Arts Ottawa: A human-centered merger to respond to community needs
This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
For two years, the Cultural Policy Hub has been working to better understand organizational precarity and resilience in Canadian arts, culture and heritage not-for-profit organizations. This research now leads the Hub to ask: what novel approaches are to organizational development, transformation and sustainability are organizations undertaking to address the precarity they face?
Over the next few weeks, the Hub will share case studies that explore how nine organizations are responding to unique opportunities and challenges, ranging from financial precarity to governance, space insecurity, connection to community and the impacts of climate change.
This first case study focuses on merging as a strategy to build organizational capacity and respond to community needs in Canada’s capital.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the newly appointed executive directors of two Ottawa-based arts service organizations, Ottawa Arts Council and Arts Network Ottawa, met to discuss how they could collaborate to address a range of issues impacting their community. Galvanized by the unprecedented challenges the arts, culture and heritage sector was facing at that time, these two organizations saw an opportunity to move past cooperation and merge into a new organization—Arts Ottawa. This merger was guided not by the need to reduce administrative overhead or optimize finances, but by a desire to transform their models and activities to expand their impact and to help address the root causes of the precarity they were observing.
In this case study, the Cultural Policy Hub explores the history of the merger of Ottawa Arts Council and Arts Network Ottawa into Arts Ottawa, the motivations and processes that led to this merger and its outcomes. This study is based on an interview with Cassandra Olsthoorn, Arts Ottawa’s Co-Leader in charge of Strategy & Community Mobilization, formerly Executive Director of Arts Network Ottawa.
Read the full Case study below:
