[TheForge] ABANA support

[Dave Mudge]

ABANA has a TRUST with $150k.
It generates about $7k per year interest which is used exclusively to
fund the scholarship programs.
If anyone has ideas for changes, that's great. Tell your favorite
board member about it.
They are easy to contact, their contact info is listed on the ABANA
web site www.abana.org  The new board members will be listed on the
web site after they become "official".
You are all welcome to donate money to the trust and you (if you are a
dues paying member) are encouraged to apply for a study grant or an
affiliate grant to offset the cost of your local conference,
demonstration or training program.
As for conferences, ABANA is not out of that game, we just couldn't
get the numbers low enough for the gate and still match all of the
requirements that everyone wanted. Clearly a new model for ABANA
conferences is on the agenda. They have to drop the eats & sheets part
of the package and that might be enough to do it. The president has
asked for your suggestions several times. Send them to her.

dave mudge

On 10/23/07, 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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