By  The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra

Earlier this week, we at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, together with our colleagues at Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies, were pleased to announce a $100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to support our new strategic alliance. We are extremely grateful to Knight Foundation for providing this start-up capital for our alliance. We thought we would take this opportunity to share a little more about the partnership.

At the heart of the SPCO/GTCYS partnership is belief that working together we can better serve our common community. But what does working together mean in the context of this alliance? In our case it means sharing space and sharing infrastructure. GTCYS moved into our space and will have access to office equipment, IT services and our development (fundraising) resources. The SPCO will not do GTCYS’ fundraising for them, nor will the SPCO provide access to our donor base. Instead we will help GTCYS develop a strategic fundraising plan drawing on our deep experience and the best practices we have developed over time. We will then advise them on implementation, drawing again on our best practices and collective judgment. In return for sharing our space and fundraising infrastructure, GTCYS provides the SPCO with a management fee.

In addition to the space and infrastructure sharing, this alliance provides a platform for further programmatic collaboration. We are already having conversations about how the SPCO and GTCYS can do more in the community than we could do on our own, and we look forward to being able to share and implement some of these ideas in the near future.