Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 4 No 4

DAVID SCHWARTZ Featured Contributor

Creating a Nonprofit to Preserve and Respect History

I t all started when I was a junior in high school in Staunton, Virginia. The president of the camera business was a 50-year Master Photographer, Margo Kent. I liked the portrait side for a while, so I was the grunt person focusing the camera all the time. But I liked the actual pieces of equipment better. I came to the store and I just stayed here. It will be 50 years on May 30, 2018. I started my camera collection the day after I started at the store. Margo thought that I was crazy, spending that much money to buy a used camera - and maybe I was, since I needed to get a week’s advance on my salary to pay for it. But I kept collecting cameras and equipment. And I watched other camera stores close up during the transition as electronic and digital imaging came along. My son didn’t want to have anything to do with the cameras, and I didn’t want to sell them, so I started the nonprofit Camera Heritage Museum. I thought that this would work better as a nonprofit than a for-profit business. I thought we could probably raise more money to get a larger location because where we are is by far too small. On our whole exhibit floor, we are showing about one-third of our collection of approximately 6,000 cameras.That’s not a lot on display. Creating the Nonprofit My original vision was just to show people the collection. I did not understand nonprofits at all.When I started learning about nonprofits, I had to do a lot of self-education. There are not a lot of places where you can learn this stuff except by reading book after book. It’s not very easily read or easy to put together.

but nothing open that people can actually see. There is a difference between seeing photos of cameras and almost feeling them. You understand proportion of size, and what the photographer went through. Some of these are large, and some are small. There is a great variation, although they all do the same thing. Items from our collection were nominated for the Top 10 Endangered Artifacts list, put together by the Virginia Association of Museums in Richmond, in 2014, 2015 and 2016. They are endangered because most of them are getting thrown in the trash. One prime example was our first gift. The month after we became a nonprofit, we were contacted by Dr. Lee Gray, the curator of the Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She said that they had a huge collection of cameras that needed to go. If we couldn’t take it, they were going to have to dump it. Nonprofits must give their holdings to another nonprofit or they must be destroyed. I think the IRS law should be changed, but I can’t do anything about it. That is the law. We were the only museum open that would accept it. The problem was that they needed us to pay for the shipping to Virginia. We couldn’t afford it at the time. A friend, Chuck Wilson at Wilson Trucking, was very gracious and transported the collection from Memphis to Staunton free. It was a beautiful gift. He got a friend to give us a very reduced rate to transport it from LSU to Memphis. It was a wonderful collection, and they were going to just throw it in the trash. Most of our camera collection was like this, sitting in private collections. We have gotten three or

IRS law is very specific on what you can do with certain things. Once I had educated myself, I thought that it would be hard to set up a nonprofit, but it was quite easy. The hardest part was getting the certificate from the state of Virginia to let us get grants or do major fundraising. We had to go through the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of Taxation (that may vary from state to state). A lot of nonprofits don’t realize they have to register with whatever state they’re in. We’ve just gotten our certificate, nearly six years after the nonprofit was begun on December 5, 2011. Before that, we could raise only small amounts of money. There are lots of regulations on the nonprofit side as to how you manage the organization’s assets. Once you put cameras into the collection, they belong to the nonprofit, and you can’t take them out yourself. There is a legacy portion, but it’s not about me. I just like to see these things preserved because the next generation has no concept of what film cameras are about. The Smithsonian and the George Eastman House (of Eastman Kodak) have huge collections, but they’re not going to put them on show. We looked to see if there were any other groups in the United States, and there were no other camera museums open to the public. There are a lot of private collections,

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