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WHAT'S
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The Institute: Future
Delivered by Mr. Andrew Beck, vice-president of the Pilsudski Institute on June 6, 2003, at the Montreal, Quebec meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences.
Pilsudski Institute like most businesses and organizations is beginning to look at the future to determine its direction for the 21 century. To look at the future we should first scrutinize the past. As we look at the history of various Polish-American organizations we can see a fairly common trend-during times of crisis such as World War I or World War II these organizations flourished backed by strong support of the Polish-American community but as peace arrived the began to falter. This was primarily due to the fact that in time of peace the Polish immigration was more commercially oriented and support of institutions was not there.
Pilsudski Institute formed during World War II always had a small but very loyal membership. Initially it was one of very few organizations where membership was composed of both the old Polonia and the early war immigrants. The membership consisted of intellectuals, businessmen as well as blue-collar workers. Among its founding members was a worker from Detroit, a baker from Philadelphia and a printer from New York while the new immigration brought in people like Gen. Sosnkowski, writers like Kazimierz Wierzynski and Jan Lechon, historians like Oskar Halecki.
The end of World War II brought many servicemen from Polish Armed Forces from England and the aftermath of the Solidarity movement brought an active and young generation. We are very fortunate to have this younger generation in our membership to whom we hope to pass the responsibility of management in not to distant future. This for example is not the case of our sister organization the Pilsudski Institute in London who do not have a younger membership and consequently will be forced to make some hard decisions.
There are two key factors that have to be considered when we look at the future:
1. Will we have the young membership to carry out future activates
2. Will we have adequate funds to the job
We believe that we have a reasonable handle to do the first and we are struggling to provide second.
At the present time and in our present location it takes a minimum budged of approx. $100,000 to operate the Institute. There is only one paid position and the rest is done by volunteers. Membership fees and donations provide only a fraction of the operating budget so that the Institute has to reach out to other sources of funding to stay alive.
In 1994 when the Institute faced an extremely difficult cash flow situation we were forced to leave our premises on Park Ave. South where the rent reached over $50,000 per year and move to a much less expensive location on 2nd Ave and 12 Street. At the same time we initiated a drive to raise much needed funds and we experienced this post war syndrome with the new economic immigration. We compiled a list of over 100 names of doctors, dentists, lawyers and other professional from among the latest immigrants as a test of how responsive this group will be to an institution such ours and the net result was that we did not receive a single donation.
This experience convinced us that with the thinning out of the ar time immigration and lack of response from new arrivals we have to seek different sources of funding.
Just at that time we were very fortunate to have the advice of US Navy ret. Admiral Zygmunt Bajak who came up with the initiative of running a series of Annual Awards Banquets sponsored by American industry similar to those that are done every year by the Navy League. We were probably first Polish-American organization to reach outside Polonia to the American industry and we were very successful in getting sponsorship from industry giants such as International Paper, Boeing, Citibank and others. This program which lasted more than five years greatly helped the Institute finances and in effect put us back in business. Unfortunately the events of 9-11 together with the current recession have lately made finding of industry sponsors very difficult but we are now working on some new prospects.
To assure a long term existence of the Institute our management stared to consider the following options:
1. To merge with some other similar institution or with a university
2. To promote the formation of an institution similar to POSK in London where members of that organization can exist by sharing of facilities and expenses.
3. By finding some acceptable solution to move the Institute back to Poland
4. By creating an endowment fund from which the proceeds would give the Institute adequate operating funds.
We probed the possibility of the first two options without much success although one university has shown some interest. We also investigated the possibility of moving the Institute to Poland, which would bring the resources closer to Polish historians. To have independence and freedom of action in Poland the Institute would need funding independent of Polish government and the assurance that the Institute’s collections would be integrated and not parceled out among many institutions. But at the same time we asked ourselves whether Polish-America should be deprived of a valuable cultural asset and resource. In the final analysis we decided that the Institute should stay in United States at least for the foreseeable future.
We are currently working hard on the last option which is the creation of an adequate endowment fund. The proceeds from our very successful banquets program together with several generous testamentary bequests have put us part of the way toward that goal but we have still a long way to go.
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