Why donate to Apartment613?

Apartment613 Community Initiatives is a registered, not-for-profit media organization providing a free digital platform for Ottawa news, ideas, art and culture.

Apartment613 is a volunteer organization that has spent more than 10 years writing and publishing an award-winning arts and culture blog, Apt613.ca. Artists and volunteers started this organization, as a project among friends, to help others discover and connect with arts, culture, and events happening in Ottawa. We have evolved from there, but funding for Apt613.ca has not kept up with the need and demand for local arts media.

In recent years, Apartment613 has begun trying to fill a critical gap in what has become a sparse local media landscape. Ottawa newsrooms have shrunk and many community newspapers have closed down. Our local stories are going untold and many arts and culture producers are not getting the publicity they need to succeed.

Apartment613 may look like a professional media organization, when in reality we’re more like three squirrels in a trench coat. Working here is a side gig for all of the staff members, due to a lack of available funding to support full-time hires. We rely on grants and advertising revenues to sustain our work, and we lost 90% of those ad revenues in 2020, thanks to the pandemic.

The fact is, Apartment613 can no longer rely on ads to fund this project, nor are they sufficient to foster sustainable growth and move us toward professionalizing the organization.

We want to continue to meet and exceed your expectations for local arts and culture coverage and expand the work we do in the #ottarts community. We want to see more of Ottawa’s diversity represented on our platform. But we can’t do it without your help.

The goal of our first-ever Patreon campaign is to provide more and better-paid opportunities for our current staff as well as for new positions at Apt613. We aim to hire reporters, writers, music, performing arts and food editors, and photographers, prioritizing diversity when hiring for these new positions. We want to better reflect our community and have the resources to properly pay our contributors.

If you don’t have the means to subscribe to our Patreon right now, that’s okay. There are other free ways you can support Apartment613, including:

• Supporting the businesses which support us
• Reading the blog and sharing with friends
• Following @apt613 on social media
• Showing your support for another project (a small handful of our favourite non-profits are Le Pressoir, Ottawa Showbox, CHUO, and CKCU)
• Whitelisting Apt613.ca if you use an adblocker software

Everyone is welcome at Apartment613, so grab a beverage and come on over!