Shaw Festival organizers announced last week that the once more quiet effort to raise $150 million is now an open campaign — something for the world to know about.
The organization announced the creation of the All.Together.Now campaign, which is the newest phase of their long-standing fundraising efforts with the goal of building numerous brand new arts facilities in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The slogan All.Together.Now refers to a common refrain in theatre to encourage everyone in the room to join in the play or the song. The idea of the campaign is to promote the idea that the theatre brings people together and doesn’t isolate them.
Tim Carroll, the artistic director of the Shaw Festival, said that he hopes this idea inspires people to support the organization in what Shaw Festival executive director Tim Jennings said was the “most significant cultural investment in Niagara in the last 100 years.”
“This fundraising effort has been going on since I was here (in 2017),” said Carroll. “We had been raising money quietly but we hadn’t launched the campaign until now. …We will be raising money from everyone and not just the people who knew about it.”
The efforts to raise money through government and private fundraising before the campaign started has resulted in $110 million already having been raised. This leaves $40 million to go.
The Government of Ontario said they were giving $35 million to help rebuild the Royal George Theatre back in April. The federal government has also given $15 million for the development of the Artists’ Village. The Shaw Festival is also waiting to hear from the federal government about funding for the Royal George Theatre.
The rest came from private donations. These include larger donors like the James A. Burton and Family Foundation and Tim and Frances Price, as well as members of the public who wish to donate to the Shaw Festival.
The Shaw Festival’s efforts centre around two main projects. The first is to take down and restore the Royal George Theatre, a 110-year-old theatre in the Historic Old Town which is set demolished due to age and disrepair.
The second is to create a new campus called the Artists’ Village, which is an expansion of the Festival Theatre. They will renovate five decommissioned buildings in the Old Upper Canada Lodge that will be used for seasonal housing for Shaw actors, classrooms, performance spaces, and studios.
The feature of the Artists’ Village particularly singled out for mention by the Shaw Festival is the Burton Centre for Lifelong Creativity, which is meant to be a place where people from all walks of life are encouraged to come to be creative. As per the theme of the campaign, one of the major aims for the centre is for it to be a place that can reduce isolation for more than one million seniors by 2030.
The Artists’ Village will open to the public in May 2026, though Jennings said some outdoor work will continue throughout 2026. The festival’s aim is to demolish the Royal George Theatre in 2026 with the new theatre to open in Fall 2028.
The Shaw Festival also has an offshoot idea from All.Together.Now called the Movement for Real Human Connection. Carroll says this phrase “tells you what we’re really about,” which is using drama to bring people together.
The Shaw Festival is the organization that runs an internationally known summer-long festival, named after famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. It puts on plays in Niagara-on-the-Lake from spring until winter each year. The festival’s website says 10 or more productions are shown in three theatres to an audience of around 250,000 people each year. The festival was founded in 1962.