Endowment fund set up for historic downtown park

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This article was published 27/10/2021 (1780 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The province is setting up an endowment fund to help sustain Winnipeg’s Upper Fort Garry Provincial Park.

The historic downtown tourist attraction and gathering place is known as the “birthplace” of the province, where Manitoba entered into Confederation in 1870.

The Manitoba 150 host committee announced Wednesday it is donating $100,000 to a new endowment fund to help ensure the unique park is preserved for years.

“What can we leave for the next generation?” asked Stuart Murray, who co-chaired the Manitoba 150 celebrations that began in the winter of 2020 with acrobatic snowmobile stunts outside the legislature and ended inside the legislature Wednesday with a news conference about the fund to be managed by the Winnipeg Foundation.

“Upper Fort Garry is allowing the community to come in, learn and get a sense of who we are as a province,” Murray said.

“This endowment will help establish its long-term sustainability,” said Charles Loewen, chairman of the Friends of Upper Fort Garry.

“We see Upper Fort Garry as a place of many voices, of many stories,” he said at the event Wednesday with Murray, Premier Kelvin Goertzen and Conservation and Climate Minister Sarah Guillemard.

“We know that more needs to be shared — both painful and celebratory,” said Loewen, who sees it as a place for reconciliation. “Better, more thorough and difficult conversations must be engaged,” he said, noting the park is for all Manitobans.

To start, the endowment fund is expected to yield $5,000 a year, said Guillemard. For every $2 donated to the fund, the province will give a dollar, she said.

It costs close to $100,000 a year to maintain the park, according to the Friends group.

It relies on money generated from an adjacent surface parking lot to sustain it. Since less people have been parking downtown because of the pandemic, that revenue source has suffered.

Loewen said the endowment fund will allow more to be done at the park. “More is envisioned.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca