YORKTON - Yorkton Council gave the go ahead for the City to proceed with Phase 3 of a process to refresh the Yorkton’s Community Cultural Plan at its regular meeting Monday.
That the process started back in February 2020 is going to continue to move forward is not a surprise. You rarely get two years into a process, come upon the verge of completing the second phase and then toss the remainder of the process aside.
In this case the first two phases have been made easier in the sense they have not cost the City any money. Both phases were funded through grants from SaskCulture.
The third phase, it is hoped, will also garner a SaskCulture grant, at least if the City’s application is successful.
But, in this case the dollar value is higher, and SaskCulture wants to see the municipality is truly committed to the process, which usually means investing directly, so the approval Monday included spending up to $20,000, or 50 per cent of the cost of Phase 3.
When the ‘refresh’ is complete, that will be after a fourth phase the City will have a revamped Cultural Plan updating the document created in 2009.
If you are not familiar with the Cultural Plan don’t be too surprised. Often such documents are largely used internally as a sort of guideline for Administration to refer to, to see if proposals fit with the plan’s perimeters.
It’s a handy document for Council to refer to as well, if only to see if they are keeping culture in the mix of its decisions and spending.
Of course the challenge of the plan itself is to define culture in a way that is not so all encompassing that everything the City does simply falls snugly under the document’s parameters.
Culture can be anything from the sidewalks that allow walking access to parks and theatres, to restaurants, businesses selling art supplies, to the Godfrey Dean Gallery and the Anne Portnuff Theatre.
Spend a moment and tangentially you can make just about anything about culture, and in that light it is difficult to ever measure whether the City is actually doing a good job in terms of supporting culture because everything it does has its impact at some level.
That said, many will have a slightly more focused vision of culture, one around languages and art and dance, those things we look at as important to who we are and where we have come from.
There is a difference between Ukrainian and Scottish cultures, and neither is about sidewalks.
It is the core elements of what Yorkton as a community sees as culture that the City Plan must have on its main page, and those core elements that Council and City administration need to make sure they support in visible, direct, and yes at times financial ways.
