WECC needs $50K of help to stay open By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 5:52 PM CST Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025

The West End Cultural Centre says it needs $50,000 by the end of the year to stay up and running.

The non-profit venue inside a former church at the corner of Ellice Avenue and Sherbrook Street is appealing to the general public for donations through a fundraising campaign.

“This $50,000 would allow us to enter the year in a safe situation where I don’t have to be thinking about laying people off or cutting people’s hours, and I don’t have to be thinking about cutting programs down,” Jorge Requena Ramos, WECC’s executive artistic director, says during a phone interview.

“This place has always been for-community, by-community place, and this is a community solution.”

Since its founding by Ava Kobrinsky and pioneering Canadian folk impresario Mitch Podolak in 1987, the WECC has become a fixture of Winnipeg’s concert and live arts scene. The pair, their comrades and successors cultivated a space that’s imported some of the world’s best-known folk and roots musicians, from Gordon Lightfoot to Neko Case, while also platforming local musicians.

Over the years, WECC’s programming has expanded to include virtually every musical genre, as well as a free music school, with a mandate of supporting local community and alternative music.

“This place has always been for-community, by-community place, and this is a community solution.”

Ramos says right now the organization needs to have a hard look at some of its administrative and programming strategies while sticking to its guns mandate-wise.

“We definitely have to be working on a two-sided solution. When Mitch created the West End Cultural Centre, he wanted to get away from the mainstream. And so, we’ve been getting away from mainstream for a really long time, but there is a kind of artist nowadays … away from the mainstream and also really popular,” Ramos says.

While many non-profit cultural organizations have a dedicated fundraiser, the WECC does not, and Ramos suggests the organization should be considering fundraising options beyond government sources and donation appeals.

“We need to take some corporate sponsorships for the (WECC) to make the model more viable. Fundraising works with being very careful that we can still stay the West End Cultural Centre. Our community, board and us other staff are very conscious and very careful with this,” he says.

The West End sent an email out over the weekend and posted a lengthy Facebook message outlining the venue’s financial situation. The appeal is chock-full of warm quotes about the WECC by well-known local musicians such as Don Amero and David Landreth, placing the WECC at the centre of Winnipeg’s musical and cultural life.

The West End Cultural Centre has a volunteer board that employs four full-time staff members and a number of part-time or casual staff, including technicians and front-of-house representatives.

Three and a half months ago, Ramos’s position as artistic director expanded to include the executive director role after Jason Hooper left the position to take a job as managing director of Theatre Projects Manitoba.

While the venue has been struggling with an unreliable HVAC system for a number of years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars according to Ramos, he also emphasizes other stressors, such as declining audience and bar sales, that have affected revenue.

“Inflation took away that third beer, and then it took away the second beer, and now we’re at this place where people are coming to shows less and it compounds over years of presenting content.”

Ramos says beer sales are down 50 per cent and adds that, while government funding is stable, it’s frozen and not keeping up with inflation and other pressures.

While help from government amounted to 35 per cent of the venue’s budget when he joined the WECC in 2019, these days he says it covers only about 15 per cent.

There are structural reasons why this situation may not improve dramatically in the near future. While the Manitoba Arts Council’s budget saw a $1-million budgetary increase last year after two decades of static funding, things are looking less optimistic for the better-heeled Canada Council for the Arts, essential to many of the country’s cultural organizations’ operational budgets. Its funding from the federal government is on the decline after peaking during the pandemic.

“Eventually we’re going to realize that putting our nose up to a screen all day long is only making us sadder… and going into the places like the West End Cultural Centre is the cure.”

A rash of recent organizational deficits cross Manitoba’s cultural sector — and the closure of mainstay local presenters such as Sarasvati Theatre (2023), The Good Will Social Club (2024) and Virtuosi Concerts (2025) — adds to a feeling of systemic pressure.

“The great majority of people are receiving culture currently from their phone,” says Ramos.

“Eventually we’re going to realize that putting our nose up to a screen all day long is only making us sadder and sadder and sadder and sadder, and going into the places like the West End Cultural Centre is the cure.”

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca