FUNDING THE MUSE

Contingent on there being a paradigm shift in regard to how musingplaces are imagined and understood in the wider community, new funding methods, indeed a whole new funding paradigm, needs to be explored. 

Once you put aside old/traditional museology models, entrepreneurial opportunities are opened up. Under the closed loop cost centre funding model it was virtually untenable for musingplaces to be income generative except for charging tokenistic entrance fees typically designed to meet peripheral costs.

Often this tactic backfired with visitor numbers falling and programs being judged more critically, more harshly even when they fell short of their mark. 

If musingplaces equip themselves to operate in the open market, and in competition with all players, there are untapped, unexplored and unimagined opportunities to be explored. This once no-go area needs to be revisited – and with gusto. Musingplaces have rich storehouses to be ‘put to work’ – not plundered – and with the 21st C new museology paradigm increasingly making it an imperative,  entrepreneurship need to be enthusiastically embraced. This might well go to standalone for-profit businesses being established to generate profits that subsidise aspects of a musingplace's non-income generative activity.

Crowdfunding is gaining favour as funding method for a diversity of projects especially those devised to kick-start an ‘enterprise’. Interestingly successful funding under this model comes with peer group assessment of a kind that government instrumentalities could not replicate. Indeed, public funding agencies are beginning to use crowdfunding as an element in their funding mechanisms and assessment procedures.

Congratulated by crowdfunding it becomes politically more palatable to fund something, or an aspect of it, but not from the ‘public purse’.

Elsewhere in the world the lottery mechanisms, rather than taxation, are used to underwrite aspects of cultural development funding. In fact the Sydney Opera House was funded by a lottery and in Western Australia Lotterywest plays a significant role in arts funding. Likewise, MYlotto has played an important role in New Zealand’s arts funding since 1987.

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Musingplaces might well imagine themselves as Community Cultural Enterprises – a version of social enterprise. While being ‘risk aware’ such enterprises offer ever expanding frontiers to be explored, interrogated, drawn upon, delved into even. Interestingly, new enterprise models seem to be emerging facilitated and/or articlated by the Internet – B corporations among them.

The binary of the unsustainable cost centre and the sustainable enterprise, survival against success, becomes somewhat compelling evidence in favour of success – just so long as the risks are mitigated – and a need for change to meet contemporary circumstances.

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Accordingly, the development of a network of musingplaces in Tasmania that are cooperating community enterprises seems to be a productive, and enriching, proposition. It is one that outshines the simple survival of the ever diminishing prospects of cost centre thinking and the counterproductive ‘cargo cult management’ mindsets. All too often this kind of folly comes with the cost centre paradigm in the time warped beliefs that nurtures these dollar-induced worldviews. Nonetheless, all this does offer us something to muse upon.