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Your KWMP Action Plan

Kitchener Waterloo Musical Productions Season Update

After much thought and discussion, the KWMP Board of Directors has decided to postpone our production of The Addams Family until May 2021. It is our plan to have the same cast, crew and creative team members in their current roles, but we understand that this is a full year away and that some may have conflicts with the new timeline. If vacancies arise we will fill those by holding auditions in late 2020.

The Board has also decided to not produce a fall show this season, and instead focus all of our efforts into implementing the Your KWMP Action Plan.  While this was not an easy decision, we believe that this work will ensure that our organization will thrive for the future.

Your KWMP Action Plan

Note

The Your KWMP Action Plan was approved by the KWMP Board of Directors before the global pandemic disrupted all of our lives. We are still committed to implementing this plan, but understand that some timelines may have to be adjusted.

Overview

Over the summer of 2019, the K-W Musical Production Board of Directors engaged the KWMP membership and members of the arts community with a series of surveys, focus groups and conversations, with the goal of helping our organization evolve and represent the dreams of our membership and community. 

Over 200 people responded to our online survey, including current and past members, audience members, and community supporters.

The Board of Directors hired Lynda Abshoff to facilitate group discussions with 40 members, who in small groups shared their thoughts, ideas, and brainstormed what they thought the future of KWMP should look like.

Lynda’s experience includes over 40 years in corporate and non-profit organizations facilitating organizational and service changes. She is currently the Executive Director of the Brain Injury Association Waterloo-Wellington, helping to facilitate new programs and services for individuals with brain injuries in our area.

In addition, members of the KWMP Board of Directors have met with representatives of dozens of performing arts organizations, community members, city and regional staff and local politicians. 

Based on these conversations, we have identified four themes that included:

The feedback from our membership has been amazing and has led us down a few unexpected paths. The board has been working hard to explore some of these ideas,  having conversations with stakeholders, evaluation options and trying to ensure that our action plan was both true to your feedback and achievable.  

This exploration work has taken longer than expected, but we are quite excited about the work that has been done and are looking forward to sharing the results in the future.

Your KWMP Findings

Resources

KWMP is a volunteer-driven organization led by a leadership team, which is made up of the Board of Directors, Committees, and Creative Teams and no paid staff. It takes thousands of hours of volunteer work to produce high-quality community theatre, and manage a community rehearsal hall.  This has led to burn out of key volunteers, lack of official lines of communication and risk of high volunteer turnover especially when times get stressful. 

As an organization, we need to address these issues and bring on additional resources, training and representation in our leadership team.

This year we will be looking to find a way to support the leadership team by developing a plan to hire a part-time paid staff to manage our rehearsal hall and provide some administrative support for the organization.

It is our hope that this new staff will give the members of the leadership team more time to focus on the artistic side of KWMP and increase the revenue that we generate from rentals of our hall, props, costumes and sets.

Artistic Vision

KWMP continues to evolve. We have produced shows in churches, school cafeterias, universities, the Centre in the Square, the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts and St. Jacobs Country Playhouse, to name a few. 

It has been difficult to find space to produce the high quality shows that you have come to expect from KWMP due to cost and lack of availability of theatre space. This has created a lack of clarity on the direction for current and future shows. 

We will work hard to produce 2 musicals per year that are something different than you might see elsewhere in the community. 

We will continue to develop relationships with other local arts organizations, to see how we can support each other. We will investigate if there are opportunities to co-produce shows to reach a new audience and share resources.

For the past several years, KWMP has relied on the artistic direction to come from our creative team with the board of directors acting as producers. We will evaluate if an Artistic Director role might help our organization thrive.

Asset Management

KWMP is in a unique situation in that it owns a building that has no mortgage and has recently been upgraded to include ramps and accessible washrooms. This asset and others such as costumes and props are currently underutilized. Serious consideration should be given to managing these assets in a more proactive and professional way.  These assets could provide significant revenue and provide community resources. 

The Board of Directors and Building Committee has worked hard to maintain and upgrade our building at 14 Shaftsbury Dr. and make it available to the performing arts community. We have conducted a facility audit and have identified areas that need to be upgraded over the course of the next 25 years. We have also looked at how we could repurpose the space to have it utilized by the local performing arts community. This includes applying for funding through the Department of Canadian Heritage, Canada Cultural Spaces Fund to convert the main hall into a black box theatre. 

KWMP is committed to working towards increasing the availability of affordable theatre space in Waterloo Region, whether it be at our space or by supporting a joint community initiative. We believe that the performing arts community needs to work together in order to achieve this goal, and as an organization, we are committed to being part of that conversation.

Culture

KWMP is a community organization. People become engaged and want to stay engaged because they are getting something out of their experience. It could be new friends, a chance to perform, a creative outlet, or a chance to develop new skills. We want to be able to create an environment that keeps people remain engaged between shows and provides an opportunity to learn.

To that end, we will work toward creating ongoing events between shows, both in terms of educational workshops and social events.

We heard from our members that learning and developing new skills was important, and have already worked to increase the number of apprenticeship roles within our creative team. 

Your KWMP Action Plan Next Steps

We are taking a sprint approach developing a long term plan, which is a process that is quite often used in the tech community to evaluate problems, create a plan, test, evaluate the results and plan the next steps, in a short period of time. To that end, we have committed to meeting with our members again this summer to evaluate our process (via Zoom if needed) and continuing to be agile with our planning.

The work has only just gotten started, if you would like to help us turn this plan into a reality we invite you to help us do that by sharing your thoughts via email, or a video call, joining a committee, joining the board, volunteering, partnering with us or joining us in August for our next planning session.

Helpful links

KWMP Contact Info