Director's Statement
Dear Members,
I am very happy to introduce the grunt gallery Legacy Fund. This permanent endowment, managed by the Vancouver Foundation, was begun using equity within our facility through a mortgage and having it matched through the Vancouver Foundation and the Endowment Incentives program of Canadian Heritage. It was started in December of 2006 and now has just shy of $400,000 invested. The interest from this endowment assures grunt's viability long into the future.
Later this year we will come again to you, our membership and supporters, to ask for your support to build on this fund. While many of you have supported us through the years by buying memberships, our fundraising products or supporting our events this will be the first time since our purchase of the space in 1995 we have come to our community for an investment in the long-term future of our organization. Back then, many of you supported us through the purchase of tiles towards our capital campaign. These tiles are still on the wall at grunt celebrating all the people who supported this campaign.
Those tiles, sold at $100 each, were an investment many of you made in our organization and an investment that continues to pay off. The space, we purchased in 1995 for $179,000, is now worth over $450,000 and continues to grow in value. The equity, while great, hasn't been the biggest advantage though. Up until this year and the beginning of the Legacy Fund our mortgage payments were a reasonable $630 a month allowing us a purpose built facility for a fraction of the cost it would be to rent it. This savings in rent has allowed us to put more money into our community in the form of wages, contracts and artist fees, to invest more resources into our programming and less into the overhead to run the facility.
These past 12 years since your investment have been fruitful years at grunt. We continued our exhibition program with greater resources, stabilized our then fragile performance program and expanded into print and digital media in a big way. As well, your investment changed the way government funders looked at us. From our permanent place in the middle of assessments of arts organizations by arts councils, we now sit at or near the top not just with local funders but nationally as well. Our focus back then as an important local institution has expanded with a strong national presence and increasingly a stronger international one.
The goal of this our inaugural Legacy Campaign (April - March 2009) will be to raise just over $500,000 and through the matching programs this will take us to over one million dollars in the endowment. With this level of investment, the interest will bring the organization $40,000 to $50,000 a year and grow by the same amount. This will allow us a new annual source of income that will continue to grow and feed our future.
So later this year when we approach you to support our campaign we ask you to think of grunt's role within contemporary art in Vancouver over the past 24 years and our potential as a force for new artists and new work long into the future. The Legacy Fund will be here permanently for you to remember in your will and other ways to support contemporary art in Vancouver. It will allow grunt to grow into the institution Vancouver will need in the future.
sincerely,
Glenn Alteen
Gallery Director