On Fri, 26 Nov 1999, Roger Smith wrote:

+++++ [FURTHER CLIP] +++++

> f) Corporate partnerships that might drag ICOM into the 1990's seem few and
> far between?  Several international comittees do sterling work in this
> regard to support their meetings, but the same cannot be said with any
> confidence of the central organisation.

============================

In fact, as the accounts show, ICOM centrally has raised VERY large sums
of money from government, corporate and foundation sources almost every
year throughout the '90s, but virtually all of this has been for very
specific special programmes, especially AFRICOM (with lesser amounts for
the "100 Missing Objects from..." series, and the ICOM-Arab launch and its
follow up).

To this should be added the more local fund-raising around the three
General Conferences held during the decade.  Most of this, in effect, went
to subsidise the Conference registration fees of those ICOM members with
enough money to attend the Conference in the first place. The ICTOP "SWOT"
analysis questioned the appropriateness, morality even, of subsidising the
registration fees in this way. This is something that seems to have crept
in to ICOM's Conference requirements without any debate or consideration
sometime after the 1983 London Conference (where record numbers turned up
even when charged more or less the full cost of the Conference through a
realistic conference fee - around US $250 - equivalent to at least $800
today).

However,is quite true that little or nothing of the proceeds of ICOM's
central fund-raising has so far gone towards ICOM's core functions and
activities in the international and national committees. Whether this will
change with the floating off of AFRICOM as an independent NGO remains to
be seen.


Patrick Boylan
Chair, ICOM-ICTOP


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