• About Us

• What is the CHRC?
• CHRC's Mission
• What CHRC does
• Why CHRC is necessary
• CHRC Board of Directors
• The History of CHRC
• Provincial and Territorial Advisory Committee (PATAC)
• Annual Reports

About Us

> What is the CHRC?

The Cultural Human Resources Council (CHRC) strives to be at the centre of vision and forward thinking in the area of cultural human resources development. CHRC brings together representatives of arts disciplines and cultural industries in the cultural sector to address the training and career development needs of employers and cultural workers including artists, technical staff, managers and all others engaged professionally in the sector.

The cultural sector comprises literally hundreds of occupations in eight broad sub-sectors: live performing arts, writing and publishing, visuals arts and crafts, film and television, broadcasting, digital media, music and sound recording, and heritage. The sector includes employers and workers in several thousand organizations, big and small, not-for-profit and for-profit.

Created in 1995 to strengthen the Canadian cultural workforce, CHRC is one of over 30 sector councils supported by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC). CHRC's membership spans the country, and its members are as diverse as the disciplines and industries they work in.

The Canadian cultural community is large, dynamic, highly skilled and well educated. According to the Culture Statistics Program of Statistics Canada, more than 600,000 Canadians work in the cultural labour force. Almost 70% of these individuals hold a university degree. They are twice as likely to be self-employed, and are typically well motivated, entrepreneurial and creative. Cultural workers contribute an estimated $48 billion to the economy. Further, the number of people working in cultural fields has grown at more than twice the rate of the total workforce over the past 20 years.