SUPPORTERS

Supporting the Six String Nation

This project was made possible by a handful of corporate and patron donations along with hundreds of individual contributions to make us ready for our debut on Parliament Hill on Canada Day 2006.

Of course, bringing the Six String Nation presentation to your festival, event, school, or community is the most experiential way to support our work, but donations are also hugely helpful!

Donations allow us to work in under-resourced schools, where even a reasonable per-student fee can be prohibitive.
Donations pay for transportation and accommodations across Canada, so that we can connect with schools and communities in every province and territory, even when they cannot afford the full cost of the trip.

We welcome any amount, large or small. Our newsletter will keep you up to date on our progress as we work to establish an endowment to help provide travel, accommodation and fee subsidies to struggling communities. Purchases of Six String Nation books and merchandise are another source of support.

Our goal is to be able to deliver the project to any place in Canada that would like to have us.

If you have additional ideas or resources that can help, we’d love to hear from you.

We are extremely grateful to have some brilliant partners to help us not only with the upkeep of Voyageur but with the enhancement of our public and educational offerings.

From almost the very beginning, D’Addario Canada has been beyond generous in supporting the project on an ongoing basis, providing a steady supply of fresh guitar strings, guitar maintenance products, tuners, capos and things like that. They’ve brought us to industry functions and provided great advice and contacts, not to mention prizes for special events we’ve done from time to time. And they also provide us with custom Six String Nation guitar picks. Many of these picks are given away to the countless performers and volunteers who play a part in our presentations and portrait sessions but we do offer a small number for sale in packs of six – another way D’Addario helps to keep us going!

We first met Esri Canada president Alex Miller at a surveyors’ conference in Yellowknife. Apart from running a cutting edge GIS mapping company, Alex is a keen singer and musician and immediately saw in Six String Nation a project he could get behind. We’ve presented at many events for Esri Canada, including corporate retreats, conferences and user community forums from Halifax to Toronto to Vancouver. They’ve made me a GIS Ambassador for my work in schools and collaborated with me to create a series of activities students can engage in following or preceding a Six String Nation presentation using their ArcGIS mapping platform. They also provided the map images and animations you see in a Six String Nation presentation.

In Canada, education is a Provincial jurisdiction – so providing the appropriate materials to best meet the requirements of provincially-established curriculum and guidelines is a bigger job than we can handle ourselves. But through some of our contacts in the educational field we were introduced to Gillian Judson and her colleagues at imaginEd and the Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education (CIRCE) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Their work in the field of imagination-focussed learning lines up so neatly with the ways in which Six String Nation engages students that we are exploring ways to build resources that any school in any part of the country can use to examine notions of history, geography, identity, music, math, and any number of subjects touched on in the Six String Nation project in a profoundly integrated and, yes, imaginative way.

We’re just at the beginning of this journey together so look for more exciting developments to come!

Partnership opportunities

Does your organization have strong roots in Canada?

Do you value the diversity within your organization?

Are you looking to inspire the connections that lie just under the surface of your talent pool?

Are you looking for creative ways to connect to a diverse community or attract diverse customers?

We'd love to come and share the story of the Six String Nation with you and your team, of course, but perhaps there are opportunities for a more robust connection and we're always looking for sponsors.

Single events and promotions or longer term projects, we'd love to hear from you! Please contact us!