[TheForge] ABANA support

[Jerry Smith]

Andy,

I think your right, ABANA needs to look at long term
and build an endowment fund. I have been a member of
SERTOMA and Kiwanis and raise funds that will keep
their organizations alive and able to sustain their
get togethers and their charities. 

The NRA has dinners to raise money for the
organization, if we all chipped in $10.00 at the local
level to support the national (or International)to get
into a trust or an endowment fund. ABANA would be a
lot healthier.

Just my 3 cents worth,

Jerry
--- Andrew Vida <osan at netlabs.net> wrote:

> 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...
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