If you have ever watched a movie in the Norm or listened to live music at Koerner’s, then you have been lucky enough to experience some of the rich arts and culture on campus. However, most students don’t get a chance to see the amazing clubs on campus due to a lack of support. The AMS has largely neglected arts and culture, and many clubs struggle to fund their most basic activities. Clubs are forced to survive through the passion and commitment of their members, often at great personal, academic and financial expense. Frustrated, we decided to take matters into our own hands and attempt to get support directly from you – students.
We are the Film Society, Blank Vinyl Project, Debate Society, Jazz Cafe, Musical Theatre Troupe, Players Club and Slam Poetry. Collectively, we host film screenings, live concerts, musicals, plays, debates and much, much more. We are asking you for a small, opt-outable fee – $1.50, increasing slowly over time, to be distributed equally between us so we can run bigger, better and more accessible events.
It’s not that the AMS doesn’t provide any opportunities for clubs like ours – the Clubs Benefit Fund, for example, provides single event grants of up to $1,500 available at most once per year. But when many of these clubs are hosting nearly 10 events a semester, one event grant will never be sufficient. Larger equipment costs, recurring costs like venue bookings and artist or speaker fees remain entirely unsupported. Without a guaranteed operating budget, students must either take on personal financial risk without guarantee of being refunded or settle for smaller venues and less events, often with hefty ticket costs. This severely limits accessibility, especially for cash-strapped students.
Some of our clubs have been around a very long time. The Players Club is celebrating their centennial along with the university, the Film Society was constituted in the 1930s and the Debate Society is older than UBC itself. Despite a long history, dreams of growing and evolving these campus institutions are completely out of reach. With your support, the century-old Players Club could bring in professional actors and playwrights. The Film Society could host Q&As with local directors. The Debate Society could be more like the Oxford Union, which has brought in famous speakers from Churchill to Malala. This is what we hope to accomplish and part of why the fund is graduated. If you want to find out more about us and what each club hopes to do with a permanent budget, check out our website here.
It is not just our seven clubs that need help to grow and become something greater. When building this question, we reached out to many other large arts and culture clubs. Some did not wish to join and some simply did not respond. These clubs also deserve our support and while we will continue to collaborate heavily with them, an ideal solution would involve the AMS establishing a fund and administering it in a non-partial, deliberated fashion. Unfortunately, the constraints of a referendum question mean that any proposal appearing on a ballot would likely be riddled with vagueness and ambiguities. Our question and the outcomes are comparatively clear: you know where the money is going and you know what you are going to get.
We hope that your future AMS executive will do their best to tackle this systemic problem — but they haven’t yet and we can’t rely on them to do it soon. In lieu of an alternative solution, our proposal allows us to do more things that students love. If you vote yes this week, you will see more live music, more free concerts, more film screenings, spoken word, speakers, plays and musicals. And all we ask for is $1.50.
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