The yaks will be back next year.
The shaggy beasts, along with all the other critters at the High Park Zoo, aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. On Monday Councillor Sarah Doucette announced a surprise donor has stepped forward to provide funding for the beleaguered attraction that should be enough to keep it running until at least 2013.
At a packed meeting at the Grenadier Restaurant in the heart of High Park, Doucette told the crowd that the Honey Family Foundation has committed to matching donations made to the to the zoo through the city’s Parks and Trees account, to a maximum of $50,000.
The foundation’s offer is good until June 15, but the group had also pledged to match donations in 2013 and 2014 up to the same amount.
The zoo still needs a long-term funding strategy, but Doucette hailed what she called “a very generous offer” from the foundation.
“We needed time,” she told reporters after the announcement, which was attended by roughly 150 people.
“This has really allowed us to have that time we asked the city to give us and the city didn’t give us.”
Funding for the zoo was cut under Rob Ford’s 2012 budget with little advance notice, and is set to run out in June of this year. But with $40,000 already raised through donations, it will only take another $30,000 from the public and a matched contribution from the Honey Family to approach the $114,000 it would take to maintain the animals for the remainder of the year.
Over 12 months, it costs $227,000 to keep the zoo’s 50 animals, which include bison, llamas, emu, reindeer, and capybara.
Almost as important as the cash injection itself, the guarantee of more money over the next three years means zoo supporters can start working on a long-term business plan, which Doucette says will likely hinge on a large corporate sponsorship supplemented by donations.
She’s already had conversations with interested companies, but before they put any money on the table they want guarantees the historic attraction is going to be sticking around.
“They say… call us when your zoo’s staying open,” she said. “We’ll be calling them very soon.”
The plight of the zoo, which has been part of the park for 112 years, prompted an outpouring of support from the local community. Volunteers took in $10,000 in the past four days alone as visitors streamed in to see the annual spectacle of cherry trees in bloom. An online campaign has raised $18,000 so far.
At Monday’s meeting other fundraising ideas were floated, including charging visitors higher prices to feed the animals, marketing “zoo poo” as fertilizer, and even making sweaters out of llama fur. Efforts to generate revenue are hampered however by the fact that when John George Howard donated the park to Toronto in 1873 it was on the condition that it remain free to its residents forever, meaning the zoo can’t charge for admission.
As supporters breathe a sigh of relief, they can only speculate about the organization that has gifted the zoo its reprieve. Little is known about the Honey Family Foundation, and even Doucette hasn’t spoken directly with any of its representatives. Instead they approached her last week through another group, the Toronto Community Foundation.
The councillor says all she knows about them is that they’re local residents who love the park.
