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• organized on-site parking for a final season before responsibility was transferred to the Toronto Parking Authority. For over a decade our operations have enabled as many as thirty-five students each year to earn money for their education, working either as parking attendants or Guardsmen (whose wages we pay in large part). • posted our new website in May. Since then it has had almost 30,000 hits and attracted more than 125 people to subscribe to our Fife and Drum newsletter or join The Friends. • assisted through a link on our website with the recruitment of seventy-five new volunteers who made their debut at Luminato. • fielded a paid Guard of twenty young men and women plus six volunteers under age sixteen. The Guard travelled to Fort George for the Soldiers’ Field Day Drill Competition, and was assisted with costs to go to Queenston on October 13 for a grand re-enactment of the battle where Sir Isaac Brock fell in 1813. • provided Guards of Honour for the Garrison Ball in January and the visit of HRH Prince Charles and PM Stephen Harper to the Fort York Armoury in May. • published five numbers of our Fife and Drum newsletter and e-mailed it to more than 3300 addresses. Included were articles on the Fort York Armoury, the Centennial of the War of 1812, and Barrack Master Henry Evatt. • organized another successful Georgian Dinner for ninetysix people featuring dishes of 200 years ago, many prepared by the Fort’s Volunteer Cooks and served in the style of the period. Profits from the dinner support the Fort York Guard. • celebrated the spectacular installation of The Encampment as part of Luminato in June; also welcomed other events organized by the City of Toronto’s 1812 Bicentennial Committee to animate this special year. • advertised Fort York in four issues of Spacing magazine, building on a series initiated in 2008.
• helped sponsor two Canadian citizenship ceremonies where some eighty people received their certificates. • copied for the record photo albums of activities from 2001 to 2011 loaned to us by a long-serving FY Guardsman. • held board meetings monthly, and turned out at every special event and function held at the fort. • continued to support the site’s Resource Centre by finishing catalogue of the slide collection; by adding to the shelves a large bequest of military books from former MPP Donald C. MacDonald; and by producing the first draft of an index for The Fife and Drum. • sponsored three Parler Fort events during the spring. • welcomed three new directors to our board and saw four others retire. We intend to fill the one vacant place on our board with a colleague having an accounting background. • held a Directors’ Dinner in April for current and former directors of The Friends and Foundation and FY staff. • nominated several of our past and current board members and senior staff to receive Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medals; seven are known to have been honoured. • co-operated with Ryerson University graduate students in their study of possible uses for the Fort York Armoury when National Defence no longer has need for it, and turns it back to the City. • continued a watching brief on issues related to development in the fort’s precinct, particularly along Niagara Street and in the Ordnance Street lands off Strachan Avenue. A Precinct Advisory Committee, established to help us, functioned only intermittently. • advised the Site Administrator on the placement of existing and new flagpoles in a relandscaping of the site concurrent with the building of the Visitor Centre.
What The Friends of Fort York Do: Our Accomplishments for 2012
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