Edmonton Fringe Festival hits fundraising goal with $58,000 donation

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The Edmonton International Fringe Festival has hit its $300,000 fundraising goal, thanks to a last-minute donation from an Edmonton company.

The festival announced at a news conference Thursday that it fulfilled its Sustain Fringe fundraising goal of $300,000, thanks in no small part to a $58,000 donation from Edmonton-based medical supply company, MHCare Medical.

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“To receive such generous support from an organization like MHCare Medical to help us reach our goal today, we are overwhelmed,” said Fringe executive director Megan Dart. “We are overjoyed. We are so excited that we get to now look forward to the future sustainability of our organization and to next year’s event with more optimism, to be quite frank.”

As the festival wrapped up Sunday, $242,000 had been raised through online and on-site donations — a number that Dart says is impressive but still would have limited the scope of future Fringe events. According to Blayne Iskiw, MHCare Medical executive vice president, when his office heard that the Fringe was going to fall short of their donation goal, pushing them across the finish line with a big donation was a “no-brainer.”

“It was consensus across our executive team,” Iskiw said. “We’re all Edmontonians, we all grew up here. So everyone knows the Fringe, we’ve all been there at some point in our lives and our kids are going to be going there if they haven’t already. From discussion to execution, this whole thing happened in about 72 hours.”

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Had MHCare not made its surprise donation, Dart said, the Fringe could have been forced to charge for, or even eliminate, some of the free programming the Fringe offers, like Kids Fringe.

“Even fathoming the idea that we might have to reimagine how we deliver that program in a much smaller scale is a total heartbreak,” Dart said. “It’s an absolute heartbreak and not something that we want to take from the community because we know how important it is. Kids Fringe alone sees 15,000 visits from local families, and this year we had 800 daycare visits.

“It was quite a vulnerable thing for us to come out in March and say we’re in trouble, we need help. The response was so immediate and so overwhelming.”

MHCare was a major supplier of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic. In late 2022 and early 2023, the company was contracted to import the province’s ill-fated foreign shipment of children’s pain medication. Several Alberta government ministers and staff attended Edmonton Oilers playoffs games this spring in the company’s luxury box.

rostad@postmedia.com

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