with community schools across the country. Ian Ihnatowycz, a Ukranian-Canadian investment specialist in his early 50s, gave a first-ever donation of $5-million to the RCM. Ihnatowycz, who was once a student at the conservatory, has three children, Simon notes, and he understands the value of education.
Another important part of the RCM campaign was to target a corporate sponsor whose business vision dovetailed with RCM initiatives. That partner was Telus, which has given $10-million and has pledged to help the RCM find another $5-million through its business network. The RCM's fundraising efforts have paid off so successfully that the campaign committee has decided to complete what was going to be a two-stage project in one. "We were going to try to raise just $60-million," says Simon. "But we passed that mark a year ago." The RCM is now over $70-million toward a $95-million goal, he says.
But not all fundraising campaigns break the mould. For Canada's National Ballet School, Margaret McCain co-chairs, with her husband, Wallace, a campaign to raise $100-million. (To date, the committee has raised $89-million.) It has been challenging. "We don't have wealthy alumni and we don't have wealthy parents [of current students]," she says.
She doesn't believe she would have been able to do it without her husband's business contacts. "When all is said and done," she says, "it's still a man's world, and men give to men."