Out of tune: Rotary Music Festival facing funding decline

“We hope over the next year or two as the funding from the Rotary Club itself declines we’ll be able to develop methods to raise funds through the society,” explains festival committee chair Donald Davis. “The society is a non-profit organization so we can take advantage of the tax advantages from the society sponsoring the festival.”

For years the Rotary Club of Medicine Hat has provided a sponsorship of $40,000 to the festival annually.

Two years ago the club and society struck a five-year agreement that would see that sponsorship gradually decline until 2026 when it would be $32,000. No decision has been made for funding after that. Davis says the Rotary Club will maintain the naming of the festival.

Davis says most of the costs are to bring in the adjudicators and rental of performance spaces, mainly at the Cultural Centre and the Medicine Hat College. A lottery is taking place during this year’s festival, one of the first fundraising ventures of the society. As well, they’ve already moved parts of the festival from the cultural centre and college into city churches as a way to cut costs.

Another way to help fill the financial gap would be increasing registration fees, something Davis says everyone wants to avoid doing.

“Our registration fees are the lowest – if not the lowest they’re very close to being the lowest in the province – so we don’t want to increase that because that puts the burden back on the participants and we don’t want to discourage them in any way from participating,” he says. “Some families have one or two or three individuals and they’ll participate in two or three or four different competitions and so we can’t increase the fees significantly because it punishes the people that are the ones that are supporting the festival.”

Davis says the number of participants at this year’s festival is almost back to pre-pandemic levels owing to more players in the brass and woodwind competitions, something he calls a positive development.

The two-week festival wraps up this weekend with two premiere events.

The Rose Bowl is on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Medicine Hat College Eresman Theatre and the STARS of the Festival concert is 7 p.m. on Sunday at St. Barnabas Anglican Church. Both are open to the public.

For more information about those concerts and how you can help the society at the Rotary Music Festival website.

by Chris Brown

Out of tune: Rotary Music Festival facing funding decline

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