[TheForge] ABANA support

[Andrew Vida]

Methinks the past 9 years have been rough all around, ABANA-wise.  The 
conferences have been qualified successes, and depending on one's point 
of view, a bit of a disappointment.  Now there apparently will be no 
more of that.  Then there has been the whole issue of the board not 
doing a very good job of communicating to the membership, which has 
resulted in an unfavorable perception in the eyes of some.  It seems to 
me that this last bit really needs to change if the organization is 
going to thrive and not just exist.  It may not be "just existing" but 
it kind of feels that way... but then again I am now on the outside 
occasionally looking in.  Oh, and BTW, the only reason my membership 
lapsed was because I was 1/2 a step from living on the street for a 
while there, so ABANA membership became a luxury I could no longer 
afford to indulge myself in.

I think ABANA needs to change.  How much, I cannot say.  I'm not that 
smart, but I'd say that the only way for it to do so is for the 
membership to take up arms and make things happen.  The board members 
aren't any less a bunch of yahoos than the rest of us.  They do what 
they can and if it isn't what the rest are expecting, the rest need to 
speak up and get involved.

I've asked this question before (don't recall answer, pardon my feeble 
brain): does ABANA have an endowment?  If not, it should work on 
building one.  This is how the NRA and similar organizations operate.  U 
Penn has about $4B at work.  ABANA can and maybe should do the same. 
Perhaps ABANA could use a few people with MBAs and hard business 
experience to help put this together.  In my opinion, ABANA should be 
run similarly to a for-profit corporation in terms of how it accrues and 
manages its resources.  This should be done with utmost efficiency - I 
don't know that is isn't, but I suspect that any organization can stand 
some degree of improvement.

Given an adept fund raising operation, ABANA could become self 
sustaining in a few decades... maybe less.  It would operate off the 
interest earned on the endowment.  Grow it enough and ABANA could send a 
goodly number of people on educational treks, and maybe even 1 or 2 to 
college every year.  How about partnerships with organizations such as 
SNAG (Soc. of N. Amer. Goldsmiths) for interdisciplinary exchange to get 
people into broader exposure to the other metal arts?  This is all very 
involved and very time consuming, I grant, but I always saw ABANA as 
becoming perhaps more than it appears to be.

Of course, I may have no idea what I'm talking about... in which case, 
please ignore the preceding diatribe.  Or is it a polemic?  Oh fudge...