CityStudio is an award-winning, transferable partnership model between a municipal government and their local academic institution(s).
Strong commitments from municipal and academic leadership and trusting partnerships are key to the success of your CityStudio.
The subscription agreement clearly outlines how we will achieve success together.
The CityStudio model revolves around an annual cycle that begins with a project development workshop that leads to community-based projects, the HUBBUB project showcase, and project evaluation.
The CityStudio Network will support you with training, knowledge exchange, one-on-one mentorship and advising, as well as troubleshooting.
This can take from a few months to up to a year or more depending on your readiness. Steps 1 and 2 of our 5-Step process (from interest to licence) tend to take about a year, but it depends on how established the relationships and collaborations are between the municipality and the academic institution. The launch record is four months. Once we understand your readiness we can provide a realistic timeline for you.
Once you’ve received your membership and licence, you can immediately begin hiring for your CityStudio Projects Coordinator. Training and onboarding of the Projects Coordinator will take up to a few months. From there, you can begin sourcing project ideas from the municipal staff and connecting with relevant academic stakeholders. We offer a suggested Annual Cycle to provide more guidance on this.
There are two costs: Set up costs and Ongoing Costs. Set up includes your subscription fees, licence, and training. Ongoing costs include staffing, space, and operations (including office costs, event costs, and marketing and communications).
In terms of the subscription fees, we have a tiered structure to make our offering accessible to variously-sized municipalities and schools. Please get in touch with us to learn more about how we do this.
A new CityStudio can be funded in a variety of ways. The key principle is that it is a collaborative funding model with a combination of cash and in-kind contributions from all of the key partners, including the municipality, the school(s), and potentially additional community partners, such as non-profit organizations. We suggest that when starting out, you secure financial commitments to last you the first 3 years, so that you’re able to adequately build your CityStudio.
Once you and your partners are ready and have signed the subscription agreements, we will provide you with the following: Bespoke coaching to help you get set up; Training and certification for your CityStudio Projects Coordinator; the Brand package with your new CityStudio logo; a suite of templates to help you get set up quickly; your login to the CityStudio Network member-only online community; and assistance with building and amplifying your launch announcement.
Our agreements are five years in length, and renewable thereafter.
Yes, inclusiveness is a core principle of the model. You are more than welcome to include any/all of the academic institutions within your area.
Yes, there are ways to do this and we have examples within our network. Please reach out to discuss the details of your context.
At CityStudio Vancouver, we believe that good projects come from good relationships with our partners, students and community – whether in Vancouver or beyond. Even more, we understand the importance of building trust as part of this process.
Positive, open and respectful communication is a key part of how we build these trust-based relationships and we are committed to protecting the personal information you share with us.
The privacy policy below – which is a summary of our full policy – outlines our best efforts to fulfill this commitment, while also ensuring we can communicate widely, personally and accurately in the most cost-effective way possible.
CityStudio may need to collect your personal information, which means any information that can be used to identify you as an individual, including your name, date of birth and image, as well as your personal contact information, like your mailing address, personal email address and phone number. It also includes any personal finance information like bank account and credit card details.
We collect this information in a variety of ways, including website forms, surveys, over the phone and in person.
There are a number of reasons why we may ask for this information, including to fulfill newsletter subscriptions, to process a donation or rental agreement, or to invite you to relevant events. We will always let you know the purpose for collecting your information ahead of time, if it isn’t clear already.
We may use cookies and other technology to learn how you use our website and to help make it more user-friendly. Information collected this way may include (but is not limited to) your IP address, the type of web browser and operating system you used, and which of our web pages you visited. We also track open and click-through rates of our emails to help us learn the type of content you’re interested in.
We may also collect “anonymous” data using tools like Google Analytics that tells us how you use our website, including link clicks, page visits and time spent on a webpage. This is collected when you interact with our website, social media channels or emails and helps us ensure the content we’re providing is relevant.
CityStudio will always obtain your consent to collect, use or disclose your personal information. Sometimes consent is given in writing, like when you sign our studio consent form at the beginning of term. Other times consent is implied, like when we’ve posted a Notice of Photography and offered you an opportunity to opt-out of having your photo taken. Consent is also implied when you provide us with your personal information for a clear purpose – for example, subscribing to our email newsletter.
We will never collect, use or disclose your information without your knowledge or consent, except in special circumstances, like when it’s required by law or in the case of a life-threatening emergency. (Read more about that here.)
We will also never use your information for purposes other than those identified at the time of collection, unless you give us consent (written or implied) to do so.
We will never sell your personal information to other organizations.
We are committed to ensuring your personal information is secure and protecting it from unauthorized access, collection, use, disclosure, copying, modification, disposal or similar risks. We do this by ensuring all hard copies are kept locked and physically secured, employee access is restricted and granted only when appropriate and necessary, and all technology is secured with user IDs and passwords.
We will also use security measures when destroying your personal information such as shredding documents and deleting electronically stored information.
CityStudio doesn’t always collect and store personal information in our own systems. We sometimes use third parties like Mailchimp (for our email newsletters) and Eventbrite (for event registration) which store your information on their own servers, sometimes located in other countries like the United States. However, we only use third party services that are committed to the safety and security of your information.
Your information is yours. With limited exceptions, you are allowed to view the information we hold on you, learn how we may use it and request a correction. To request access or a correction, please submit your request in writing.
Yes. Please get in touch if you want us to stop using your information in a particular way and we will fulfill your request as soon as possible. We will be sure to let you know if this will restrict our ability to provide a particular service to you.
You can unsubscribe from our email newsletters by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the email.
As mentioned, CityStudio sometimes uses cookies and other technology to collect anonymous data. To stop this from happening, you can adjust your web browser’s “cookie” and “cache” settings. Please note, doing this may impact the performance of our website and your experience interacting with it.
We may occasionally change this policy without notice. Changes will be reflected on this page as well as in our full policy.
This page is a summary of our full privacy policy, which provides more detail about our policies and practices. Our privacy policy explains how CityStudio Vancouver collects, uses and discloses personal information in accordance with British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our privacy officer at media[at]citystudiovancouver[dot]com.
