Zoo funding: surveying the overall ‘funding landscape’ before you make your long term plans
It is too tempting for a zoo organisation, perhaps under fresh management or other new impetus, to move towards a full, long term masterplan without any thought at all as to where major external funding might come from. Only later to start looking around for major funding partners and trying to shoehorn the site’s development into programmes not actually designed for it.
How much more subtle to get stuck right into whatever political, economic and social agenda currently excite and motivate decision makers at regional, national or even European levels – the people who can make your site develop in a way you cannot ever afford to do alone.
Now, I am not remotely suggesting that a conservation minded zoo betrays its mission and starts building housing estates or something. But the paths to that mission, and the ways in which people can engage with the animal and natural world are many and wonderful.
Looking creatively at what a zoo organisation can offer to Society at large, and conceiving the organisation’s future in an intelligent awareness of macro-issues ( whether economic or scientific or community or educational or whatever) has to be a good thing. In addition to securing extra resource for your institution to develop, the new concepts that emerge from this cross fertilisation will be richer and more imaginative.
And there’s another advantage. In becoming involved in issues beyond those of immediate and apparent relevance to the zoo and aquarium world (i.e. the environment and tourism/ leisure), zoo leaders will start to become part of that decision making process itself. So new programmes and the funding that comes with them will start to take account of the strengths and possibilities of large audience nature sites in ways not previously possible
John
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