The Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center, soon to be the Haines Sheldon Museum. (Jillian Rogers)
An influx of federal relief money means the Haines Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center can keep its employees for now.
“It was such a relief,” said Museum Director Helen Alten. She said deep funding cuts from the municipality meant she would have to lay off up to three staff members and reduce her own hours, so she started to look for alternate funding sources.
“And this was just, I mean, this was a shot in the dark. My husband used to always say you can’t catch fish unless you wet a line. And to have a national funder fund us and recognize our merit… It really made me feel good.”
Haines’ Sheldon Museum and Cultural Center will receive nearly $60,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ CARES grant awards. The money will support three employees from June to December.
The NEH CARES grant category was extremely competitive. Only about fourteen percent of the applicants got funding. The Sheldon Museum was one of six museums selected in Alaska.
Alten credits an online program called History Tidbits with the museum’s success in the grant process. The “tidbits” are short videos posted to social media. They delve into local ideas or things, using photographs, archival material, and other pieces from the collection to tell the story. Alten says they demonstrate how quickly the museum could pivot to serving the community online in a crisis, and web metrics show that the series is popular.
The museum is currently open by appointment only, but its next exhibit won’t even require entry to the museum.
“Our next exhibit will be in the community. We’re sort of thinking. We’ve had some really cool ideas and so, but what we’re thinking is that it people won’t be coming into the museum. They’ll be walking around town and seeing things. So that’s all I will say at this point,” she said.
The museum also received some smaller grants this year. Nearly $15,000 in a Museums Alaska grant will go towards digitizing the collection. Alten plans to re-hire an archivist and an archival assistant. The Alaska State Council on the Arts put $4,500 in relief funding towards the museum’s staff and utilities costs. And the Alaska State Museum put grant money towards a 2020 summer intern at the Sheldon Museum, but gave the museum the green light to spend it on COVID-19 expenses instead.
The museum will close in July and reopen in August. The next History Tidbit will be online Wednesday at noon.
