Today CAN brings you "The Funder's Tale," in which Dan Yashinsky, an award-winning Canadian storyteller, ponders his new job at the Toronto Arts Council. "After 25 years of being a freelance storyteller," writes Yashinsky, "I decided to apply for a straight job. I saw an ad for Community Arts grants officer at Toronto Arts Council, did an interview and, to my real surprise, was accepted. But when I heard the news, I lost my voice for a week." Adjusting to his first job "with benefits," Yashinky began seriously to think about community art and its relation to social change: "Will community arts produce concrete and measurable change in our social habitat? Perhaps. But what it will undeniably do, beyond all theories and definitions, is give us new ways, hard as they may be to measure, to express why those changes are necessary and new ways to make them." This essay is the online line debut of a story from The New Quarterly’s jam-packed issue for Winter, 2006/07, "The Artist as Activist," published in tandem with a similarly themed issue of Alternatives magazine; both were guest-edited by Susan L. Scott. [LINK]