Canada Council publishes responses to its strategic plan review

The Canada Council has been undertaking a strategic planning consultation across the country, with conversations with key stakeholders and groups, including representatives of the magazine industry and freelance writers.

There was also an online survey in which respondents were asked to comment on a wide range of issues. The results of this phase of the consultation -- which may be of significant interest to small literary and cultural magazines that are Canada Council funded -- are now available for dowloading online at the CC website. Part 1 is a summary of the stakeholder discussions; part 2 is the results of the online survey*. Still to come is a summary of conversations with 200 young artists about how Canada Council funding might be tailored to their needs as the Council goes into its second 50 years.

The strategic plan will be reviewed by the Council's board later in October.

(*The summary of the survey, by the way, provides a cautionary tale for being careful what you wish for. Council staff designed the survey with so many open-ended questions and got so much response, much of it lengthy, that the result was overwhelming. Hill Strategies Group, on a tight deadline, was able to extract useful data from the estimated 700,000 words of responses only by creating its own database and sampling method.)

[The illustration, which accompanies the review, is by Mélodie Coutou.]