What we do in the US when the gov. doesn’t fund these things is we go to the largest corporations in the land and beg, guilt trip, cajole, charm, and button hole continuously until we get the funding. In return, the corporations get loud honorable mention as sponsors by plastering their logos and which projects they funded on the sponsors page in your literature, guidebooks, so they can tout their interest in preserving culture, patriotism in their own literature and improve their image among the population.
This is done by letter writing describing specific projects that they might want to fund, visits to corporate offices, benefit dinners attended by a mix of government officials and corporate heads (so they can network their own projects among officials), etc. For instance, you make sure a government department head is sitting near corporate heads that could be mutually beneficial to each other. If asked, these people may tell you who they would like to sit next to. Make it worth their while. Contacts are gold, and these people will pay gold for introductions to each other.
These dinners must be first class affairs. To get the money to hold them, you could first hold smaller benefits and fairs, traditional dances and music by people in regional costumes, playing traditional musical instruments, give tours of parts of the institution for admission, teaching the people about their history and heritage and display those things most important to them. Crowd pleasers. Show them what you are doing to preserve their heritage. Get vendors to donate their food labor and allow them to use you as an advertising vehicle.
Appeal to the newspapers, TV and other media to get news items and free ads for your institution and your events. Make it exciting and make it easy for them to do this. Consult a PR firm and get them to donate their consultation. Research your local, county and federal tax code to see if these companies get any tax deferments for helping your institution out. Point out that this is the way it is done in other places and be prepared to back that up with hard evidence.
Convince them that, for now anyway, it would be more beneficial—as to advertsing and being an official sponsor—that diverting this money to you is their patriotic duty, because you are in trouble. Make the big event an annual event. Make it bigger every year—start a tradition.
Be passionate. Everybody loves a true believer. If this institution is as important as you say, it will sell itself after the awareness hits the public. But you have to get the word out there and couple it with what the world would be like if this cultural history lost its home and professional curators. True passion is contagious.
And there are good jobs at the end of the tunnel. Get this down, network, accumulate your contacts among business and government leaders and you will become a valued fund raiser. People with these skills and contacts are badly needed when they are good at it and it can even lead to positions in the ministry of culture, tourism and even the foreign departments. Everybody needs an unabashed schmoozer. Everybody and every institution can use the successful ones. Everyone likes good PR and down deep want to do something good for their country. All you have to do is loosen their pockets and show them the invaluable benefits they will reap. You treat them like kings in a first class hotel.
In the U.S. our Smithsonian Institution was once in trouble under funding cuts under President George Bush. Sr. who was big on cutting government financial obligations in favor of corporate sponsorship. I was a newly licensed med-surg nurse, didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, working the floor in a hospital owned by a Florida corporation that also owned a few hospitals at the time which had made a major donation to the cause and received some airline tickets and invitations to a dinner held in the Smithsonian Institution’s oldest building, the beautiful National Museum of Natural History on the Washington Mall where all the big presidential monuments are, just down the street from the White House. Among the doctors sent, the corporation wanted a few floor nurses to represent and I drew the long stick in med-surg dept. LOL.
We were flown into DC, picked up in stretch limos, served this amazing five course dinner with great wines in candlelight in the vast Jurassic Hall under towering palms and vaulted ceilings. It was beautiful and delightfully spooky. Ten feet above my table hovered the head of a huge, completed triceratops skeleton.
I sat between two doctors, one of whom was Dr. Paul Farmer of Harvard and Tufts Universities, who began and developed Partners In Health out of Boston, a non-governmental social justice and health care organization with AIDS clinics in Haiti and Medical Assistance Disaster Teams that responded all over the globe. Turns out he was a Florida boy, from a small town just north of where I came from.
I spent almost the whole night listening to one of the brightest, most fascinating, passionate medical people I]ve met before or since. While everyone else was taking the midnight tour upstairs to see the Hope Diamond and other exhibits, the three of us knocked off a couple of bottles of wine and talked about everything from west coast Florida and foreign aid to infectious diseases. Man, I was way out of my water and just listened to these guys.
Two months later, I got a call from Tufts University in Boston to attend a three day trauma training program at Fort Benning, Georgia afterwhich I was given paid time off and shipped in a military air transport to join a PIH DMAT responding to Hurricane Andrew. The area south of Miami looked like Hiroshima after the atom bomb drop. I spent the next two weeks giving hundreds of inoculations to displaced children in a huge, stifling Army tent, played lullabyes on a beat up old guitar to put them to sleep at night, and loved every minute of it. A few months later, I was sent to an Army Medic School in Houston specializing in battlefield expedient medicine under PIH sponsorship. This guy was incredibly connected.
For the next 20 years I was sent to further training and certifications, and called up to work on Red Cross and PIH DMATs in floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes in the States and the Caribbean. It was invaluable experience to my nursing career and an opportunity open to few nurses.
In 2010 I spent eight months in Haiti after the earthquake, stayed for the resultant cholera epidemic, and stayed further for the hurricane that hit that island the following autumn. Immediately after the earthquake, Farmer was made US Ambassador to Haiti without portfolio when both ex-presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton flew in to pump up relief worker morale. The President of Haiti had died of a heart attack and Haitian bureaucracy was holding up our supply drops from the US and French air craft carriers parked just off Port- au-Prince. They loosened the logjam and left Farmer in charge of the multinational effort to aid Haiti.
Today, PIH is all over the Caribbean and Africa. Farmer is in Rwanda organizing community health clinics, Ebola and AIDS clinics.
I would have never met Farmer if I hadn’t had the opportunity to sit next to him at that dinner and my life would be much poorer for it. Things like that don’t happen to regular mensches like me. It changed the vector my life took and introduced me to the best, most dedicated people I’ve ever known and worked with.
That’s the kind of thing an invitation to one of these events can do for people.
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