YORKTON - The City of Yorkton has a shiny new Community Cultural Plan after it was adopted by Yorkton Council at its regular meeting July 29.
The question is what will they do with the hefty new document?
A plan is only as good as what it leads too, and with this plan there are a number of moving parts to make it as impactful as its near 200 pages might suggest it should be.
To begin with, municipal plan or not, culture will always be firmly in the hands of residents.
It is groups within the city that maintain culture, from artists to dance troupes, to writers, and well frankly almost everything is an element of culture.
Therein lies a challenge for any plan, to encompass something that is as much about eating a perogy or plate of haggis, as it is about maintaining the languages of our forefathers.
But what is important has to come from the community. The city – the new plan not withstanding – can only be a supporter or sometimes facilitator, and perhaps a funder.
Often the barrier to cultural expression comes down to dollars. Nothing is free, from the fabric to make a dance outfit, to the stage rental to perform on, to the meeting room to organize in.
As a follow up to the new plan the city might want next to evaluate its cultural investment.
Certainly there are municipal tax dollars spent on culture, from the Godfrey Dean Gallery, to the public library, to the new interpretive centre at the brick mill, but that also needs to be measured against $7 million plus at the Deer Park Golf Course and near $4.5 million at the Kinsmen Arena.
Now of course you can make the argument that sport is part of culture and in Saskatchewan, Canada to suggest otherwise about hockey in particular would be missing its long time significance here, but that said there has always been something of a definable line between sport and culture. In terms of funding sport usually taking the lion’s share.
Evaluating the split and investigating if the new plan warrants more municipal dollars makes sense at this point.
The city also needs to find ways to engage the community about what the details of the new plan means to them.
There was consultation through its creation, but what now? What in the many pages helps a group maintain, promote and share culture moving forward?
Until those answers are well understood by groups, the plan is little more than a promise that things might be better moving forward.
