Jini Stolk, Executive Director of Creative Trust from 2002 – 2012, was appointed as the first Creative Trust Research Fellow at the Toronto Arts Foundation. Claire Hopkinson, Executive Director of the Toronto Arts Foundation/Toronto Arts Council (and Creative Trust’s founding Board Chair) announced the creation of the Fellowship last night, and said she was delighted that the experiences, values, and success Creative Trust had in building the capacity and vitality of arts organizations will continue to be available to an even broader constituency through the Toronto Arts Foundation.
Jini expressed her gratitude and excitement about being able to continue to develop and share the important work started at Creative Trust, and to work with Claire and others at the Toronto Arts Foundation to build Toronto’s reputation as an international leader in arts development and support.
Creative Trust, which also announced its closing at last night’s celebratory party, has been the most successful sustainability program for the arts in Canada. Over the past ten years it has achieved all its original goals and had a profound impact on the financial health and organizational capacity of Toronto’s music, theatre, and dance companies.
The purpose of the TAF Research Fellowship is to maintain Creative Trust’s experience and learnings, share them with Toronto’s many hundreds of professional arts organizations of every discipline (an impressive 454 of which were funded by TAC in 2010) and use them as the basis of continuing research and knowledge development to benefit Toronto’s arts community.
