The Vera Deacon Regional History Fund is our employment fund established in 2008 in honour of the generosity of Mrs Vera Deacon.
Since 2008, close to a hundred donors have joined Vera, in donating to the Fund, and have provided paid employment to our student and community volunteers, who come in every week to work on our Hunter Region’s Cultural Heritage projects digitising, researching and sharing knowledge about our history with the wider global community.
Our aim is to have a billion dollars in the Fund, so that we can provide full time employment and training to all our young people, especially those interested in careers in cultural heritage across the GLAM (i.e., Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) sector. Please support our work.
More details on the fund and the work it has been able to achieve are here: https://uoncc.wordpress.com/vera-deacon-fund/
Donations can be made online directly through this link here
For more information about the ‘Vera Deacon Regional History Fund’ CLICK HERE
Thanks
First step:
Raise a billion dollars????????
Why:
To provide payment for the “Volunteers” who support Hunter Living Histories.
Why would a volunteer require payment?
Definition of a “volunteer”:
A person who freely offers to do something or work for a organisation without being paid.
The people who voluntarily contributed their research are not going to, or want to, be paid are they?
I am aware that I have not contributed to your cause but I can show you some of my receipts for my equipment, my accommodation, photocopying etc as recognition of the very real cost of research.
Please be aware that I do not receive or expect any financial return in regards to my “hobby” and that my time and finances were voluntarily expended.
I was advised that going to university was the correct path to advance myself in regards to my interest in local history.
Luckily I decided to spend the university fees and text book money on research, equipment and travel.
The time that would have been spent on academic study was freed up to volunteer with other historical groups and gain life experience.
My life experience, outside of history, includes fictional movies.
Indiana Jones may have been a fictional character in the movie “Raiders of the lost Ark” but if “Doctor Jones” had not have left his university classroom it would have been a very boring movie.
The four Indiana movies raised around a billion dollars in revenue due to the public popularity of the “adventure and mystery” of history outside of academia.
So please forgive me if I do not hold my breath in regards to your expectations of the “real world” funding your cause.