Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center almost half way there

“Founder’s Phase” of fundraising could wrap up next summer

The Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center (MCBPAC), which is shaping up to be the largest public private partnership in Gunnison Valley history, is getting ready to step into a new phase of fundraising after getting donations for almost half the project’s cost.

For more than a year, the MCBPAC board of directors has been working in a “silent phase” of fundraising and has been yielding a good return. Now with $10.3 million pledged to the project, en route to funding the anticipated total cost of $23.5 million, the board is starting to look toward a new phase of the capital campaign.
“The way that a silent capital campaign works is that you have some significant naming opportunities and you have to have some pretty significant donations,” MCBPAC co-president and executive director Woody Sherwood says. So for the past 15 months, finding big donors has been the goal.
The struggle with funding a project the size of the MCBPAC is that the typical donation just won’t do. “You can be out there all day long collecting $10,000 donations and you just can’t get to a project of this size,” Sherwood says. “When you’re trying for something of this size here, if you’re not really successful in the silent phase of getting major donors, you just can’t have enough bake sales to get there.”
Instead the initial focus has been on finding donations of $500,000 and up. Giving such a large gift to the project would get the donor’s name on some feature of the new MCBPAC. “Right now it’s the Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center, but it could be the (Your Name Here) Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center,” Sherwood says. “But nobody’s given the big check yet.”
But because some people who might be solvent enough to donate at that level are otherwise committed to donating elsewhere, the MCBPAC board has identified so-called “naming opportunities” down to $100,000—and donors are coming out to take advantage.
“Right now I would say that a majority of the donors are from within the community and they are very excited,” Sherwood says.
According to Sherwood and others associated with the project, the hope is to transform the performance paradigm that has remained in the valley since the Center for the Arts was built in Crested Butte 25 years ago. While the current facilities can hold audiences of between 200 and 300, the envisioned facility will hold an audience twice that size and will have a stage and infrastructure to suit a world-class performance venue.
“I’ve been told time and time again by the younger generations about how excited they are to have the level of touring productions that we’ll be able to bring in. It will be a completely different group of musicians,” Sherwood says.
It was precisely that need for a venue to serve a new and expanding quality of performances that served as the impetus for the project, which started as a partnership between the town of Mt. Crested Butte’s Downtown Development Authority and the Crested Butte Music Festival (CBMF).
The CBMF has grown tremendously from its roots as a small mountain gathering into one of the country’s premier gatherings of young and established musicians.
“If you’ve seen one of the operas at the Center [for the Arts], the orchestra is behind and the performers are there. There’s no room,” CBMF president and MCBPAC co-president Tom Biery says, “and in fact we have to get fire variances.”
Last year, performances of Carmen, the opera featuring Keith Miller of the Metropolitan Opera, were extended to four nights, instead of the originally planned three nights.
“We’ll clearly see a difference in the nature of the opera productions, with more sets, orchestra being in a pit, performers having more stage. We would like to reintroduce dance but really haven’t been able to do it,” Biery said.
“To give you an idea, we give approximately 40 performances throughout the course of the summer and we would have somewhere between 100 and 150 rehearsals,” he continued. “If you think about the logistics of trying to do that, it’s quite a project and it’s almost chaotic.”
To compound the confusion, Biery says, the CBMF has lost practice venues at the Crested Butte Academy, the theater at the Elevation Hotel and the Gothic Building in Crested Butte, which have all been closed or reborn as something else.
And the Crested Butte Center for the Arts, which is serving as a rehearsal and performance space for the CBMF, is planning an expansion of its own. The new facility, which could get its start by 2014, would have 2,300 additional square feet of rehearsal space, a room dedicated to dance, 1,900 square feet of classroom space and another 1,000 square feet for multipurpose use.
Such a facility would allow the CBMF suitable practice space for visiting musicians and offer performances to the public in spaces more suited to the show.
“Some performances need a bigger house, bigger stage, bigger back of the house. Some performances would do better in a smaller facility. Home Soirée are essentially modern day chamber concerts in people’s homes,” Biery says. “That’s not going to change from the festival’s standpoint. So we kind of need it all.”
The performance hall being envisioned for the MCBPAC is based on a successful model, with seating at orchestra level or up in a balcony and a stage to accommodate any performance.
But before anyone takes the stage, the MCBPAC board—made up of members from the Crested Butte Music Festival, the town of Mt. Crested Butte and four at-large members from the community—has a lot of work to do.
The foundation has been laid, with land donated and transferred from the town and CBMR and a long-term lease has been signed for the facility. The Mt. Crested Butte DDA has committed to issuing a bond for up to $6 million and the CBMF has committed to raising another $4 million.
Biery says, “With the commitments from the town and the land value that’s been donated we’re getting close to having 50 percent of value committed to the project. From my standpoint that’s tremendous. We’ve given ourselves really about a year and a half more to raise most of the money.”
Sherwood says once the board has raised 60 percent of its goal it will go to corporations and foundations known for supporting the arts with more confidence. “We have been on their radar a little bit and we should get a few dollars there at the end to make it total between 10 and 20 percent of the total project value,” he says.
After the silent “Founder’s Phase” of the fund-raising wraps up next summer, a second phase will start the “Major Gifts Phase,” with solicitations for gifts of between $10,000 and $100,000.
“Then in 2014-2015, depending on how fast this is all coming, we’ll have the public campaign,” Sherwood says. “The public campaign will really be kind of where the party’s at.”
The result, when all is said and done, is what Sherwood and Biery both agree will be a game-changer for the Upper Gunnison Valley, not only in bringing a new arts center to the community, but also in providing a shot of economic activity in an extended tourist season.
“People understand that economically, the community is very challenged right now and they see that while it’s not going to be a magic bullet, it’s an important piece of creating a new economic development program for the valley,” Sherwood says.
And the facility won’t just be for the arts; it will be a part of the community also, opening its doors to special events and organizations looking for a bigger venue.
“We’re not trying to change the community. We’re trying to recognize Crested Butte will always be Crested Butte and that will be part of the allure and charm,” Sherwood says. “At the same time, when it comes time for the caliber of musician we’re trying to attract to be professional, they really want to be the best professional they can be and they need a facility to support them.”