Art and culture leaders from all over beautiful British Columbia will soon be flocking to Tofino and Ucluelet shores to participate in the 2017 Arts BC conference from April 27-30.
Hosted by the Pacific Rim Arts Society (PRAS), the three-day event will take place at the Ucluelet Community Centre, Black Rock Oceanfront Resort and the Best Western Tin Wis in Tofino.
For the first time, Arts BC has added four free workshop sessions to the program, which are open to the public. The new element aims to engage the local art community and leaders of non-profits.
The free workshops will be held in the Black Rock Ballroom on Friday, April 28 and Saturday, April 29.
“It’s all about community cultural development. That’s what Arts BC is all about; providing professional development,” said conference chair and PRAS executive director Jacqueline Chamberland.
“Why not extend some of the opportunity for the different non-profit organizations? And the non-profit organizations don’t necessarily have to be related to the arts,” she said.
“There will be BC Gaming offering workshops on the grants and I know for a fact that lots of organizations will want to go to that one. It could be sports, it could be anything.”
On the Friday, there will be an early morning Stone Soup Networking workshop led by BC Cultural Days manager Nazanin Shoja followed by a Catalogue Raisonné workshop.
“This one in particular will interest the artists. It’s on how to catalogue your art,” said Chamberland, who celebrates her seventh year with PRAS this April 21st.
Saturday dives into more of the business side of things with an Insurance for not-for-profits workshop and the BC Community Gaming Grant session.
Chamberland hopes locals will use these workshops as an opportunity to connect with other groups in the arts community.
“We have to work together in collaboration with different organizations. We shouldn’t look at having more than one organization as a threat. We should see it as one complementing the other, you know.”
“We should be working together not in competition with each other. The more collaboration there is between organizations the more we are going to accomplish,” she said.
Anyone interested in attending one of the free workshops just needs to send an email to pacificrimarts@gmail.com.
“But if they decide at the last minute we’ll take them at the door too provided it’s not too crowded,” she notes.
For more details on the annual Arts BC conference visit: http://artsbc.org/conference/.
