Actually, at least two of the museums in Balboa Park are doing as ducks do: looking serene above water, and paddling crazily beneath the surface to stay afloat. I know this because I'm a member of one museum, and a member of another group that donates money to that museum to keep one of its core (and award winning) departments open and working.
My experience is that this is fairly normal for non-profits. There are fat years and lean years, and more to take care of every year, given that greed is currently fashionable and philanthropy currently is not.
Given Tim's disparaging comment on sustainability, I suspect I'm whistling in the wind here, but I'd strongly suggest that the wealthier among us might seriously consider giving grants to our favorite museums to pay for the salaries of people to keep up their favorite weapons collections. Rust and rot doesn't do anyone a bit of good, does it?
I'd also suggest that, if fantasy online games are mining all these museums for weapons to use in their games, they'd do well to give a bit of money back to the museums that provided them with the raw material they used to decorate those games.
But then again, I've always been an impractical romantic.
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Originally Posted by laEspadaAncha
Fortunately, here in the U.S., or at least here in Southern California, our regional museums have largely continued as normal, their funding requirements (AFAIK) mostly received from membership, benefactors, and through fundraising events - here at Balboa Park in San Diego, they've even maintained their rotating schedule of "Free Tuesdays" for San Diego residents. Our one casualty since the crash of 2008 has been a North County sattelite arm of one museum. It's our parks that have suffered the most, with reduced staffing and the consequential closing of park-related museums, such as the Serra Museum at the Presidio, or the San Pasqual Battlefield Museum here in San Diego County, which have both had their hours of opertion reduced to a handful a month.  |