On Thursday, November 4, the Canadian Arts Coalition is leading Arts Day on Parliament Hill – a day when artists, lead volunteers and arts managers from across Canada will meet with MPs and senior officials in Ottawa to advocate for

• sustained and increased funding to the arts through the Canada Council, and
• a refreshed federal commitment to international market and audience development for Canadian arts and artists.

The Board of Directors of Orchestras Canada will take an active role in Arts Day, joining interdisciplinary arts teams to make the case for enhanced arts investment and a renewal of Canada’s long-time role in international cultural diplomacy. Our board will work with up to 80 other arts leaders and meet with at least 100 MPs over the course of the day – and it’s an exciting enterprise!

If this sounds easy and automatic, though, it’s not: an immense amount of work is going on behind the scenes at Orchestras Canada and elsewhere to make this happen. As a voluntary collaboration among a number of leading national arts service organizations, the Coalition has neither operating funding nor a staff team; accordingly, each of the Coalition’s member organizations is contributing money, time and leadership to the effort. It’s exciting and it’s vitally important.

If you’d like to learn more about the Coalition, please visit the website here.

And if you’d like to get involved in Arts Day, let Katherine Carleton at Orchestras Canada know, via email at katherine@oc.ca