Nestled in between Annesley Hall (Victoria University at the University of Toronto) and the Lillian Massey Building sits the Gardiner Museum, one of the world’s most renowned specialty museums, a hotbed of ceramic activity, and one of Toronto’s best-known museums. With an operating budget of $4M per annum, they have fundraising down to a science. I sat down with Gardiner Museum Chief Operating Officer Lauren Gould to learn about how fundraising works at the Gardiner and what happens behind the scenes on major events like SMASH.
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| The Gardiner Museum located at 111 Queens Park, Toronto. Source. |
Lauren, thank you for agreeing to meet with me, I’m very excited to be talking about fundraising at the Gardiner. How are you today?
I’m doing well, how are you?
I’m doing well, thank you. So although many of our readers will be familiar with the Gardiner Museum, before we get into this, would you mind giving me a brief overview of what the Museum’s mission is?
Sure. It [the Museum] was founded in 1984, and it was a gift to the City, the Province, and the country from George and Helen Gardiner, who were avid ceramic collectors. We’re one of the few museums in the world that’s focused on ceramics, so one of the world’s most notable specialty museums. In terms of our mandate and mission, our mandate is to bring together people of all ages and communities through the shared values of creativity, wonder, and community that clay and ceramic traditions inspire. With that mandate we’re really trying to engage audiences with our exhibitions, our programs, classes, and also steward a significant permanent collection. We also champion emerging and established Canadian artists and their role internationally. We do a lot of innovation through our clay education programs, so that we can bring together through the experience of actually making ceramics with a deeper understanding of the art form.
So how does fundraising fit into that Gardiner picture? It takes resources to support that kind of programming.
Fundraising is vital for everything that we do. Depending on any capital or special projects that we’re doing, we raise about $2M a year, which is about half of our operating budget. We’re a bit less reliant on government support than some other institutions, so our government funding usually only forms between fifteen and twenty percent of our operating costs, whereas with a lot of arts organizations it tends to be at about fifty or sixty percent. We do have a more diverse funding base, which is a good thing. A lot of our fundraising happens through our memberships, both general memberships and Patron Circle memberships, who are people who want to have membership benefits, but also want to philanthropically support the institution and what we’re doing. Being able to tell the story of what our education programs accomplish, what exhibitions bring to the people of Toronto and beyond, those are the stories that people really respond to and then want to support.
There are so many ways for the public to support the Gardiner and its mission, two of which are the Porcelain Society and the Young Patrons Circle. Would you mind elaborating a little bit for our readers on what those two groups are and how they contribute to the community?
The Porcelain Society was developed for those who intend to make a planned gift to the Museum, if they’ve either left a bequest of funds or a bequest of objects within their will as a gift to the Gardiner. The Porcelain Society comes together at least once a year, we do a very special event for them either with one of the scholars or experts in the field that we’re bringing in for a lecture. They’re people who are very, very dear to us as an institution because they’ve made a big commitment.
The Young Patrons Circle is something I actually worked to develop at the Gardiner. When we were getting to the point where we wanted to create a Young Patrons Circle I used a lot of methods that I would have used when we were developing a new public program or outreach to a specific community. That involves going out and asking people what will work for them and what they want to see the Gardiner do, how they want to interact and have a relationship with us. In the last three years, they’ve put on their SMASH art party event, which has been wildly successful and has really been a great compliment to our other major fundraiser that happens during the year. I think what’s been special about SMASH is because we’re small, it’s easy for us to really immerse people in art at a party. When you come to the Gardiner for SMASH, it looks so different, and you’re surrounded by the art, and you’re interacting and participating with it the entire evening. You’re not just walking past something and seeing something that might be incidental to the party itself; the art really is the party for us.
How long does it take to plan an event like that? How many people have to get involved in its planning?
Well, a number of people are involved in the planning for sure. There’s usually a subcommittee of the Young Patrons Circle that gets involved in steering the event alongside staff. The special events coordinator at the Gardiner drives the process forward, they work in partnership with an art director that’s selected for the event. That art director, alongside the committee and the special events coordinator, comes up with the theme. The art director really does the outreach and selects the artists that are going to be involved and the installations. On-site, the special events coordinator is working with our marketing team, operations team, curatorial team to make sure it’s the best experience and event possible. Sponsorship obviously plays a role in that, both cash sponsorship and in-kind sponsorship. The process for a party like that usually starts a year before in terms of putting the committee together, recruiting the art director, choosing a theme, but I would say it really hits the ground running in terms of planning in January for the June event.
Fundraising, running the Museum, creating exhibitions, engaging with the Community Arts Space [a project which invites local artists to utilize space in the Gardiner to stage projects and exhibitions], it all comes together in one big, cohesive Gardiner picture. What’s your favourite thing about all of these fundraising and outreach efforts that the Gardiner does?
You know, it’s hard to choose the best night of the year. I think one of the most rewarding things is seeing the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment and pride from the team here. Our staff work incredibly hard to make sure that the Gardiner is successful, to make sure as many people engage with our great programs and exhibitions [as possible], so I think that’s probably number one for me. When I think about some of the most special nights of the year, I think of things like Empty Bowls, where potters donate bowls and chefs come in and donate their time and soup, and all the money we raise goes to Anishnawbe Health Toronto. Or when we do have the exhibition opening for the [ceramic] works that the Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic group does, which usually happens in December. Those two things are ones that say, “Okay, we’re not just a museum, stewarding a wonderful collection, putting on world-renowned exhibitions, and bringing in artists like Yoko Ono. We’re also doing things that are really impactful for the community.”
That’s really amazing. If you could narrow it down, is there anything that stands out as particularly impactful or meaningful for you individually that has been achieved at the Gardiner through fundraising since you joined?
There were a number of big fundraising successes that we’ve had, but when I started working in development here our sponsorship goals for exhibitions were extremely modest. The Gardiner was trying to raise $25 000 for presenting exhibition sponsorships, and when we invited Kent Monkman to come and do an artist intervention as one of our major exhibitions in 2015, I said, “Let’s ask TD [Canada Trust] for $100 000. We know that this exhibition is going to be expensive, this is a major show, he’s an amazing artist talking about an issue that’s so important in Canada.” We put in an ask for $100 000, received $75 000, and it was the biggest corporate exhibition sponsorship we’d ever been awarded. I think it just demonstrated to us that we could actually be what we were worth, and that just because we were small didn’t mean our ambitions had to be.
Check out some upcoming events and initiatives at the Gardiner Museum: Japan Now: Female Masters, Power and Possession: The Ethics of Collecting, Adult Classes, Drop-In Classes. Learn more at the Gardiner Museum website.
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