Prince George, B.C.  – The Province has announced an  $8 million dollar  fund  to mark  Canada’s 150th  birthday  with dollars to go towards  projects  that  celebrate  the history of B.C. its culture, heritage and contribution  to the country.  Grants of up to $100 thousand dollars will be  available,  and that’s great news for a project Exploration Place in Prince George  is already  developing.

“We are actually in the process of creating  a new permanent First Nations Gallery in conjunction with  the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation, so we’ve  been looking for major funding streams” says Exploration Place CEO Tracy Calogheros.

Exploration Place already has  an application into to the Virtual Museums of Canada program for one grant,  and will  submit  an application  to the newly announced  B.C. program  to see if they can land dollars for  display cases and the mounts they   need for the textiles that will be part of the exhibit.

Calogheros says this  exhibit  has several streams “There is an online  component and digitization component.  We  have a large  collection of oral histories that are on reel to reel tapes and cassette tapes.  They are coming past their physical life spans,  so we need to get them  exported over to a new medium.  That  in and of itself is a  about a $300 thousand dollar project and that’s where we sought funding  through Virtual Museums of Canada.”  She says they expect to hear this spring if that application was successful.

The actual  physical permanent  exhibit has a budget of about $150 thousand    says Calogheros.  “When you’re working with textiles, in particular,  furs, natural  materials,  they are really, really fragile, so we need to go the full mile on  proper lighting as well  as  climate control on the cases and mounts,  and it’s  so expensive.   We are planning to build a whole  pit house  inside  the permanent gallery space.  We’ve got some ideas around  interactive media,  interactive floors,  we want to have some teaching space in it,  so  it’s not a huge  gallery, but it is an expensive one.”  So  a $100 thousand dollar grant  under the new Provincial  funding would be, in  her words “outstanding.”

The deadline for applications is  February 10th,  less than a month away,  but Calogheros says already having a project in  development means they will have  enough time  to  submit an application “When you’ve got money available to you,  you drop everything and do what needs to be done  and that’s what we’re going to do.  Because we’ve already  got this exhibit in the pipeline,  it allows us to be able to   submit  to this (Provincial) funding program.”