Garth Spencer was the last winner of the Canadian Unity Fan Fund in 2023 and therefore is the fund administrator. He says none of his efforts to get a convention to host a CUFF delegate, raise funds, or attract a candidate to succeed him, have borne fruit. So he has published the following statement titled “I’m Giving Up”.
I’M GIVING UP
Many of you don’t know this, but once upon a time, fans started fan funds, so that well-known fans could show up in places where other fans would like to meet them. That was back when fans wanted to know about other fans from other places.
About the 1980s, some Canadian fans thought it would be a good idea to have a national fan fund, so that well-known fans from one side of the country could meet fans on the other side of the country.
Today, a lot of fans don’t know anything about fans from outside their city, or outside their fandom. Today, a lot of fans don’t know what a fan fund is. Over the past year, I have been trying to advertise the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, raise support, and raise funds.
Despite my best efforts to spread the word to conventions and clubs, very few people have responded. I really didn’t realize how unknown fan funds are, to contemporary fans.
Very few people have made bids on the items CUFF offers for sale.
No Canadian conventions have offered to host a fan fund delegate. This is a problem because scheduling the CUFF nomination and election process depends on when the destination convention is scheduled. (Nominations and election also depend on fans knowing about, and participating in this fan fund.)
Nobody has expressed an interest in standing as CUFF delegate in 2025 or 2026. Admittedly, I haven’t gotten as far as soliciting candidates.
So, I’m giving up.
If fans in Canada just don’t know or care what a fan fund is, there is not much point in doing this anymore.
[Reposted with permission. Thanks to Danny Sichel for the story.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
There are many SF writers and conferences in Canada who support and host foreign writers. Surely Canadian fans can do the same for fellow citizens.
The fan-led and -organized, written-SF-oriented, English-language conventions of Vancouver (VCON), Calgary (Con-Version), Toronto (Ad Astra), and Montreal (Con*Cept), are long gone.
Keycon (Winnipeg) is the lone survivor, Keycon 41 happening this year, in May.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
The demographics are changing in many ways. I’ve come across (mostly younger) fans and even aspiring writers who don’t even know SFF magazines exist, for instance.
Garth was the CUFF delegate to Pemmi-Con. Garth had been a CUFF delegate before, and this time I think he took it up for the good of the cause. If he hadn’t, then we’d have had nobody when Fran Skene, the previous CUFF administrator, passed away. Garth has been stalwart, but squeezing water from a stone never was in the job description.
A number of US conventions have gone away, or are going through major changes. It seems like the same thing is happening in Canada, but Canadian fandom is more spread out and has smaller groups. The SARS-COV-2 pandemic hit hard and some groups are still working to come back from it.
On Pemmi-Con, I worked with some younger local fans from Winnipeg, and they were great. But there should have been a lot more of them. I was hoping to go to KeyCon, the local convention, and meet the local fans, but it was on hiatus. John Mansfield passed away, which was a big loss. A few local fans found us and volunteered anyway, for which I am very grateful. Meeting and working with them was the highlight of the con for me.
If the Worldcon is in Montreal in 2027, that could be a good time to revive CUFF. There also is the Edmonton in 2030 bid. WCSFA is holding one-day events and rebuilding their organization, to bring back VCON. I’m hopeful for all these efforts, and wish them success.