CharityVillage NewsWeek Archives: Funder Focus: Anne Bertrand and the New Brunswick Foundation for the Arts

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Funder Focus: Anne Bertrand and the New Brunswick Foundation for the Arts
By Elisa Birnbaum
December 3, 2007
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the New Brunswick Foundation for the Arts, a public charitable foundation created to foster the artistic and cultural life of New Brunswick. With its primary focus on the management of an arts and heritage stabilization program, the foundation is committed to helping the province’s arts and heritage institutions move beyond current challenges toward long-term sustainability. CharityVillage spoke with foundation chair, Anne Bertrand, about the challenges facing New Brunswick's arts and culture sector, the foundation’s goals for the future, and why the stabilization program is so vital right now.
CharityVillage: What’s the history behind the foundation and its founding mission?
Anne Bertrand: It was created about 15 years ago in order to, in a general sense, encourage and promote the artistic and cultural life of New Brunswick. It was a fairly simple approach. And, as a foundation, its intention was to go out, get some money and manage funds that would allow it to fulfill that purpose.
However, at first the board was somewhat melded with another arts board and it never got its infrastructure in place. It continued along, established some prizes and had some well-intended volunteers, but it didn’t have funds to create a presence and build from that so it was kind of dormant. It was then resurrected in 2002, and with an amendment to its incorporating status in 2003, it brought in a stabilization program.
The program set the stage for pursuing funds for the purpose of promoting the artistic and cultural life in New Brunswick, but also to award grants, bursaries, prizes and scholarships. It was going to go all over the place. We needed to lend assistance. We saw there was a huge need to help the artistic and cultural organizations, so the focus was placed there.
CV: What were the challenges facing the cultural and artistic sector that the foundation wanted to address?
AB: It was crumbling. We saw a huge decrease in the federal commitments to the provinces and its art and cultural sector through federal transfers. We actually had a significant drop in New Brunswick from 26 dollars per capita to six dollar per capita. So you can imagine, we had galleries, museums, theatre groups - all not-for-profit - and all trying desperately to stay alive by begging all the time just to pay rent, pay power, etc.
Meanwhile, we’re expecting the sector to spend a lot of their creative juices on giving us what we want, which is to be pleasantly diverted from our stressful lives with wonderful works of art and plays and exhibits. But what we were finding out was that it wasn’t happening. They couldn’t spend enough time on those goals because they were so desperately worried about their crumbling infrastructure. And their managers were leaving because they could get paid jobs elsewhere. It was a state of crisis.
CV: Were these challenges different than those faced in other provinces?
AB: No, these challenges were not unique to New Brunswick, but we’re such a small province and when you’re small everything happens quickly because it rises to the surface quicker than it does in larger centres. We started to sound the alarm bells right away. And the province come to the fore quickly. Because we’re small in population, it doesn’t take long for people to talk to other people and to quickly know what’s going on.
CV: How did the stabilization program become the main focus and initiative of the foundation and what was the goal in creating it?
AB: Interestingly enough, in 2002 we saw a new government come up with a policy on arts and culture and back it up with some money. They threw over half a million dollars at arts organizations and the federal government said they’d match it and they did. Then the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation said they were going to add $250,000 and told us to get some private sector money to put a stabilization program together. In fact, the governments and the Bronfman Foundation gave all this money to the NBFA and no one else. They said, “We think the NBFA should be the body to do this.” So all of this really created a need to gather a board, get offices. It was a wonderful avenue to put us back on the map, to get us back on track to do what we want.
At the end of the day, we want to help organizations move beyond the problems they faced due to the crisis of 2000. We want them to be financially sound and to sustain that financial stability and to allow them to be creative. We want to continue to preserve and encourage a wonderfully vibrant artistic and cultural life. That’s the goal.
CV: How does the program work?
AB: In order for organizations to be allowed into the program, they have to satisfy a whole group of stringent criteria. They would have had to survive the tough times and that shows us that the community is behind them, that they have dedicated volunteers, that they have some permanent staff. Then they go through an evaluation process, an assessment that identifies their strengths, weaknesses etc., and then a thorough analysis of their financial status.
When they make it through all the tests, they are then able to receive up to $100,000 in money, to help with their capital reserve and cumulated deficit elimination. But we just don’t give it to them, we stay with them for three years. We spread that money over a three-year-period during which they have to maintain that criteria, file reports, etc. We provide organizations with constant help, from sound management to consulting; we give them any kind of technical assistance they require.
CV: How does the foundation recognize the contributions of organizations to the arts?
AB: We essentially have three prizes. First, there’s the Arts Organization of the Year, in partnership with TD Bank. It’s a $3,000 award that we intend to increase next year. Second, there’s the Municipality of the Arts of the Year and, finally, through a partnership with the Jack and Nel Oudemans family, we have the Nel Oudemans scholarship prize. Nel was a textile artist and when she died, her family gave us about $14,000 of their foundation money. It’s a small scholarship in the amount of $500, awarded to a most promising second year student in the crafts or visual arts domain to encourage and promote advanced studies.
CV: What role does fundraising currently play at the foundation?

AB: In order to do what we really want to do and what our incorporating status requires us to do, we need a pile of money. We don’t have it yet because the money we do have was raised for the stabilization program. We were able to get $1.7 million, which is not a lot but a significant increase to what we did have. We do want to fundraise and get $5 million to start a major fund. Then we will get some interesting strategic partnerships with other foundations and major funders.

Hopefully people will get interested in talking about us and partner with us so that we are able to do what it is that we can do so well. I think they will be able to evaluate us from the success of the stabilization program because that, in itself, is a significant program. It’s huge and it demonstrates we were able to do something very big with very little and all that knowledge will be applied to managing funds.

CV: Talking about partners, what importance does the foundation place on establishing partnerships?
AB: I’m a fervent believer in partnerships because the buddy system works really well in all aspects of our lives. If we use the Oudemans as an example, they believed foundations were the right vehicle to advance their wishes - to encourage students of the arts to strive for excellence. The Oudemans get the recognition they so deserve and our foundation allows them to get that recognition, but the foundation also gets visibility for being able to manage someone else’s money really well. So we enhance our credibility, transparency and ethical conduct. And one of the things I intend to do is to go out and get other partnerships to really boost this prize to make it a really big one.
If I extend that to the ‘big boys’ in New Brunswick, I think the private sector has a duty to preserve and protect the artistic and cultural life in New Brunswick. Otherwise we will dry up and become a dead society. That’s been one of my big messages. And, yes, we’re starting to target partners but we don’t have any at this time, aside from TD Bank and the Oudemans. The focus now is on the stabilization program, which can give us visibility so that when I go knocking on private corporate doors, they’ll know who I am.
CV: What are the future plans of the foundation?
AB: Because the stabilization program will end in 2010, we’re doing all this formidable work to become known. Last spring, we launched a strategic planning exercise of our own so that we know what we’re going to be doing and we’ll be ready before 2010. We’re calling it the NBFA strategic plan. And we will be filing a report for our annual meeting in June 2008.
But I see our goals as limitless. I think the foundation should be propped up and secured so that it will be there forever. I want to build a significant fund and do whatever it takes so that my successors never have to fundraise again, so that they can secure partnerships and continue to dole out the monies that are required for New Brunswick’s development. I really see a future for it like any other province. I never saw us being small as an impediment. I see the foundation today as coming of age and squarely putting its two feet on the ground, in clay and cement, never to fold.
Though lawyer Anne Bertrand was initially recruited to the NBFA in 2004 to help with the stabilization program’s fundraising efforts, it didn’t take long for this dedicated and feisty leader to make her way to the organization’s top rank. With a 22-year career as a tireless litigator and adjudicator, extensive experience in community service and a fervent passion for the arts, Anne is infusing the organization and the sector with an energetic face, voice, and newfound hope moving forward. For more information about the foundation, visit: www.nbfa-fanb.ca.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance journalist, producer and communications consultant living in Toronto. She can be reached at: esbirnbaum@gmail.com.