Alec's 2026 Chair report

Chairman’s Report Alec Pearson, May 3, 2026

I’m happy to report on another incredibly successful season. This year once again saw recordbreaking audience numbers at our concerts, thriving social and outreach activities and our healthiest budget numbers to date.

Since our last AGM, we enjoyed our two summer festivals, each of which could have had its own report written about it. We organised a 4-concert international artist series featuring: Tariq Harb, Celso Machado & Josh Searles, Leonela Alejandro (GFA) and Aurora Orsini. The season was well-received and well attended. In addition to our own numerous events and activities, VCGS has also helped advertise almost 2 dozen local events throughout the city featuring guitar.

For the students and local guitar enthusiasts of Vancouver, we continue our monthly guitar socials, our semi-annual student open-stages and our support of local competitions through scholarship funding. We’ve organised masterclasses for students of all ages and levels. For the first time, we introduced an annual bursary project to help support some of our locals participating in the Northwest Guitar festival, held this year in Victoria. At that festival, many of our locals had a strong showing, particularly in the youth category. Congratulations to Rayna Jui-Chen Hsaio (Vancouver - youth 1st prize), Tiger Chen (Richmond - youth 2nd prize), and Bowen Sun (Richmond - youth 3rd prize). This bursary is planned to continue annually to support students and budding professionals.

One of the major highlights for me, this past season, was our “Rising Stars!” concert featuring young award-winning local guitarists Tiger Chen, Eileen (Haoyue) Tang, Justin Zhou and the already renowned and decorated Catherine Huo. The concert was very well attended, and the level of playing was truly impressive in every sense. We must congratulate these students’ teachers, Alan Liu, Luis Medina and of course, our former VCGS chair and continued pillar of our community, Galina Jitlina. In many senses, the success and inspiration that radiate from these students is a reflection of the community building and efforts of the VCGS. While we may not present a youth concert every year, this is an event that is most certain to return.

Another major highlight for me was the announcement and down payment on a future asset for the VCGS, a newly ordered guitar by Sunshine Coast's renowned luthier, Martin Blackwell. While the arrival of this guitar will be a few years away, it will create opportunities for local students and professionals in need to perform and record on a truly world-class instrument. This is an opportunity that may not otherwise exist for them and can make all the difference in a competitive field where the smallest margins can make or break one’s success. In another sense, VCGS will feel honoured to cherish this instrument as a reminder of the world-class builders that live at our doorstep, built from the trees that grow on these lands. This is also an investment that symbolises our maturing ability to project our good intentions farther into the future.

Finally, I want to mention our two wonderful VCGS Ensemble concerts led by Michael Kolk. The VCGS ensemble, it should be noted, seems to continuously prove itself as a source of enthusiasm and community building. This year, the ensemble celebrated its first commission of a new ensemble work written by yours truly (Alec Pearson). The ensemble will continue to commission works from local composers and has already engaged both Denys Pachenko and Stanton Jack to this end.

Never before has the Vancouver Classic Guitar Society been able to not only support the performers and audiences in our city, but now we broaden our horizons and are growing our support for our students, composers and guitar builders in new and exciting ways.

Like a growing tree, our roots are thickening and spreading. In no particular order, I would like to take a moment to thank the wonderful volunteers who have been cultivating this growth. Without their cheerful, shining examples, our community would recede and diminish.

I would like to thank:

• Valerie Boser in her role as Secretary and Publicity Director. Having her enthusiasm, dedication, and clear communication on this team has been a chairperson's dream. To list everything Valerie has a hand in would take too long for this meeting.

• Jason Park for his dedication to fostering our monthly socials group. Jason is also the go-to person when we have a tech sticking point. He is amazingly reliable and never afraid to take on a daunting task.

• Veronika Csizmok works alongside Jason to help keep our website up to date and looking fresh. She also reliably exports sales data to the team and helps out at events whenever we need her.

• Wakako Morris and Romulus Lubbong for their work on the financials. They are a force working hard in the background that keeps this entire operation moving smoothly and reliably. They also play a role in the foreground, helping with the refreshments at every concert event.

• Francis Lumibao is our dedicated photographer, videographer and editor. His efforts help to capture all of the magical moments this society creates.

• Luis Medina, who, even though he now lives in Toronto, makes an effort to attend every meeting the guitar society schedules. Luis plans our local summer festival, which is no small feat. This event fills in the gaps of our off-season and has created amazingly memorable moments.

• Owen Brundige, who is Valerie’s reliable helper with the newsletter and an aspiring and developing guitarist in his own right.

• Tejay Liao, who has helped us get to know our performers better and more closely with his awesome interview series. Tejay has also been wonderful in his role as Volunteer Director, helping to organise all of the helping hands at our society concerts.

There are many tasks these team members complete which I haven’t listed and also many other people I would like to thank including Galina Jitlina, Michael Kolk, Christian Reuten, Susana Valente and so many more volunteers.

I would also like to thank our sponsors, Lochhead Precision Engineering, Alan and Gwendoline Pyatt Foundation, RTU Power & Controls Ltd, Octave Landscape Architecture, Music stores - Long & McQuade, Tom Lee, Tapestry and the British Columbia Gaming Grants for their continued support. I also wanted to thank a new sponsor who hasn’t yet been added to our promotional materials, “Clamptek Enterprise Co., Ltd” (www.clamptekglobal.com), who has made a very generous monthly donation to the guitar society. From Clamptek, Elizabeth and her family are new to Vancouver and have decided to make this monthly donation to the society because “I believe it will be one of the great music societies in Vancouver”. Thank you, Elizabeth. I believe we all agree with you

In addition to our amazing sponsors, we have numerous donors who have made contributions of all sizes. You are all greatly appreciated.

Finally, there is one more large milestone the society will now cross. Up until now, society has always said that we are “completely volunteer-run”. It’s been a point of pride for the society, but it’s something we will no longer be able to claim. This is because I will be stepping down from the chair position, having served in this role since 2017, and moving into a contracted paid position as Executive and Artistic Director which will run full time May through August and part time throughout the rest of the year. I will of course continue to volunteer throughout the year, but in the interest of forgoing any perceived conflicts of interest, I will be stepping down from the board. The board will then serve as an oversight committee for the work I will do. The board will also decide on the exact value of this contract in a future meeting once I am no longer on the board. This will follow a small fundraising campaign I will launch very soon to help offset some of the expenses to the society.

As our society has grown, so has the workload. My mission with this new position is two-fold. Firstly, I would like to lessen the burden on our existing volunteers. For example, there are many aspects of preparing our concert season and activities which I can now easily handle in the offseason. Secondly, it will allow me to focus and grow the society in ways that simply were not possible before. For example, I would like to more actively pursue sources of funding, more collaborations with local groups, and perhaps start to look at ways that guitar education can be made more readily available to the general public. I look forward to hearing from our board what other wish list items they will want me to focus on over this summer.

This paid position is the first movement in this direction, but I hope it will not be the last. I hope that we can continue to offer more paid work for some of the work done at VCGS. While volunteer work will always be a core component of society, I think in the very long view of things, more paid work will be a necessary step to take in order to guarantee this organisation's sustainability and growth.

Thank you all for taking the time to listen to these reflections. It has been a pleasure to serve as chair for these years, and I am excited by the future prospects of this wonderful community we have all built together.

Alec Pearson (VCGS Chair)