Arts, Culture & HeritagePhoto: The St. Boniface Museum.
Manitoba Heritage Trust Program helps support Manitoba’s museums and archives.
Rarely do we get the chance to feel history come to life around us. Peering through a window into our province’s rich past is a precious opportunity.
To help enhance that experience, The Winnipeg Foundation is administrating the Manitoba Heritage Trust Program (MHTP) with support from the Association of Manitoba Museums and the Association for Manitoba Archives.
Initiated by the Manitoba government, MHTP is helping more than 200 museums and heritage institutions across our province by offering stretch funds to the organizations to help grow their endowment funds. By assisting in sustainability, MHTP allows institutions like Le Musée de Saint-Boniface Museum—which exists in an old, historic building—to continue giving Manitobans a treasured look into our past.
“Having a trust and being able to one day pull from that trust is going to help us to provide great restorative conservation work to some of the objects in our collection,” says Vania Gagnon, Director of Le Musée de Saint-Boniface Museum.
The Friends of The St. Boniface Museum Fund is an example of how MHTP is assisting in keeping Manitoba’s history alive.
“The fund is going to help us with that back-end work that nobody sees, but it’s also going to allow us to fund some fantastic programming like our play, In Riel’s Footsteps, or those days where we provide free museum access to the community,” Gagnon says.
In addition to Le Musée de Saint-Boniface Museum, approximately 50 organizations are working with the Manitoba Heritage Trust Program.
Every $2 given to an organization’s MHTP endowment fund is stretched by $1 — so a $2 gift will become a $3 gift. Along with distributing the stretch funding, The Foundation provides organizations with administrative support, such as official tax receipts and promotional resources to help them fundraise during the three-year program.
For more information about the MHTP, visit EndowManitoba.ca.
Manitoba Heritage Trust Program funds
The following funds were established between Oct. 1, 2019 and May 30, 2019.
- Amis du/Friends of Musee de Saint-Boniface Museum Fund
- Buhler Gallery Fund
- Burrough of the Gleann Fund
- Carberry Plains Museum Fund
- Corporation Du Site Historique Monseigneur-Tache Fund
- Fort La Reine Museum and Tourist Bureau Fund
- Keystone Pioneer Museum Fund
- La Maison Gabrielle-Roy Fund
- Lundar Museum Society Fund
- Manitoba Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum Fund
- Manitoba Crafts Museum and Library Inc. Fund
- Mennonite Heritage Village Fund
- Ogniwo Polish Museum Society Fund
- Sipiweske Museum Fund
- Souris Hillcrest Community Corporation Fund
- Strathclair Museum Association Fund
- The Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre Fund
- Transcona Museum Fund
- Watson Crossley Community Museum Fund
- Winkler Heritage Museum Fund
This story is featured in the Summer 2019 issue of our Working Together magazine. Download or view the full issue on our Publications page.