Culture is Critical.

Dear Friends, Family, Colleagues, Community Members:

Arts Organizations are used to austerity measures, sacrifice, and diversifying revenue streams. It’s the model we run our companies on.

We work out of a basement office with a staff of four - two of whom are full time. In the last year, we’ve brought meaningful, innovative projects as close to home as Clayton Park (a dance/theatre show about wealth inequality) and Sipekne’katik First Nation (a Mi’kmaw adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest). We’ve toured as far west as Vancouver, and internationally to the North West of England where we presented a groundbreaking, large-scale international co-production (working alongside acclaimed artists and organizations in the UK).

We’ve worked with communities across the province replanting coastal seagrass, creating permanent community art installations. We’ve taught workshops, mentored emerging artists and interns, provided professional development opportunities for university students and community members, and developed and presented an original show highlighting the incredible geology of Nova Scotia (in collaboration with the Fundy Geological Museum).

We’ve performed concerts, and continued to host and share a podcast we created with the Ecology Action Centre, featuring esteemed guests like David Suzuki and Elizabeth May.

We’ve employed dozens of artists. From the hyper-local, to the international, all on a budget that was already shoestring. There was no fat to cut, just a lot of determination and creative energy in a time of rising costs and growing uncertainty…and now this.

The proposed cuts to arts funding, Indigenous services, programs for African Nova Scotians, museums, victims of abuse, transportation for students (the list goes on and on), are devastating, and have the potential to have deleterious ripple effects for years to come.

We are a vibrant, diverse, complicated province. These cuts seem to target the Nova Scotians who are most marginalized and/or whose livelihoods are the most precarious. There has to be a better way.

This issue is not just about the arts. It is about recognizing the importance of every fibre woven into the tapestry of our home. We cannot pull at random threads without compromising the integrity of the whole thing.

Culture is critical. Community is critical. Call your MLA. Email the Premier. Join us at rallies.

Love, Zuppa.