Florida Maritime Museum Receives Help To Create Folk School

CORTEZ, FL – Christmas came early for the Florida Maritime Museum with a couple of huge gifts from local charitable organizations.

The museum will receive matching funds from The Patterson Foundation to jumpstart its efforts to create The Folk School. The school will offer heritage skills classis as a way to preserve the rich culture of Florida fishing villages.

Funds contributed to the organization by Tuesday, Jan. 31 will be matched dollar-for-dollar by The Patterson Foundation up to $50,000.

The Preston family of Cortez offered an additional $15,000 match.

“We have witnessed the changes in this tight-knit community over the years,” said Whiting Preston. “We need to leverage this amazing opportunity that The Patterson Foundation has provided to ensure the preservation of this small but significant commercial fishing village, and a way of life that I know my family and I have cherished, along with many others native to Florida.”

The matching fund program was developed during The Florida Maritime Museum’s participation in Margin & Mission Ignition, an initiative of Sarasota-based The Patterson Foundation designed to embed long-term earned-income strategies and models within nonprofits in the region.

The Florida Maritime Museum is one of five nonprofits participating in the 18-month planning and implementation process. The organization is receiving extensive consultation on revenue-generating strategies from No Margin, No Mission, a social enterprise and national consulting firm hired by The Patterson Foundation on this initiative.

“People come to Cortez, Anna Maria Island and the surrounding areas for this old Florida historic charm,” said Amara Nash, museum supervisor of the Florida Maritime Museum. “The cultural identity of this area is slowly being erased.”

The Folk School will expand the mission of the Florida Maritime Museum to collect, preserve and share traditional knowledge by offering traditional maritime and heritage skills classes like canning, net mending, instrument making, fish filleting and many more.

The Florida Maritime Museum shared its fundraising plan with potential investors during a recent event presented by The Patterson Foundation. Aside from the match challenge, The Patterson Foundation will invest $23,000 in efforts to help the museum develop its fundraising strategies.

If the museum successfully achieves the match, The Patterson Foundation will have contributed $750,000 benefitting more than a dozen nonprofit organizations over the past two years through the Margin & Mission Ignition initiative.

“The plans developed by each organization come after months of rigorous discernment to adopt earned-income strategies that align with their mission, capacity and culture,” said Debra Jacobs, president and CEO of The Patterson Foundation. “Early mission investors can double their impact with this match.

For more information on the Florida Maritime Museum, visit http://floridamaritimemuseum.org/.

Image via psyberartist, Flickr, used under Creative Commons