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Arts Incubator

•In 2001, the Brampton Arts Council worked with a group of professional visual artists to form Beaux-Arts Brampton, with the purpose of managing the incubator.

•The Brampton Arts Council also negotiated for Theatricality Plus Theatre School to be located in downtown.  These entrepreneurship projects have proven to be quite successful.  The Brampton Theatre School has since outgrown the facility and has moved across Main St.

•This incubator became known outside of Brampton.  In 2002, it caught the eye of Toronto organization, Artscape. Artscape invited 12 Ontario organizations to participate in its first year-long development program called Creative Clusters Development Program.  The Brampton Arts Council was chosen as one of the twelve.

•Senior practitioners in the arts and development industries guided participants in developing the capacity to create, build and manage multi-tenant arts centres in their community.

•Since then, the BAC has been advocating these “multi tenant” models to be developed in Brampton.

Incubator History

As the development of the HACE™ Program progressed, the City of Brampton’s Downtown Task Force (DTF) was running in tandem.

The DTF’s Arts Facilities Sub Committee was formed to examine the possible role the arts could play in the revitalization of the historic Brampton Downtown District by using a two step approach.

1. Professional and other artists were surveyed as to their needs and interest in working in a facility that may be located in the historic Downtown District, and
2. Members of the Sub-committee performed site visits of multidisciplinary arts facilities in both Toronto and Glen Williams.

This Sub-Committee’s recommendation was that the Brampton Arts Council work with the City’s Parks & Recreation Department to develop a proposal for either the renovation of existing space, or the construction of new space in the historic downtown core for the purpose of a professional arts studio and retail space.

The Final DTF Report stated, under Goal 2, #11, “Work actively with the Brampton Arts Council to ensure that a Professional Artists Facility is established in Downtown Brampton.  The City will facilitate processes to assist in enabling this exciting and creative opportunity to be located in one of Downtown’s Facilities.”

One of the initiatives of HACE™ was to establish an “incubator” –a small business mentoring and training centre for the arts in downtown Brampton.  (Involves acquiring/leasing a property for the purposes of job creation and business start-up/expansion in the HACE™ sector with a strong artistic bias).

Based on DTF recommendations, the HACE™ incubator component became reality, with the City leasing to The Brampton Arts Council 2 Main Street buildings.