The new gift means the freshly minted Temerty Community Access and Engagement Fund will support the same no-charge programming this year, with the main floor open to the public for free through the fall. The Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, on Oct. 21, 2024.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
The Royal Ontario Museum will use a new $30-million gift from the Temerty Foundation to endow a new fund for community engagement, hoping to remove barriers to access and to broaden the institution’s visitor base for years to come.
This includes free admission to some or all of the downtown Toronto museum on certain occasions. In recent years, the ROM has allowed free access on Canada Day, while opening up its main floor to guests without charge in the summer. The Temerty Foundation has already supported these efforts with a pilot program.
The new gift means the freshly minted Temerty Community Access and Engagement Fund will support the same no-charge programming this year, with the main floor open to the public for free through the fall – while also helping keep the museum free on the third Tuesday evening of each month.
The ROM planned to announce the gift on Wednesday. In an interview, its director and chief executive officer Josh Basseches said the endowed fund would also boost programming in the short and long terms, allowing the ROM to be flexible as audiences change in the future.
“I would love it if the museum could be free all the time; that would be great, but our financial model doesn’t make that possible,” Mr. Basseches said. “So we were talking with the Temertys about this question: How do we remove barriers? And they came forward with this extraordinary commitment to say they would like to help the ROM do that.”
Massive philanthropic gifts to the cultural world are often tied together with capital campaigns that offer the naming rights to something physical, such as a building wing or academic institution. With the Temertys’ gift focused on programming, Mr. Basseches said, it can help museum leaders “transform what the ROM can be in our community, and to do it for decades and decades to come.”
James and Louise Temerty are already honorary members of the ROM’s board of governors, and Mr. Temerty is a former chair. In the 1980s, he expanded the ComputerLand brand into Canada’s biggest computer retailing network and also founded the renewable energy-focused Northland Power in 1987.
The Temertys launched their namesake foundation in 1997. In 2020, their $250-million gift to the University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine, which now also bears the Temerty name, was heralded as the biggest gift of its kind in Canadian history.
“A future filled with change calls for a strong cultural infrastructure,” Mr. Temerty said in a news release.
The fund will also support the ROM’s Community Access Network program, or ROMCAN, which ensures free access and special programming for often underserved groups. Mr. Basseches suggested the possibility of offering more hands-on tactile tours of its exhibits for sight-impaired visitors.
The museum is in the midst of a major revitalization project it bills as OpenROM, which will reimagine much of its main floor, redesign its Bloor Street West entrance and add 6,000 square feet of new gallery space.
