Director's Message - August, 2020

Screenshot of Guy Rodgers meeting with ELAN staff via Zoom
(Top left to right: Deborah Forde, Guy Rodgers, Nick Maturo. Centre left to right: Aysha White, Sufia Duez, Juan Velasquez. Bottom left to right: Emily Enhorning and Swati Khanna)

ELAN staff are busy preparing our 16th Annual General Meeting on August 24. The financial year ending March 31, 2020 was a period of exceptional activity, so we have much to report. Christie Huff and the ArtEd team launched ArtistsInspire Grants, designed to connect a diverse group of highly experienced artists with the 300 English-language public schools in Quebec. Dan Webster led the innovative ARTS2U project into phase III. Nick Maturo launched ELAN’s Québec Relations funding page and began offering informative funding webinars and one-on-one consultation, with support from June Park.

All of ELAN’s projects were thrown into turmoil when schools and performance spaces shut down in mid-March. ELAN was able to continue employing all of its staff and we temporarily ‘pivoted’ our priority to aggregating and sharing information about special Covid-19 support for artists and arts organization, and new funding opportunities created in response to the pandemic. For ELAN, as for all of you, Covid-19 will have far-reaching impacts. We will share our vision of the future at the AGM. See post below for AGM invitation and a call for nomination of board members. Three seats are open this year: music, film & video, and corporate. If you have friends or colleagues who would make excellent board members, please nominate them.

The 2020 AGM is personally significant for me. It will be my 16^th and final AGM as Executive Director. Last year we celebrated ELAN’s 15^th anniversary with a big party at the Rialto Theatre. This year will be different: on-line and focussed on figuring out how to respond to the new world that is emerging. It is a major time of transition for us all.

Guy Rodgers

Executive Director

Land Acknowledgement

ELAN is an official minority language organization within a country that recognizes two languages as official. ELAN is located in Tiohtià:ke, the original name for Montreal in Kanien’kéha, the language of the Mohawk—also known as Mooniyang, which is the Anishinaabeg name given to the city by the Algonquin. While we are based in this city, our projects have also taken place in many regions across Quebec.

We acknowledge the colonial origin of English and French in Canada, and recognize that both languages benefit from official status throughout the land. The province that we know as Quebec is an amalgamation of the traditional territories of the Innu and Inuit nations, Algonquian nations, as well as the Mohawk nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Kanien’kéha and Anishinaabemowin are but two of the original languages of this province; Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun are also among the many Indigenous languages spoken across Quebec as majority languages, all well before French and English.

ELAN acknowledges the important work being done by First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to revive the traditional languages of these territories, and their advocacy for the official status of Indigenous languages.

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Land Acknowledgement