The recession's effect on local museums

            Recession graph on Wikimedia Commons.

During an economic downturn, nonprofits are the first to suffer and the last to recover. If you watch closely, you can even sometimes base your stock market guesses on them, since the largest are funded by a series of public donations, endowments and trusts that demand a tangle of investments, grant applications, state and federal funding, and financial management. Museums and historical societies in particular suffer; although they are keystones to a strong, safe, well-educated community, they are thought of as non-essential and are the first to face cuts, cancellations and withdrawals.

While the Twin Cities still boasts an impressive and active array of museums and museum-related activity, they've hardly escaped the recession unscathed, frequently popping up in local and some national news sources with the changes they've been forced to make:

According to desgriffin.com, the Walker has had to cut its budget 5% and is looking at an additional 5% in cuts.

The Bell museum and Como Conservatory's struggles with the state budget are well-documented, although the executive director of the Bell Museum  forges on with the work of getting a new Bell museum built.

The Minnesota Museum of American Art has again had to shut down and relocate - while the economy wasn't the whole picture, it was definitely a factor in the changes.

The Minnesota Historical society also faces budget cuts. According to a press release issued April 16, the society projects a 16% reduction in budget that will involve employee layoffs and reduced services as a result of decisions by the state legislature. The result of the reduced budget? The society may have to close some of their sites. The news has also traveled to Publisher's Weekly, which reports the initial cuts are made to the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

A known permanent casualty to the museum scene is TRACES museum, a WWII memorial museum located in downtown Saint Paul that was simply unable to continue without financial support. The organization has managed to continue its website .

While this is frustrating news, the Twin Cities museum scene is hardly alone in its troubles. Because museum-based education is considered a non-essential service, donations and funding to museums are among the first cut during belt-tightening procedures. It takes a change of mindset in some cases to convey that museums are necessary to communities.

So what can the public do? Visit. Donate. Write letters to the governor about the importance of museums. It's all small steps in fighting a recession, but culture can win the war against economic downturn.