Inside the Yukon's non-profit casino

Dawson City, Yukon is home to Canada's only non-profit casino. Diamond Tooth Gertie's Gambling Hall welcomes visitors from around the world. And all the money it makes goes into funding Dawson's local tourism organization, the Klondike Visitors Association. We visited Gertie's to learn more during our recent trip to Dawson City. Andy, thank you so much for being here with me at Gertie's in Dawson City. Of course, yeah, happy to be here. Why don't you just start by giving me kind of a brief history of where we are? Absolutely. So this is Diamond Tooth Gertie's, which is in the Arctic Brotherhood Hall. So this building was around since the gold rush, late 1800s, but now it is the only non-profit casino in Canada. So in 1971, we opened this building as a casino. And it's run by the Klondike Visitors Association, which is a non-profit in town that does marketing for the town. Let's talk about that non-profit structure you mentioned. It's the only casino in Canada that's a non-profit. So how does that work? Yeah, so, I mean, the organization, the Klondike Visitors Association, started in the 50s as a way when the capital moved from Dawson City to Whitehorse. People in Dawson wanted to make sure tourists were still coming. We needed a reason to be on the map and to still like make a big punch. So they would dress up in old-timey clothes, go down to the river and welcome the boats. It's kind of a grassroot start in the in 1952 and then over the years that has expanded. I'm excited. And one of the fundraisers they used to do was on the SS Kino which is on the riverfront and they would just do charity casino nights on that and then that turned into Gertie's. And so all of the money from Gertie's goes back into the community mostly through wages. Wages, contracts, we have a show three times a night all summer long with professional dancers, musicians, crew, cast, like the whole nine yards. So things like that take up the majority of it. But there's also like we do KVA grants which is we give grants to non-profit organizations in Dawson to put on events or whatever kind of like activities they want to do. So part of as part of the non-profit some of it goes back into KVA and I'm just wondering how the KVA uses that and also you know how they use it to bring people to Dawson because that's one of the goals of the organization. Absolutely one of our main missions is to improve visitation I'm going to go ahead and start the presentation. for a tourist that kind of thing so one of the big things KBA does is destination marketing. We are doing all of the marketing for Dawson City and the surrounding area. We go to trade shows across Canada. We put out ads in magazines, newspapers, online, everything. Any way we can try and capture People coming here and kind of exploring and experiencing what this incredible tiny town is, It is. that's our goal. It's to promote a cool place. And how much of the Gertie's funding that comes through, you know, the casino here, how much of that goes into these kinds of marketing campaigns? Yeah, I mean, it's... We're doing lots of campaigns all the time throughout the year. Something around 5%, it depends on the year, but of the entire budget goes towards marketing or events, aside from the wages. So just the actual activities themselves, it'd be about 5% of the entire budget. Most of the budget is people. Paying a lot, you know, we have about 80 staff that work in here, we have the office, we have Jack London Museum, so those things take up the majority of that piece of pie, which is great because that money stays in Dawson. Is it fair to say then that Gertie's kind of pays for most of the wages for KBA staff across the board? Everything. Everything. So yeah, the KBA is, we don't have government funding. We have some odd project funding depending on the thing, but Gertie's is how we pay for everything. This is so, the organization is completely unique in that way too, because often organizations like ours would be fully funded by a government. This is not. We use Gertie's to do the entire workload of the organization and have since it opened in 71. I also noticed in some of the literature you sent us, the website, that there was a Crime Prevention and Victim Services Trust Fund, which I was quite interested in. And I wanted to tie that into kind of this broader question about the role of a casino in the North. We know there's lots of addictions here, but you're also a member of the community. So how do you balance all of that together? That's a huge balancing act. The management team here at Gertie's has put a lot of effort into Game Sense, which is This is the Um, safe gambling, uh, program. We have a lot of posters around right now. We're getting brochures made up, that kind of thing. Um, and so we want to really balance that because we know gambling is a problem. Um, but we are using it here to give back to the community in like, in a way that I've never seen you go like, this is as bright as it gets in here. It's just a completely different feel. It's not a bright. Like fluorescent light room where everyone's just sad. We're open at 7pm and close at 1pm. Like it's not, yeah, it's a very different vibe here and being able to give back to the community, giving back to the Crime Prevention Victim Services Trust Fund. Like last year we gave $420,000 to that. And that money goes back into the Yukon, throughout the Yukon, for grant programs that they administer. And every year we are the biggest contribution to that fund. We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. And we've been doing it since the 90s. One of the other things that we noticed when we were visiting the KVA, the office there, is that you can use casino chips at businesses around town. Tell me how that works. Yeah, so this is like... There's a lot of things that make Dawson really interesting and quirky and I think this is just like one of the other things that makes it interesting and quirky. Pretty much every store in town accepts Gertie's chips as cash. I remember my first summer here scooping ice cream and someone tried to pay with a Gertie's chip and I laughed at them I'm like yeah yeah funny and I kind of shooed them and then someone's like oh what was that and they're like oh yeah Oh, yeah, no, you can accept that. Everywhere accepts those. I'm like, oh. Okay. So yeah, most stores you can accept it. It's cash. It's very common. People don't think, I mean, visitors think about it, but like as a local now, you just, it's common sense. It's like another form of cash. Absolutely. Andy, thank you so much for chatting with us about Gertie's today and telling us about the unique structure here at Gertie's in Dawson City. Really appreciate it. Happy to share. Thank you.