The Old Funding Model

Today was an important day at the museum I manage, The Secrets of Radar Museum. An important day because an event took place that may have a tremendous bearing on its future. The event was a meeting with representatives from the Province's largest funder, to which SoRM submitted a grant request back in November. The interview means the application made it to the short list, but the Museum has been here before and we all know there's no guarantee the application will be accepted. It's a request for funding over two years, not of an extraordinary amount, to fund most of two part-time salaries and materials that SoRM will use to undertake a massive collections inventory and accessibility overhaul. So, for an hour and a half this morning, I sat with a board member and did my best to answer difficult questions about how this funding will increase future sustainability.

How do you honestly answer that in a way that doesn't make potential funders run away screaming?

The Canadian museum sector has been struggling with this question since the mid-90s. For a number of the big museums, it seems like they have started to find a public-private balance, but for small museums, especially those not run by their municipalities or attached to another parent institution, the challenge is only getting worse. The current funding climate is very bad, with fewer dollars spread across more recipients and increased bureaucracy between the need and communicating the need. How does a museum like SoRM, with its unique, but rather a-typical subject, find sustainability? Its traditional membership has dwindled; the veterans who were its beating heart are themselves passing into history. Although the story it shares is important and timely, particularly given the World War II anniversaries and the popularity of TV shows like Bletchley Circle or the recent film The Imitation Game, how do you convince new funders that they should support a weird little museum over a flagship art gallery, youth-at-risk program, or cancer care unit?

I don't have answers for those questions. I spend a lot of my time trying to come up with fixes for the Museum's funding problem. I work quite hard to drum up interest and support, to varying degrees of success. I communicate my passion for its mission and mandate in everything I do, but I can't answer a question about how this incredibly necessary project will truly affect the Museum's bottom line, because, we in the museum sector have largely been trained to see value, merit, worthiness in ways that don't translate easily into standard business models.  So, SoRM will wait with the relentless optimism to which me and so many of my peers subscribe, to hear back about the funding decision, meanwhile struggling to make ends meet and continuing to strive for awesomeness.