President's Comments

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• Now is a unique time for this Orchestra.   After the bankruptcy, a small group of the musicians from the orchestra banded together, they raised $500,000 and they put on a shortened concert season.  They did that to support each other as a way of keeping themselves employed and keeping the music going because there had been long history of the orchestra in the community.  Also, with the help of partners, they discovered that they could annul the bankruptcy in order to save the charitable status of the organization.   What this means for an organization like this is that they can maintain their registered status and accept donations.
• After the annulment, they put together a board of directors, they began hiring staff and they hired me to start on October 15, 2025, so I’ve only been with the organization for about six months.  What is unique about this is many of the members of the orchestra have played with it for a long time, so, the Orchestra as a group of musicians playing together remained intact despite the organization that supports it going bankrupt.   Thus, we have an old orchestra, and we have a new organization that supports them.
• In order to support the activities of the orchestra our goal right now is to build a new strong administration and sustainable foundation, one that can weather external pressures like a pandemic.  This means being careful, deliberate, and responsible as we build.   A significant part of this work is financial.  We have been budgeting conservatively, renewing our donor database, rebuilding relationships with our stakeholders that were broken because of the bankruptcy, and actively researching new funding.  But this focus is not just on revenue. It is also about creating systems in the organization that are healthy, that are working within capacities that can go on for a long period of time.
• A critical result of the bankruptcy was the loss of institutional knowledge – that history and understanding that an organization has that gets passed down through all the people who worked there.  So, for  an organization that has been around since the 1940’s, this institutional knowledge is extensive.   We are working to rebuild that now; but it is a big challenge.  Part of it is going out and meeting people like yourselves who have relationships with the orchestra and hearing your stories about what the organization has done in the past or how you intersected with it.
• That’s a big part of my job now, learning about how people view and how people see and connect with the organization; doing this along with really boring stuff like building our digital office environment, creating bookkeeping and accounting workflows, managing and  streamlining the artistic operations in the production process of getting the musicians on the stage.
• A lot of my time over the last six months has been spent conducting something called an operations audit, again very boring stuff, but it’s simply asking the question - do our capacities of the time available, the human resources we have, and the amount of funding we have all align with our purpose.  After the bankruptcy we are  working with about 1/3 of the funding the organization had prior to the bankruptcy and we’re working with about a quarter of the staff, so things look and feel very different.
• I often talk about this thing called operations capacity and it’s not just how much money you have but how much how much ‘bandwidth’ you have. -  How much time do we have to do research to better understand the situation, time to spend  thinking about this and putting together the systems that help in the back end of what the Orchestra does, time to review tasks and workflows across the organization to reduce duplication, clarifying responsibilities and making sure the right work is in the right hands.   All while we are still putting on concerts and planning for those for next year.
• The one thing that’s really amazes me, that has really blown my mind is the amount of the cultural imagination in this region that is occupied by the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony.  I worked with Toronto organizations before coming here doing similar things - rebuilding organizations or leading them to transitions, but I have  never seen anything like this in the arts.  As I have travelled across the country and in Europe, in other places where one organization connects with so many people through the matrix of activities that they do, and in really meaningful impactful ways, I can see, just in the six months that I have been here, how much the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony has done that over the years and I’m really hardened by it.

• We’re approaching the end of our concert season with one more concert, May 9 at Saint Matthews Center, please come.  As we approach our final concert of the season we are still three months away from the end of our fiscal year.  And I am very happy to report that we have met our fundraising goal of $480,000.  When I was in my second interview, I told the board they were they were out of their minds thinking that they could raise $480,000 after a bankruptcy, but I didn’t understand the region or the connection that people have to this organization and so we met that goal.  In a couple of weeks, we will announce it publicly.  It is really encouraging that people have come back and have said that they wanted us here.  We have budgeted very modestly for ticket sales, not knowing that people will come back and we have met that budget for ticket sales, so all the revenue markers we set have been met.  On the expense side we have kept all our expenses in line with what was projected.
• The next big thing that the organization needs to do, and the Board of Directors have started working on this, is a renewed  Vision and Mission of the organization?  They are going through a process and out of that comes deciding what artistic leadership is needed.
• It’s been a really busy year with about 18 or 19 concerts this season and there’s still a lot of work to do.  We are still finalizing the details, but we will be announcing our new season mid to late June.  It will be slightly expanded from this year.  We will also have more of something called our Learning Community Engagement Stream, where we send groups of our musicians out to churches, events, libraries,  bars, etc. to go and perform classical music.   This is something that has expanded quite quickly in this organization, we have had over 50 events like that this year already and we’re planning for about 75 of these next year.

Closing Remarks & Reminders