🎉It's Giving Tuesday 🎉

Today is November 29th, also known as Giving Tuesday! As the opening day of giving season, Giving Tuesday is a day dedicated to supporting your favourite organizations and the causes closest to your heart.

This year we're using Giving Tuesday as an opportunity to support our upcoming Clark Centre Art Market and programming. From December 3-18th, 2022, Akin will be hosting a public arts event at the Clark Centre for the Arts in Scarborough, featuring art by local artists around the GTA. Artists of all levels of experience and expression will be exhibiting and selling work through the Winter Arts Market and Group Exhibition.

Our artists are currently preparing their works to be shown and sold and we want to centre them by making this event as accessible as possible for them. Your financial contribution will make that possible.

This Giving Tuesday, with a goal of $5000, we are asking you to give to artists; to support their practices, their work, and to join us in our determination to make space for them in our city.

Visit our link to donate or email info@akincollective.com with any questions or to discuss alternatives to donating online.

It's Giving Tuesday!

Today is November 30th, also known as Giving Tuesday! As the opening day of giving season, Giving Tuesday is a day dedicated to supporting your favourite organizations and the causes closest to your heart.

Our community supports us in countless ways and the past 20 months have cemented our belief in the transformative power of artists coming together when we need them most. We saw it in our Akin Rent Relief Fund, our virtual events, our studios, and amongst our very own members and team. 

[Image Description: On a white background is text that reads How have we allocated resources from the Akin Rent Relief Fund?. A pie graph breaks down three sections: the biggest slice in the darkest orange has text that reads $20,389 distributed out to over a 100 artists." The second slice in orange has text that reads, $1,159 Akin's admin, and the final darker orange slice has text that reads $1640 left in funds. In the right upper corner is the Akin logo.]

Our Akin Rent Relief fund is our pride and joy, supporting over a 100 artists and counting. Providing Akin artist members with anonymous one-time emergency grants towards their studio membership costs, the fund provides short term financial aid in unexpected situations or times of financial instability.

For the next 24 hours, we are hoping to reach a goal of $5000, funds that will allow us to support at least 5 artists per month for the next 5 months. These funds will be placed directly in the hands of our artist studio members.

Image Description: Text that reads Help us reach our goal! $5000. This amount can support 5 artists for the next 5 months. Akin’s logo is at the top right.

This Giving Tuesday, we are asking you to give to artists; to support their practices, their work, and to join us in our determination to make space for them in our city.

We’re grateful for you, and for the effort you put into showing us how essential it is to uplift each other during times of need.

CAMH One Brave Night 2019

From now until May 10th, Akin Dupont member Jill Smith is participating in CAMH's One Brave Night and raising funds to support mental health. Jill Smith recently started a new position at the CAMH Foundation. And this campaign is near and dear to her heart! 

Did you know that one in five Canadians experience mental illness in any given year? And yet many don't consider it a real health issue. By supporting this fundraising campaign with a donation, YOU can shine a spotlight on mental health. Together, we will help shape a world where mental illness is seen in the same light as every other illness, and all people receive the care they need and deserve. 

Jill Smith is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario (1995). Her most recent work explores everyday absurdity, as well as the connective possibilities of materiality. By re-contextualizing familiar motifs with organic, bodily forms, her work calls into question how one both exists and performs as a social body. While Smith’s work stimulates the imagination through whimsical and nonsensical colour and form, it is the relatable, yet ambiguous materiality that offers a platform to question the familiar, and escape to the alien and the uncanny.

As a thank you, for each donation Jill Smith will be making a mini ceramic sculpture. She will be delivering/shipping them to each donor after May 10th. Please donate today and help Jill Smith reach her fundraising goal $1,000.00. Every little bit helps!

Double Your Impact on Giving Tuesday - Support Akin Projects & Project Creative Users

Giving Tuesday is just around the corner – November 29. It’s a global day of giving, and a chance for us to think about the causes we care about.

All donations and contributions made to Akin Projects between now and November 29 will be split equally with another local arts organization near and dear to our heart - Project Creative Users.

Project Creative Users is an arts collective that brings together artists with disabilities to creatively examine social, cultural, and individual understandings of disability and accessibility through a process of exploring what it means to be a “user” in the environments we inhabit. We play with the word “user”, a term used in inclusive design practices wherein disabled people are commonly referred to as “extreme users.”

With your help, we can continue to have a significant positive impact on our city through the arts.

Click here to donate now and support both organisations

ps. Be sure to visit our online shop! Proceeds from all sales go to directly to supporting our initiatives.

#GivingTuesday