Performing Arts Center fundraising down to wire

Board to consider path forward at January meeting

This summer’s fundraising effort for the proposed Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center pulled in 60 percent of its target, from 145 new donors, leaving $1.25 million to raise before December 31.

Leading up to summer, MCBPAC organizers announced a Community Challenge grant worth $3 million that would go into the fund as soon as the matching $3 million was raised. With $1.25 million to go to reach the grant, MCBPAC executive director Woody Sherwood is staying positive going into the holiday season.
“When you look at it as $1.25 million to go, it can seem like a long way to go,” he said. “But when you consider that we’ve raised $15.75 million up to this point, it feels more like we’re making a final push to the summit of Everest.”
Although the project’s total fundraising goal is $23.5 million, if the $17 million mark is achieved Sherwood says the partners—including the town of Mt. Crested Butte, Crested Butte Mountain Resort and the MCBPAC organization—are committed to getting the design process moving and to building a facility, if not exactly what they’d envisioned.
And with so much community support for the project—and the duration of that support, since the project was first announced in the spring of 2011—Sherwood is optimistic that the MCBPAC fundraising effort will hit the $17 million mark soon.
“The key has really been the depth of support we’ve gotten from the community,” he said. “We’re slowly moving forward. But now we’ve really got the accelerator pushed down.”
Sherwood says they’ve got some significant “asks” out to potential donors and still have some “exciting initiatives” planned for the holiday season. Then, in just over six weeks, the MCBPAC board of directors will hold their January meeting and will discuss the future of the project.
“[The board] will be talking about if there’s a path forward,” Sherwood said, “and I believe that if there’s a path to go forward then we’ll go forward.”
For Sherwood, it’s an exciting time in Mt. Crested Butte, especially for a proposal like the MCBPAC. Amidst all the recent talk of a change in ownership at Crested Butte Mountain Resort, which is one of the project’s partners, there is the memory of all the development and investment that took place after the Muellers bought the resort.
And if a deal were to go through, Sherwood hopes the new owners would want to “prime the pump” to revive interest in Mt. Crested Butte real estate and the resort. The MCBPAC could be a good opportunity to do just that.