New Applicants — Professional Arts Organizations Operating Grant Program: Info Session Video

Melissa Tuplin: So good afternoon and welcome to this online information session for the new applicants to the Professional Arts Organizations Operating Grant Program. My name is Melissa Tuplin, and I’m the Director of Community Investment and Impact here at Calgary Arts Development, and I am joined today by members of the Community Investment team. As you’ve just heard, we will be recording this information session today, and then the recording of the presentation will be published online, so we recommend turning your cameras off and muting your microphones for the presentation portion. We will not record the Q&A section, and if we do happen to, we’ll edit it out and it won’t be published online.

So because we’re not going to be sharing the question and answer as part of the recording, please hold all of your questions until the end just to make it easier for us to do the edit. But do feel free to capture your questions in the chat as they come up and the team will help me address them at the end. I’ll also let you know that I am reading directly off a script right now to ensure that our interpretation for ASL and the transcription process is clear.

So today we will speak to information that we have already shared in the program guidelines, and will provide some context about the changes to the operating grant program for 2026 and focus specifically on giving instructions and advice on how to build your application. We’re not going to touch deeply on every single section of the guidelines, so whether you have joined us here live or are now watching the recording, please seek to take some time to read through the documents in full before applying and do reach out early if you have questions or need any support.

I can’t actually see my chat right now, so if they haven’t already, I’ll ask that one of my team members please paste the link to the guidelines in the chat.

So while I am very pleased to be presenting this information today, your contacts going forward for your application to this program will be members of my Community Investment team. Their contact information is on the screen here. If you have questions about the program itself, eligibility or getting support or feedback on your application, please contact either the program specialists, the Community Investment Specialists, Perpetual Atife and Areum Kim. If you have technical questions about the online grant portal for your account or any other technical matters, please reach out to our Systems Lead, Van Chu, or our Community Investment Assistant, Gladys. Myself and Community Investment Manager Allen Rosales, who’s also joined us today, are working closely on the program, and we will be in attendance at assessment and during funding decision-making. And my team, of course, will be in on application questions and concerns as needed. We’re very happy to support you throughout this process, and we simply ask that you reach out as early as possible.

Before we proceed any further, I want to take this time to acknowledge the land on which we have gathered to host this information session, and on which we continue to do our work. We acknowledge that the land we gather on, Mohkinsstsis, is the ancestral territory of the Siksikaitsitapi — the Blackfoot people — comprising the Siksika, Kainai and Piikani Nations, as well as Treaty 7 signatories, the Tsuut’ina Nation and the Îyârhe Nakoda Bearspaw, Chiniki and Goodstoney First Nations. Today this land is home to the Otipemisiwak Métis Government Districts 5 and 6 as well as many First Nations and Inuit from across Turtle Island.

And we acknowledge, in the context of this program, that there has been art, music, dance and storytelling and ceremony on this land since time immemorial, and it is in the spirit of this land and its people that we do our work.

As a public funder, we have a responsibility to ensure equitable access to public funding as we envision a city where all artists have the freedom, agency and platform to share and amplify their stories, art, cultures and experiences. A city where Calgarians of all backgrounds can access, create and participate in art as part of their everyday lives.

We are dedicated to addressing and working to eliminate institutional inequity in our programs, policies and practices. My colleagues and I are accountable to ensuring that lines of communication are welcoming, clear and open, and that our application and assessment processes are fair and deeply considerate. While we have been continuing to expand and improve our processes and policies around equity, accessibility and accommodation, we still have a long way to go.

We aim to continue building relationships and learning from our communities, particularly those most directly affected, about the specific challenges that exist in granting and working to create more equitable systems for everyone.

The definitions that we’ve shared on this screen for equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility, are taken from our Strategic Framework which is called Ákáakomatapoap, and is what we use to define and guide equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility in our own work.

This Strategic Framework is the foundation on which the updated operating grant program was designed. You are all individual contributors to aspects of the strategy as applicants and grantees. I will refer to the framework and to these definitions as we go through the program information. I’m wondering if a member of my team can share a link to the framework in the chat, and I also recommend taking a read through it as you develop your application.

Further to that, we understand that our programs and processes create barriers to access for many artists and organizations who want to apply. In recognition of these barriers, our Applicant Support & Accessibility Policy is available for those who may need support from program staff or financial assistance to access support from someone outside of Calgary Arts Development.

So this could include support for any part of the granting process, whether that be understanding our programs and who is eligible and deciding whether you want to apply or not, creating or submitting a grant application, or support after receiving a grant, such as understanding your agreement, sharing project updates or submitting reporting.

So some examples of accommodations are: translation of written materials into other languages, transcription of verbal meetings, or audio and video recordings into a written document, language interpretation for phone or video meetings. We can even support you in submitting video or audio applications. So if you would prefer to answer application questions verbally, you can submit an audio or video recording of yourself, or our staff could help record your responses using an online platform, and we’ll also provide support and accommodations for general grant writing assistance.

So we’ll work one on one with applicants and develop accommodations through conversation and check-ins. Our team can assist you over the phone, in person or online, and help is available for applicants even if they choose not to apply for the program. So please contact the team if you need any help or have questions about accessibility and the supports available.

We can also provide information about other community resources for established, emerging, newcomer, refugee and immigrant artists.

So, we have been undergoing a review and analysis of our operating grant program for many years, analyzing historical data, reviewing community feedback from applicants, grantees and assessors, and undertaking research about what other funders do. We heard clearly that operating grants continue to be a critical source of revenue for arts organizations, and that increasing financial precarity and unpredictable markets are pressurizing the nonprofit sector.

We heard that the voluntary sector is facing challenges recruiting and retaining volunteers and staff. We heard that growing awareness and focus on reconciliation, equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility is welcomed and valued by our community but are sometimes accompanied by a lack of clarity from funders about what is expected of organizations and how it impacts their funding and their work.

We know that having the same amount of application and reporting requirements for all organizations, regardless of size and grant amount, does not take into account unique factors like organizational structure and capacity. And we also know that the types of challenges and pressures that organizations face, as well as their goals and aspirations, vary based on their organizational structure, mandate and total scale, and that historical access to funding amounts often depended more on when an organization happened to enter the program, and how much money was available at the time, than their impact in community.

So the changes that we’ve made to this program are in response to what we’ve heard and are an opportunity for us to more meaningfully assess organizations based on their mandate and purpose, set criteria and requirements that are relevant and appropriate to organizations’ contexts, and create more capacity for our own staff to provide applicant support.

The most significant change we have made is to formally split the program into separate programs for community arts organizations and professional arts organizations. So historically, the program has been assessed through program streams of similar disciplines and then through similar budget sizes, but now splitting the program entirely allows us to develop guidelines, criteria and reporting requirements that are unique to each, and then run them on offset timelines in alternate years.

We currently fund almost 200 organizations in the program, and that is no longer possible for us to assess in a single cycle with our current staffing levels. Before I go any further, I want to state really, really clearly that there is no hierarchy or value difference between this program for professional arts organizations and the program for community arts organizations. Each program, including the length of the funding cycle, is designed with the intention to receive and assess application material within the needs and context of the organizations in each program. I’ll speak more to how those funding decisions are made later on in the session.

So the Operating Grant for Community Arts Organizations will be committed on a two-year cycle for funding years 2026 and 2027 that will be assessed this fall, and the Professional Arts Organizations Program will be committed on a four-year cycle for 2027 to 2030. The decision to push assessment of the full program for professional arts organizations to the fall of next year, 2026, is because Calgary Arts Development’s own four-year City of Calgary budget will not be confirmed until late next year, and we felt it was most appropriate to align those four-year cycles directly with each other.

So for this program, our decision to add a one-year program for new applicants who are professional arts organizations is because earlier this year, we indicated to the sector that new applicants would be eligible to apply to the operating grant this fall, and we knew that you were planning on applying, so this one-year program that I’m speaking about today is intended to bridge that gap, and to begin to build a relationship between CADA and your organization, and then also to begin to build your capacity to apply for the four-year program when it opens next fall.

The full guidelines, criteria and requirements for the four-year program for professional arts organizations is still under design, and I want to be transparent that the criteria may look quite different than what you will be applying to this year, and that is why this is a one-year non-renewable program. The other major change to the operating grant is the introduction of standing assessment committees for the programs. We’re really excited about this opportunity to begin introducing assessors to your organizations as they will spend time developing a deep understanding of your work with the same assessors, reviewing applications and reports in overlapping terms, ensuring that historical context and knowledge will be retained.

Assessors will be expected to experience your work so that their knowledge of your organization is not just conceptual, so reading your application and reviewing a few minutes of support materials. Assessment committees are always made up of community members and arts professionals, but it really is not possible for us to recruit a small committee that already knows every organization in a stream, so the standing committee allows us to build and retain awareness of the organizations we fund, helping staff better monitor impact.

So, new applicants or organizations who did not receive an operating grant from us in 2025 will need to submit a Letter of Intent for this program by October 1st. You can find this by opening the online grant platform and selecting the Letter of Intent from Open Opportunities.

You must be screened by our program staff through this process as it is how we will determine if you’re eligible for our grant programs and to determine if your organization fits best in the Community Arts Organizations Program or this New Applicants — Professional Arts Organizations One-Year Program. So the sooner you submit your Letter of Intent, the sooner you’ll receive access to the application form, as we are now beginning to review them as they come in.

The full application deadline is October 22nd, that is for both the Community Arts Organizations and the Professional Arts Organizations One-Year Program. You’ll be notified of results by mid-December, just before the winter break, and funds will be released beginning in February 2026, as that is when we receive our funds from the City of Calgary.

Again, it is very important to understand and highlight that this is a one-year program that is non-renewable. If you are successful in receiving this one-year grant, you will still be considered a new applicant to the four-year program when you apply to it next fall. So success in this one-year program does not guarantee automatic success in the four-year program that launches next year for 2027 to 2030.

I mentioned that the work to redesign the full program criteria and guidelines for the four-year program for Professional Arts Organizations is still underway, and this is the main reason that this one-year program is non-renewable. This year, you will be assessed on criteria that is more similar to the program for Community Arts Organizations for the one-year cycle, and the four-year program that will launch next year for Professional Arts Organizations will come with unique criteria, data collection requirements and increased application and reporting requirements.

With that said, the intention of this one-year program, like I said, really is to extend the opportunity to new organizations to begin to understand the types of information that we are looking for, to get to know our staff and our programs, and have that year to really begin to build some capacity in advance of applying again next fall.

Our definition for Professional Arts Organizations is based on organizational purpose and mandate. We know that many organizations have multifaceted mandates that might touch aspects of both the community and professional arts organizations definitions, so we’re really looking for what you would consider to be your primary purpose. And this is really important, as it will determine the context and focus of how assessors will be considering your organization’s work.

So Professional Arts Organizations are non-profit arts organizations whose primary purpose is to create access to professional artistic work with artistic mandates that may include the creation, production or presentation of professional artistic work, service support, or education for professional artists or professional arts organizations, and/or a focus on advancing professional artistic practice in our communities. A requirement of this program, for both eligibility and as a condition of funding, is that to be considered a professional arts organization, you must pay or intend to pay professional artist fees according to your relevant sector fee schedules or industry standards. This is new to CADA and will be an assessment criteria, and if organizations do not currently meet that requirement, you must be able to demonstrate a clear pathway to being able to do so. Our commitment to the living and working conditions of arts professionals is a core distinction between the programs for Community Arts Organizations and Professional Arts Organizations, and I do want to be clear that this is not to say that Community Arts Organizations do not pay artists or are off the hook for appropriate compensation. They absolutely do. And compensation structure is part of the assessment for those organizations. This requirement is really in recognition that to be considered a professional organization whose mandate is to advance professional practice, that expectation of appropriate compensation that raises the quality of life for professional artists is simply a minimum requirement.

In addition to the mandate eligibility for the program, all organizations applying for operating funding from CADA must meet our full eligibility requirements. So this slide contains a shortened list than what is in the guidelines, and I share it because I want to point out a couple of changes that we have made, So new this year is that we have added a minimum years of operation requirement of two or more years. You do not have to have been registered as a non-profit for two years but need to have been operating like a non-profit for that time. If you have only recently registered, please reach out to program staff to discuss before submitting your Letter of Intent. In all likelihood, we’ll have you submit your Letter of Intent and will follow up with you if we have any questions that will help us understand your organization’s structure.

And I also want to point out that we have added a requirement for 50 per cent of your organization’s board members to be living in Alberta. So again, if you do not currently meet that requirement, please reach out to our program staff member to discuss and we’ll chat about what that could look like for you.

I’ll share this screen that includes some information about ineligible organizations. If you have any questions about this list, please reach out to us to discuss.

So, excuse me. The operating grant program provides virtually unrestricted operating funds on an annual basis. We allocate funding on a calendar funding year, but you may use them in any fiscal year according to your own revenue recognition policies. There is a list of ineligible activities and expenses in the program guidelines, and you are also being held to funding conditions that will be laid out in an investment agreement, which outlines how public funding cannot be used for illegal or fraudulent activity, acts of hate or political advocacy, among other things.

And I mentioned the standing committees earlier. The full Assessor Terms of Reference are published on our site, and I recommend that you do review them. Committees will be confirmed in overlapping terms to ensure that there is a mix of new perspectives and assessors who have discussed your organization before in each application cycle. This first term will obviously be the beginning of the cycle, and the assessors who review the New Applicants — Professional Arts Organizations One-Year Program will then be moved into the committees for the four-year professional arts organizations program. So they will then spend the next two to three years after reading applications to experience the work of grantees. And a benefit of this one-year program is that then assessors will already be familiar with your organization if you decide to apply for the four-year program next fall.

So in that sense, we do recommend that new applicants apply to this one-year program to begin building awareness of your organization with assessors. If you are interested in becoming an assessor yourself for this or any of our other programs, I will share some information at the end about how to nominate yourself.

Assessors will review each application and score it on their own, and then they meet as a committee to discuss each application with staff. Staff will take the assessors’ scores, recommendations and comments and make the final funding decision, which will include our own considerations, including how organizations align with their peer organizations and other contextual information about the makeup of the funding portfolio and the arts ecosystem. While assessors’ primary source for considerations will be the content of your application material, please be aware that any publicly available information about your organization, such as your web content or any information on your social accounts, as well as their own experiences of your working community, is all valid information that they can bring into the assessment room, so it will benefit your application then to direct their attention to support material or information that exists on your website or your social accounts, as that can provide really valuable information and context.

I, as I say, I’m not going to go through every single point in the application checklist, so please review the guidelines for all of the application requirements and reach out to the program staff with questions.

In this next section, I’m going to speak in detail about how the program criteria line up with the application checklist and give some guidance on how to respond.

So, as mentioned, as you are all new applicants to the program, you will find the Letter of Intent in the Open Opportunities section. So this will ask you a few short questions about your organizational mandate, the overall size of your operations, which we will use to determine if you are eligible, and if you are eligible, whether you will apply to the Community Arts Organizations Program or the Professional Arts Organizations New Applicants Program.

We are going to be working to turn these letters of intent around and notify you within a couple of business days so that we can give you access to the application as soon as possible. Letters of intent submitted on the deadline of October 1st will be reviewed by October 3rd, and so as the deadline for the full application is October 22nd, the earlier you submit that Letter of Intent, the better.

The eight program criteria that you will be scored on have been generally aligned to the four directions of our Strategic Framework. So while we do not expect your own strategy or priorities to directly align with CADA’s, we are taking the opportunity to be more clear about how we see the individual contributions of each of our grantees helping us move our strategy and our vision for a creative, connected Calgary forward.

Each of the criteria statements line up directly with a section of the application to be clear about where you will put the information to be scored. With that said, assessors will also be asked to consider your application holistically to ensure that you do not need to repeat yourself in multiple sections if there are aspects of your work that respond to multiple criteria statements.

So for each of the eight statements, assessors will score them on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree. Staff then, behind the scenes, assign those statements a numerical score, which will be consistent, to come up with a total maximum score of 100 per cent. And the reason we do this is because we have found that agree and disagree statements are much more effective for assessors to be able to articulate their reasoning than assigning a numerical scale to the statement.

So the first set of criteria statements are about how your organization contributes to an inclusive and diverse arts ecosystem in Calgary. In our four strategic directions, this is how your organization contributes to purpose. These statements and the accompanying application questions are about how your organization’s individual contributions help create a healthy arts ecosystem and share leadership for creating an inclusive and diverse arts sector.

So when we talk about a diverse arts ecosystem in Calgary, we do not mean that every organization must serve everyone. The diversity of the ecosystem is because each organization advances their own mandate and serves their own community, and the diverse and inclusive ecosystem is the sum of its parts. So it’s CADA’s responsibility to ensure that, as a whole, our funding portfolio is representing and serving all Calgarians, and that we are encouraging the organizations we fund to consider how their own work contributes to that.

Diverse and inclusive ecosystems require accessible and equitable practices in the sector, which means considering how you are addressing the barriers to access that exist for the people you work with and serve.

So, the first written section of the application generally aligns with the first criteria statement. The organization clearly describes and understands its role in the arts ecosystem, including those it considers its artistic peers.

So this section asks you to speak about the role you play in the ecosystem, how your artistic mandate contributes to the sector, and who your artistic peers are. There is a question later on in the application where you can speak in more detail about your programming, so we recommend focusing your response here on your artistic mandate and purpose.

When we think about ecosystems, we think about interconnectedness and how the system works together, which is why we ask about artistic peers — your peers may be other organizations who work locally, nationally or internationally. This isn’t about pitting organizations against each other, and we are not asking you to make the case for why you are better than other organizations. We are looking for organizations to understand how they work alongside their peers in the sector, to create a solid and sustainable ecosystem.

So perhaps you work with a specific community or focus on a specific artistic genre. Perhaps your organization is a feeder organization for another part of the sector. Be specific about how your work contributes to Calgary. And again, we do not expect or want organizations to be everything to everyone.

This section generally aligns with the second criteria statement. The organization clearly describes and understands the barriers for audiences, participants, staff or volunteers to access its work, and its plan to address and remove those barriers. So, in answering this question, I recommend that you refer again to the definitions of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility that I shared at the beginning of this session from our Strategic Framework.

In our grant programs, centring equity in the arts sector means actively working to address the barriers to access that prevent people from feeling welcome, included or participating in your work. How do you consider accessibility and inclusion when you are designing your programs? Are you working to uncover barriers that you might not yet be aware of? This is a section that we recommend being very, very specific. This is not a test where we’re asking you to list every single systemic or historic barrier that could possibly exist for your organization. Share two or three specific examples that you’re actively working on. So maybe you’ve developed a venue accessibility policy. Maybe you provide language interpretation at your events. Maybe you’ve realized that there is a cultural barrier that makes it hard for some people to feel like they can attend your work, and you want to address that.

The second set of criteria statements are about how your organization improves the quality of life for the people you work with. So from our four strategic directions, this is how your organization contributes to people, and there are two criteria statements here, the first and the second. In our framework, people means nurturing the capacity of arts organizations and artists to flourish in the city. For the organizations we fund, this means that grantees are ensuring that they are working with people in safe, equitable, respectful ways.

So again, this is an area to be specific. This list of examples is not a list of requirements that your organization must have, but having some protocols or policies in place does speak to your organizational governance and how your organization seeks to be in relationship with the people you work with. So these do not need to be formal parts of your board manual, these could be informal practices or ways of being that are embedded in your work. How do you apply these practices and stay accountable to them? So again, give two or three specific examples.

If you’re able to, the support materials are a great place to share links or copies of the documents that you mentioned. We’re not looking for you to describe in detail every aspect of your health and safety manual. So if you have support material or can direct assessors’ attention to it, that will save some duplication of effort.

And this question aligns with that criteria statement. The organization clearly describes its compensation structure for staff and artists and is complying with relevant standard professional artist fee schedules. If the organization is not yet able to meet professional fee schedules, they have a plan to do so within the next three years.

So I spoke about this a lot earlier in the session when I was talking about the definition of Professional Arts Organizations for the program. In this section, please speak directly to how your compensation strategy is designed, and if your organization undertakes arts programming that necessitates artist fee payment, please refer specifically to the industry fee schedule or standard that you follow. So this could be CARFAC for visual arts, CADA/West for dance, or equity agreements for theatre or music. If your artistic discipline does not have a formally recognized fee schedule, then we ask that you just speak in detail about how you calculate your artist fees.

If you’re not currently in a position to pay professional artist fees and are instead paying artist honoraria, that does not automatically exclude you from this program. We understand that for young arts organizations, getting access to operating funds can often be the critical turning point in beginning to meet professional artist fee schedules. So even though this is a one-year program, we will ask you to outline your plan to pay professional artist fees within three years. And I do want to note that, while we know that access to operational funding is a factor in this, it’s not the only factor, so be sure to reflect on your other planning and fund development activities outside of public funding in this section.

This set of criteria statements are about how your organization creates opportunities for Calgarians to connect, participate, create and relate to the arts. In our four strategic directions, this is how your organization contributes to community. In this section you will speak specifically about the arts programming you present and share with Calgarians and the communities of artists, participants and audiences you serve, as well as your impact on those communities.

So similar to the first section where you spoke about the role that you play in the arts ecosystem, focus here specifically on your unique contributions. Because this application is for the 2026 funding year, focus on your upcoming programming plans, because you’ll be able to use the programming form and support material to demonstrate your past programming.

So this question is where you’ll address both the fifth and sixth criteria statement. We didn’t separate the criteria into two questions because, what is the programming, who is it for and how will it impact them are really deeply linked. You’ve already told us what your role is in the arts ecosystem, and so this is where you’ll tell us how you achieve and sustain that role.

And you’re going to get so tired of me saying this. Be specific. Please don’t tell us that your work is for all Calgarians. As you described in the Barriers to Access section, we know that you are working really hard to make all Calgarians feel welcome and invited into your work, but we know that all Calgarians are not attending it. So who is? What are the qualities and characteristics of the communities who are participating in your work? Why are they leaning into it? Maybe it’s the youth musicians and their parents. I don’t know, maybe it’s emerging artists in a particular discipline. How are they experiencing a better life in Calgary because of your work?

A common misconception about public funding programs, or at least about Calgary Arts Development, I should only speak about ourselves, is that we’re always looking for growth, and I really want to emphasize that for us, the impact of your working community at the relationship level will always be of more value than just the number of activities and audience members. So remember that it’s CADA’s job, it’s my job, to tell the story of the arts sector at the aggregate, and we do it. We tell City Council every single year about the tens of thousands of events and the millions of audience members. I don’t want you to think that we’re always going to ask you to tell us about more, I really want you to tell us why and how. So what is the experience of belonging that you create through programming in your community?

And the final set of criteria statements are about how your organization uses your resources wisely. So in our four strategic directions, this is how your organization contributes to resources. For the organizations that we fund, this section is about leveraging the funds you receive from the city through CADA into strong planning, good resource management and thoughtful operations. And you know what I’m going to say. Be specific. So in almost all of these sections in this application, steward three really, really specific thoughtful examples, and each section will go much further in giving staff and assessors a good understanding of how your organization operates and thinks than a long essay that that doesn’t provide much depth. So here assessors will want you to speak to both your aspirations and the challenges.

When we are making funding decisions in the operating program, we’re looking holistically at an organization, which doesn’t just mean how the funds will be used towards all of the successful programs that you run. It also means considering how the funds will be used to address problems and create a more sustainable organization that can continue making good use of those funds into the future.

So we’re all deeply aware of the challenges that exist in the sector. Here’s a good place to share about the specific barriers that are coming up for your organizations to meet your goals.

And again, in terms of goals and aspirations, remember that we’re not always looking for growth. This could be about deepening your work in some area or increasing the quality of a program or stabilizing another. A goal could also mean letting go of something that isn’t serving you or considering a new business model or partnership. And we know that as new applicants to the operating grant program, even seeking access to and receiving operating funding may, in and of itself, be a goal. And if that is the case, then I would really encourage you to speak about how you and your staff and your board are kind of considering what next? What will this operating funding open up for you? How will it be used to advance your impacting community? Is this a next step in your organizational growth? That kind of specificity will be really helpful.

And then this section aligned to the final criteria statement eight. The organization does not present significant risk to its financial viability or unexplained disruption of activities or impact to community in the past, current or upcoming fiscal years. This criteria will be assessed through your financial statements and financial form, but the governance and financial management structures that underpin the actual financials are also an important part of the assessment. So again, feel free to use support material to reference longer documents. You know, understanding that this is a one-year commitment for the operating grant, we’re not necessarily looking at long-term financial risk, so I would really encourage you to use this section to think about your overall financial mechanisms and governance models around finance and planning structures.

In addition to these criteria response sections, there is one final optional field called Open Space, and so if there is anything that you weren’t able to share in any of the written criteria sections that you want to highlight for the committee, the Open Space section is available to include that. It is entirely optional, you are not going to be penalized if you don’t write anything into it, that’s totally fine. Do not write things just for the sake of having this section filled out.

In addition to the written sections, you will be asked to submit financial statements and two forms. I highly encourage you to attend one of our Open Offices, or to reach out to the Community Investment specialists for an overview of how to complete the financial and programming forms. We will be checking the forms for accuracy, and if you were successful in the program, you will be submitting similar forms as part of your reporting, so now is a great time to learn how to complete them properly. All three columns in the financial form are required and so please take cautious note of the years. The forms are for the fiscal year beginning in 2023, 2024 and 2025, not ending.

And so at this point, it means you’ll be submitting actual data for the fiscal year beginning in 2023, because that year will be complete now. Likely mostly all actual data for fiscal year beginning in 2024, unless your fiscal year begins really late in the calendar year, and likely projections for fiscal year beginning in 2025. If you are a CADAC client, you can submit your CADAC form. You do not have to become a CADAC member to apply to our programs. If you don’t know what CADAC is, don’t worry, because that probably means you don’t have a CADAC number. This is an external program that is used by the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for their data collection. Our own forms are designed, the financial form is designed to look similar to it.

Financial statements should be for your most recently completed fiscal year. We do not currently have minimum audit requirements in this program, but unaudited statements must be signed by two board members that weren’t involved in their creation, and we require both your statement of operations and your balance sheet.

And the same deal is for your programming form as the financial form. So the three fiscal years are for fiscal year beginning in 2023, 2024 and 2025. If you don’t have specific programming details for the year beginning in 2025, that’s fine, you can just enter a placeholder. So for example, if you are an organization that gives a concert series, but you haven’t finished programming the artists for that series, that’s totally okay. You can say concert number one, concert number two, concert number three for that projection year. We just want to see how many activities in general that you’re planning.

The programming form has a section, for the first section, fiscal year beginning in 2023, for submitting actual attendance numbers. Feel free to enter them if you have them; it’s not a required section. That field is mostly for our reporting, but I will say as a new applicant, if you do have actual attendance numbers for the activities that have been completed, it’s a helpful tool for assessors to see the kind of scope and scale of your programming.

That programming form also has a section for each program, where you can select from a drop-down, specific communities served, and I want to acknowledge that in that drop-down we use the language of LGBTQ, Aboriginal and multicultural, and we acknowledge that that language does not align with the language that is currently being used to reference these communities. As we have collected data through this section for over a decade and track it on a comparative basis, it requires a really significant data cleaning process for us to make changes to that language, and we are planning this as part of the program evaluation and review process, and expect to see a change to this in future years as we develop our new reporting requirements.

Additionally, that specific Community Served section in the programming forms is intended for programs that are specifically designed for and with the community that you’re selecting. So, for example, if members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community attended your event, and your event was not specifically designed for, marketed to and actively intended to serve the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, do not select it from the drop-down in this section. We love your audience members, but that’s passive participation, and that’s not what we’re intending to collect in that section for a specific community survey.

If you’re successful in the program, you will be asked to submit a statistical form as part of your reporting. We are not asking for that statistical form in the application process this year, because we find it’s more useful for reporting than for assessors. That form collects information on the number of public events, number of audiences and participants, number of artists hired, and so on, so if you don’t currently collect and maintain statistical data on your programming, you will need to make a plan to begin doing so for 2026 if you’re successful in this program. And so if you are interested in seeing what that form looks like to get a sense of what you might need to start gathering, please let us know and we can send you a copy of the one from this year. A new version will be created for your reporting year, for the correct fiscal years.

We’re getting close. Just a few more slides. Calgary Arts Development has identified a couple of other additional considerations that directly relate to our Commitment to Equity on behalf of the City of Calgary. The first consideration is that the organization is consistently led by, works with and serves an equity-deserving community as defined by our listed equity priority groups of Indigenous, Black and persons of colour, D/deaf persons, persons with disabilities, persons living with mental illness and 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals.

The additional consideration for organizations led by, with, and for equity priority groups is tied directly to CADA’s definition of equity in our Strategic Framework. So this acknowledges that there continue to be disparities and systemic barriers for individuals and communities who are members of these groups to access public funding and philanthropic support, and the purpose of the priority area bonus is to recognize organizations whose leadership, program design and mandate are specifically and actively centred in the lived experience of the specific equity-deserving community they are serving.

So organizations with a commitment to equity who are doing work with equity-deserving communities, and their programs are not led by and designed by members of those communities, will also speak to and be recognized for that important work through the eight criteria but will not be considered for the additional points. We’re not asking organizations to share personal identifying information of their staff in order to be considered, and we trust that organizations will be able to speak authentically to their work.

The second consideration is that the organization consistently and regularly offers arts programming outside of the inner city and downtown, in wards where lower amounts of annual arts activity occur. There is a map linked in the guidelines that shows which wards will be considered. This consideration acknowledges the incredible work that’s been done to develop Calgary’s arts activity and vibrancy in the inner city and downtown core, but recognizes that there are many areas of the city that have fewer activities, and we’re hearing from Calgarians and councillors the desire to access arts experiences in their wards as well.

I also want to kind of note the use of the word consistently in both of these. These considerations are intended to recognize intentional and active work, so this is regular, active intentional work outside of the downtown. This is not intended to push organizations to add one or two activities in an outer ward in a single year, so assessors will be looking at both your past and upcoming programming. There is no additional section to speak to or make a case for either of these considerations. If you feel your organization fits into one of them, you may use the Open Space section to highlight it, but staff and assessors will be using the information already provided across the application to assess these considerations.

Assessors will rate each consideration on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree. A rating of strongly agree in both considerations will receive five additional percentage points, with the number of points scaling down if one consideration is rated higher, highly, or if the average rating is lower. In the spirit of transparency and clarity, we have shared some general guidance on how funding decisions will be made for this program. So, for new applicants, organizations that receive a score below 65 per cent total will not be successful in receiving an operating grant for the 2026 year. This does not mean that organizations scoring above 65 per cent will automatically receive funding, and I do want to be really transparent and set some expectations to say it’s highly likely that based on total competition, higher scores will be required to receive funding, so scoring in that 65 per cent range, while they’re not going to be automatically not considered, they will be unlikely to be successful.

I shared how we’re making the funding decision before, I spoke about how to make your funding request in order to give you some sense of expectation for what you might receive that could help you come up with a funding request and approach this application process. So, again, this program intends to assess organizations on the appropriateness of their funding request and funding amount to their overall operations ecosystem context and peer organizations in the program stream. Your funding request will be rated on a scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree on the criteria statement, the funding request is clearly articulated, reasonable and appropriate to the organization’s overall revenues and expenses, and the current impact and amount of its activities in the community. This rating will not garner you any additional points, it is used by staff and assessors to set a recommendation for the final funding decision.

We have very actively made this choice because it’s important to us that applicants put the effort and work in to make a case for your funding request. I’ll be really transparent to say that organizations who request, you know, $100,000 in their first year with no articulation of why, with the hopes that you get a portion of it, will not be successful in this program. This is not the place to kind of play that game of, we’ll request this amount and we’ll probably get 50 per cent of it. We are looking very, very closely at what you request and how you articulate how you calculated it.

It is also possible for an organization to score very highly across all of the criteria, then very low on this funding request consideration if assessors feel that you have made an unreasonable or unarticulated request, and we’re going to take both into account when looking at your score and your request rating. So it’s really important to explain how you made your calculations and how the funding will positively impact your organization. So in the application, you will be asked to request a specific annual funding amount, and you’ll be asked to provide a reasoning for how you came up with that funding amount. Assessors and staff will be considering whether your request is reasonable, and that it is clearly described or calculated. Organizations may approach this in a variety of ways. While your actual operating grant is unrestricted and can be spent towards any area of your operations, there may be a specific operating expense line that you’re seeking additional funds to cover. So, for example, you want to increase pay for your artistic director. You would speak to the calculation of what that wage would be. Some organizations may want to speak to how receiving the operating grant will allow you to increase the number of rehearsal space rentals or address inflation. However you decide to calculate or come up with your funding request, be really specific about what it means for your organization.

And I’ll also state here that we’re not approaching this with the idea that we’re going to have minimum or maximum on grant amounts. That said, something that you could do is to take a bit of a scan through our operating grant results from 2024 and get a sense of where similar sized or types of organizations are currently sitting, knowing that we are generally going to be reassessing all organizations to try to come up with funding amounts that are in line with their current impact in the community, as well as the kind of peer organizations in the ecosystem.

For reporting, if you were successful, all grantees approved for funding in 2026 will begin to submit reporting for the 2026 funding year, which will be due in February 2027. If you’re successful, you’ll receive more information about how to submit that report when you sign your funding agreement. I mentioned earlier that we are continuously seeking potential assessors for our programs, and we make up peer committees through both public nominations and staff expertise. So if you or anyone you know is interested in assessing any of our programs, there is a nomination form on our website.

Please note, though, if you are interested in being an assessor for the operating grant program, you will be asked to commit to a two- or three-year term, and you will not assess your own organization. More information can be found in the Assessor Terms of Reference linked in the Guidelines.

I’m going to skip quickly to this screen, just to mention, I’m sure all of you are already signed up for our weekly newsletter, but it really is the best place to get the most up to date news and information from CADA and learn about funding opportunities, and our storytelling opportunities. I will also just share, so you can jot it down, our contact information one more time.

As I said, Perpetual and Areum will be your best contacts for questions about the program. Van and Gladys will be available to assist you with any technical questions or questions about the platform.

And now I have been talking for about an hour, so I am going to pause and drink some water, and we’re going to stop the recording, and I will open the floor to any questions. Thank you very much.