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Help Canfield Dance Arts Studio Stay Open!

Dear dance community,

We need your help!  We hate to ask, but we have exhausted all other avenues including disaster relief loans and asking our landlord for help. We are at risk of losing our dance studio and Marta’s private medical practice (both small businesses in their infancies). Read on for more details. Any help you could give would be so very appreciated and we would be eternally grateful. 

For those of you who do not know us: 

We are Paul and Marta Canfield. We live in Upstate NY (Finger Lakes Region) and have a dance studio (mostly West Coast Swing) in Horseheads, NY that we just opened in July of 2019. (See our Facebook pageCanfield Dance Arts Facebook Page  for pictures of the construction process!) Our business, Canfield Dance Arts has been around since November 2016. Last year we had the opportunity to create our own studio and in the short 9 months we were open before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we had some of the most amazing moments in our dance lives. We had so much fun with our dancing community in our studio space. Robert Royston and Brandi Guild came to teach their amazing intensive. The legendary John Lindo came to teach workshops and dance the night away with us last December for our Holiday Dance. Not to mention ALL the JT Swing Team practices! Plus the NEW and seasoned dancers from the community that supported us for our weekly lessons and monthly dances. You can learn more at our website: www.canfielddancearts.com.

We are at risk of losing the studio space because we have been closed - completely - since March 12th, 2020.  We are having a hard time covering our overhead including the lease each month. (NYS has not allowed us to open at all. We 100% agree with this policy.) Marta’s part time private medical office shares the space and has had to pay all the overhead for the lease space since March. Even the medical practice has seen a reduction in revenue during this pandemic and very soon it will no longer be able to continue to pay the rent.  We are at risk of losing both of our small businesses at the same time.

www.canfielddancearts.com 

We have applied for numerous disaster loans and only qualified for a small one early in the pandemic. Even our small business advisor is baffled that we are falling through the cracks because we don’t qualify for programs. He has truly gone above and beyond for us. We are in the 4th year of both businesses and we haven’t been able to pay ourselves yet, nor afford to have employees. All the Paycheck Protection Programs and a lot of the disaster loans require you to have employees in order to qualify for funding. Our landlord has only offered a 50% deferral on the lease. If we do that, our lease cost will go up in 2021. We can’t afford that either. We signed a 5 year lease in 2019 with the hopes we’d be dancing in our studio for many years to come. 

Our hope is to be here when we are all finally able to dance again. We have been urged by our close friends in the dance community to do a GoFundMe. We are humbly asking for your help because we can not continue on this course and keep our studio.  We’ve tried for 9 months to do it by ourselves. We are running out of options.  Thank you for taking the time to read our story and consider donating.

With humble gratitude, 

Paul and Marta Canfield
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Donations 

  • Jacqueline Sanders
    • $25 
    • 3 yrs
  • Sandy Else
    • $50 
    • 3 yrs
  • Anonymous
    • $10 
    • 3 yrs
  • Tara Welkley
    • $30 
    • 3 yrs
  • Rachel Eckert
    • $20 
    • 3 yrs
Donate

Organizer

Marta Canfield
Organizer
Beaver Dams, NY

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