The Jacksonville Center for the Arts would like to invite you to join them this Thursday at 3pm for a special event to celebrate a very important milestone in pursuit of a brand new Civic Center for the city of Jacksonville.
The “THANKS A MILLION” party is a public event to thank everyone who has helped the Jacksonville Center for the Arts reach the one-million dollar milestone.
Dr. Susan Weller is the President of the Board for the Jacksonville Center of the Arts. Dr. Weller describes why one million dollars was such a valuable benchmark to reach.
“It took us just a little over two years to get to the one million dollar mark, and that benchmark was set by the city of Jacksonville, who gave us a ninety-eight year lease on the lot that we have where we intend to build the building. So it was kind of an important thing to conform to with the lease that they gave us… A million dollars is just the beginning of what we have to do, but we have to celebrate this because there’s so many people that have been very skeptical about our ability to raise the amount of money that we want to.”
Dr. Weller speaks about the multi-purpose nature of the new building and what has happened in recent years to push the Jacksonville Center for the Arts to strongly pursue the building of a Civic Center.
“It’s going to be an absolutely wonderful building. People can have their conventions, their weddings, their reunions… But also we’re gonna bring in outside people for educations things and for performances and we’re going to make this available to the very rich community we have in the arts and give them a place where they don’t have to worry about not having enough room to do their programs. Just fairly recently, we lost the Jacksonville Theater Guild because they had no adequate place to perform, and we expect to revive them once we get our building built.”
Dr. Weller talks about what the event will feature, and why everyone is welcome.
“We’re going to have some finger foods and wine, beer, coffee, tea, that kind of thing. And we have some new drawings that our architect has put together of the inside of the building, and if people want to take a look and see what it’s going to look like, that’s going to be kind of fun. And then we’re going to have a few people say some things to thank people and we’re going to recognize the people that have been so generous to us. So, it’s going to be quite a little party, sort of an expanded press conference thing, but it’s going to be a nice party.”
The “THANKS A MILLION” party will be held at Schiraz Cafe on the Square located at 27 South Central Park Thursday beginning at 3 pm.