It’s a wrestle elevating cash for the humanities. Simply ask Contact Photography Festival

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When company collect for the Contact Photography Festival’s Thirtieth-anniversary gala at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Tuesday, they’ll have an opportunity to snap up works from the likes of Carrie Mae Weems and Edward Burtynsky – picture artists who’ve formed Contact right into a world-renowned pageant over three a long time.

The cash Contact hopes to lift by auctioning work from these beacons of its previous is essential to securing its future. Since the Bank of Nova Scotia started winding down its longtime title sponsorship two years in the past, the pageant has struggled to exchange the roughly half-million {dollars} the financial institution gave it every year. Darcy Killeen, Contact’s chief govt, hopes to lift at the least $150,000 this week by each silent and reside auctions of picture prints and different artworks.

Killeen has managed to recoup a small quantity of Scotiabank’s annual funding by smaller company sponsorships over the previous two years, however has struggled to make up the entire quantity. “This fundraiser will allow us to have a festival and hopefully lay the foundation for future growth,” Killeen says, “but it’s not going to fill the void of our title sponsorship.”

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Both sponsorships and philanthropy have been more durable for cultural organizations to safe over the previous decade; the early 2020s deepened these woes, including to the shock by COVID-19 lockdowns, surging rates of interest and rising inflation.

Organizations equivalent to Scotiabank, Bell, TikTok and Netflix have lately deserted high-profile arts sponsorships for causes as different as altering company priorities to dissatisfaction with the Online Streaming Act to shifting national-security priorities. Scotiabank itself confronted years of strain for its arts sponsorship from pro-Palestinian activists and artists over a subsidiary’s funding in a significant Israeli weapons producer.

Two years after Scotiabank walked away from Contact, there are indicators of some renewed curiosity from corporations and donors to speculate extra deeply within the arts. But they arrive with numerous caveats.

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The most up-to-date Canadian Sponsorship Landscape Study, authored by Norm O’Reilly, a companion with the T1 Agency, discovered that manufacturers’ investments in sponsorship rights charges grew 58 per cent in 2024 over 2023. But different long-standing traits cloud this image: manufacturers now primarily see these sorts of sponsorships as advertising and marketing investments, not philanthropic causes, and anticipate a larger return on funding. “The CFOs are paying attention,” O’Reilly says.

That is smart on this planet of major-league sports activities, the place advertising and marketing alternatives abound – and are rising, because of important curiosity in ladies’s skilled leagues. A title sponsorship at an arts pageant, against this, won’t get an organization’s emblem in entrance of as many potential prospects, particularly with out comparable broadcast rights and venue activations.

Pro sports activities sponsorships are additionally turning into costlier, O’Reilly says – that means they’re consuming into the full {dollars} that manufacturers can spend on different partnerships.

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The survey of 149 corporations additionally requested for the sector the place they invested of their largest sponsorships – which ranged in worth from $15,000 to $35-million. Arts sponsorships made up 0.9 per cent of those. Put one other method, just one in 100 manufacturers have made inventive organizations their high priorities for sponsorship investments.

Arts philanthropy has taken some massive hits recently, too. TRG Arts, an analytics-focused consultancy, mentioned that, by mid-2025, it’s discovered a 14-per-cent improve within the variety of items to performing-arts organizations throughout North America, and a 12-per-cent improve in complete present worth. But adjusted for inflation, that worth is definitely down 11 per cent from 2019 fiscal years, simply earlier than COVID-19 lockdowns.

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In Canada, TRG Arts has anecdotally discovered that the variety of individuals donating to the humanities is flat whereas present income is rising, mentioned Jill Robinson, its chief govt.

And whereas TRG Arts’s analysis covers till about mid-2025, different knowledge, from the cultural-sector advocacy charity Business / Arts, means that Canadians hope to offer extra. A nationwide survey performed on its behalf final October by Nanos Research discovered that tradition followers deliberate to donate $200 to the sector by the top of final 12 months – up from $120 in 2024.

But Business / Arts additionally discovered that cultural organizations get solely a small quantity of donors’ complete giving – receiving simply 12 per cent of its survey respondents’ budgets in every of the final 12 months, with a current drop in youthful donors.

That determine is near what CanadaHelps, Canada’s largest on-line donation platform, discovered went towards arts-and-culture charities in 2025: 7.2 per cent. The group has, nevertheless, been seeing will increase in each arts-and-culture donations and the worth of donations on its platform over the previous 12 months, says Julie Fiorini, its General Manager of Charity and Donor companies. (The group will launch extra figures when it publishes its annual giving report within the coming months.)

Nonetheless, Aubrey Reeves, Business / Arts’s CEO, says that the sector continues “to be in a precarious situation.” She’s crunched figures from CADAC, a Canada-wide database of monetary knowledge from organizations that apply for presidency funding, and has discovered that sector bills have elevated 46.4 per cent since simply earlier than pandemic lockdowns. That uptick, she says, exceeds development in sponsorship earnings.

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Contact continues to be making an attempt to profit from a shrunken funds. Its income was $1.2-million in its ultimate 12 months partnered with Scotiabank, in response to its most up-to-date Canada Revenue Agency filings; Killeen says it’s fallen to $700,000 this 12 months. The pageant has minimize workers by 35 per cent, decreased salaries for remaining staff, dropped its worldwide promoting marketing campaign, reduce on its public-art programming and stopped printing a listing.

“Culture is such an important part of a vibrant city, of our livelihoods, of our happiness, I don’t think we can lose complete sight of it,” Killeen says.