The People’s Museum – Message from Development Director

Dear Friends of SCAS,

I have truly enjoyed working for you over the past year and am so grateful for the generous past support of our members through their membership dues. Your membership dues as well as your Annual Fund donations have always been tremendously impactful on our operations and the community with whom we share our educational resources.

The stories our exhibits and collections tell are the stories of New Mexico. As a native New Mexican raising a family in Santa Fe, I am particularly honored to be involved with the two new development initiatives now in place at SCAS to further our mission: Free Admission and an exciting New Membership Model designed to allow us to open our museum to a larger audience and freely share the beauty of our New Mexican culture with locals and tourists alike. Your involvement with our organization inspired us to boldly adjust our admission and membership models to best serve the people of New Mexico and enabled us to launch these initiatives—thank you!

What is our New Membership Model? Simply put, it is free—dues are no longer required to join. We truly believe we are serving our community in a way the SCAS founders had envisioned nearly 100 years ago by removing all financial barriers associated with access to our important collection and the cultural information it contains. No more membership dues to join, no more admission fees to enter. With this new model our teaching collection, research library, and archive will have a wider reach and serve to promote the arts of this region that tell not only a local story but many important national and global stories. Our history is in fact world history.

You may be wondering how this is all going to work, and if it has even been done before. We understand how important our work and collections are to future generations, so we dutifully researched, workshopped, and planned for this decision. Our research findings, along with the success of other organizations using this cutting-edge model to guide us, further supported our convictions to pursue this path. I am excited to be a part of this transition and am dedicated to nurturing relationships with NMHA Museum and SCAS donors, members, and museum goers who support our vision. As our first donor after we publicly announced our new initiatives wrote to me, NMHA is now “truly a people’s museum.”

Access to this New Mexican history and the contemporary works inspired by it as housed in and exhibited at NMHA and SCAS still needs your dedication and help. It is our hope that you will help us make history by embracing this new model and continuing to provide your support with donations equal to or, if possible, even greater than your past paid membership dues or admission payments.When you give to SCAS you are in turn giving back. All donations made to the museum help us further our mission and expand our reach to the larger community!

Please scroll to the last section of this newsletter to view all the ways to give. Thank you!

If you are already a member, you are automatically enrolled as a Friend of SCAS. To join as a new Friend of SCAS simply follow the button to our website form. We are thrilled to revel in this value rich membership model with our Friends, old and new.