Increase Your Financial Resilience

Hello, and welcome to summer? Or, if you’re struggling with time losing all meaning–like I am–then welcome to sometime in March when I stopped counting. I’m back from my brief medical break and am feeling strong and ready to dig in. With that in mind, here’s a roundup of recent content I’ve created to help you increase your financial resilience; including two items to write your representatives about that (if passed) will increase funding for libraries, archives, and museums.

Increase Your Financial Resilience with These New Resources

In order to become more financially resilient, we must build up our funding muscles. This includes knowing where your organization’s money comes from and how you can get more of it. To that end, I have new funding related content to share with you:

1. Over at Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog (where I’m a regular guest blogger) I’ve written a series of posts breaking down the American Alliance of Museums’ TrendsWatch2020 report. This year focused on financial sustainability and was written pre-COVID. I’ve taken each each income stream covered by AAM, summarized the content, and have added my recommendations for how to adapt and increase the health of these income streams in this new economic reality. No matter what your job is, it’s always a good idea to understand where your organization’s money is coming from and what you can do to strengthen each income stream toward a more resilient financial future. Here are the first four of six posts:

An Introduction to Financial Sustainability

Earned Income

Charitable Income

Government Income

Catch the final two in the series via the Think Clearly blog on July 22 (Financial Capital) and July 29 (Fostering Financial Sustainability).

2. My course content site has launched and is now available to everyone. A huge thank you to those who’ve joined me in the first course: Get into Grants! This course is free and open to everyone so please feel free to share the link with colleagues who may need this resource. Given that grants make up a majority of funds from both charitable and government income streams, it’s critical for you to get into and master grant funding. Need more help? Don’t worry, I have two more courses that help you create a competitive grant project and teach you how to develop a compelling grant story. Stay tuned!

Advocacy Alert

Library Stabilization Fund Act

The LSFA funds would help keep nearly 370,000 library workers on the job, defray costs related to safe re-opening, and support a range of library services to millions of patrons, including high-speed internet access and digital literacy training.

You can read more via the Society of American Archivists here.

Museum Pandemic Relief and FY2021 Funding

This request to two-pronged: 1. Approve another round of pandemic relief funding ($6-billion) to be distributed via the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS) and expand existing pandemic programs such as PPP and increased charitable giving incentives; and 2. Increases FY 2021 funding to $382.7-million to IMLS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

You can read more via the American Alliance of Museums here.

Resources to Get Started

Our collective strength relies of each of us advocating for our libraries, archives, and museums–and that advocacy work includes contacting your representatives. Need help getting started? No problem! Check out this post for how to contact your rep and what to say. And you can always snag my fill in the blank template here. Remember: Being in regular contact with our representatives about our funding needs is a necessary part of increasing our financial resilience.

What’s Next?

I’m nearing the completion of my grant course suite which leads me to: What’s Next? I’ve received requests to speak to resilient job searching tactics, tips for when to know it’s time to leave (the job or profession), and how to recruit and engage volunteers. What else would you like to see? What can I help support you on? Please comment or send me an email ([email protected]) and let me know.

And if you haven’t already, I invite you to sign up for my newsletter so that you’re first in line for any future offerings and free resource drops.

Thanks and be well!