With our new vision, we are taking a holistic approach to our community and our stewardship. We are shifting our focus from transaction-driven to community building.  

Community starts with a core purpose (our vision), and every member of the community is in orbit around that purpose. Highly engaged people will be in orbit close to the core purpose and others will have wide orbits. People can move in and out of close orbit over time. Board members, for example, are highly engaged for a brief period, and then return to a wide orbit. Even in our patron and subscriber bases, the orbit analogy resonates: Our younger ticket buying audiences may stop attending when they need to focus on careers and children, but they return as subscribers when they have the time and discretionary spending to do so. There is no barrier that makes you either part of the community or not part of it. Everyone participates to the level of their interest, and every contribution helps.

In the past, we understood our staff as the means by which we connected stakeholders to Alberta Ballet and its products. In a community building model, employees are understood as stakeholders themselves, also in orbit around our purpose. Employees hold the purpose very closely—because they believe in the purpose, because they are dedicating a portion of their working life to the purpose and because they devote many hours every week to the purpose. In many cases, former employees maintain a connection. They come to performances, they take on contract work at the company or the school, they remain in the arts sector and support knowledge sharing and collaboration. Even as former employees, they still are in orbit around our core purpose–it is just a wider orbit with fewer touch points. Once we apply a community-building lens to our goals and objectives, employee engagement and wellness is more than a corporate function–it is a key activity in our strategic plan.

We have done some work in the past that reflects a community-building model, but this work has usually been in direct service of generating near-term sales. We need to incorporate an understanding and commitment to community building on a grander scale and over a longer time period for our strategic plan to be successful. Working with immigrant-serving agencies, Indigenous communities, community health advocates and dance networks will be our primary means of connecting with under-served audiences whom we now understand as part of the community orbiting our core purpose. 

The heart of our new strategic plan is to inspire curiosity and a deep personal engagement among all those we touch, and our strategic plan materializes in how we use our core purpose to serve everyone who has a connection to our vision. The quality of our programming and the resonance it creates with Albertans becomes the barometer for how well we have embodied and delivered on our values of believe and reflect.