I think most of us view our rail preservation activities as a place to get AWAY from politics and societal turmoil. I know I do.

But there's no way to avoid that fact that, save for a few professional exceptions, most rail preservation is carried out in the "non-profit" sector, with a great many of them--Steamtown, Grand Canyon Railway, Cumbres & Toltec, Cass, the state RR museums in Ca./N.C./Pa., etc.--tied at the hip to government operations or oversight.

So imagine my surprise to come across in my news feed a report alleging apparently appallingly low trust among Americans in non-profit organizations:

https://independentsector.org/trust/

Some selected quotes below:



Here's an earlier article from 2020 delving into what could be behind some of the mistrust:

https://www.philanthropydaily.com/anoth ... onprofits/



Now, I can't think of any of our sites/operations that have any "agenda" towards "changing the world" or "making it a better place" or whatever, but I've often heard complaints that the "new director is just a schmoozing socialite, not a railfan" or the like, to paraphrase lightly. But the "railfan," for example, might not have found the donations and goodwill for the B&O Railroad Museum to survive that roundhouse roof collapse, as an example. And railfans alone aren't the reason for the new rescue and ongoing revival of the East Broad Top.

If you go looking, you can find criticism of this report and its findings as well, such as this classic "who's underwriting the report, and what bias are they imposing?" query:
https://www.philanthropydaily.com/indep ... _aid=73350

I know that, in the past, I've heard ignorant people spout falsehoods about how certain museums and lines are quite obviously "run by the city/state." That's an education problem much bigger than we can expect our operations to address.
But might we somehow end up with a problem where even supposedly educated people are making false assumptions about our work?

And more importantly: Are we doing anything to either accidentally promote the idea that we're "political/societal activists" or to dissuade that possible notion? (One example that comes to mind: An excursion RR that, on Earth Day, invited a small group to show off science-fair-like displays on the energy efficiency of railroads, the environmentalism of the waste vegetable oil they were trying to convert to, etc.--which I found perfectly low-key and in keeping with the day, but someone else might have found as sanctimonious as Greta Thunberg's scowl....)

Food for thought: Does your non-profit make a difference and contribute to the community, or is it perceived as a self-serving club using donations to pay for the trains the members play with? If the former, how well is that point made clear to the public, and in what ways does your organization handle doing that?

One club I was in, for example, helped to run flood relief efforts after a major flood. That was not part of our mission, but we did what we could to support our community in a time of need. It doesn't need to be that up front, either. Just not being a nuisance, networking with community leaders, and showing that your operation's presence is a good thing (however you do that), can do wonders for local support.

Perception is everything when you want and ask strangers to hand their hard earned money to you, especially today. If you rely on just the railfan community for your needs, you are setting yourself up for failure, imo.

-Sam

Remember... if you are non-profit everything is public.

Friends of the Cumbres & Toltec paid their President = $105,000 in 2019

California State paid their Executive Director = $254,000 in 2019

B&O paid their Executive Director = $243,000 in 2020

Henry Ford Museum (operators of Greenville Village) paid their Executive Director $600k in 2019 and 6 more top level exec.'s over $200k.

Meanwhile.. the top leaders at Illinois Railway Museum, Tennessee Valley, and RR Musem of PA are paid $0.

Who do you want to donate to? :)

Guidestar.org provides free public access to nonprofit tax information, plus (fee based) analysis. Definitely worth registering for free access, to see Form 990's in PDF format, albeit usually one tax cycle behind. Makes for interesting reading, and a useful reality check...

https://www.guidestar.org/

Uhh, I bet ya they're not.

And you have to remember: when you're talking about leadership positions at museums and organizations, you're competing for labor just like everywhere else.

We may think executive salaries across the board are out of whack, but if you want someone with credentials, experience, and a well stocked LinkedIn account, you can't expect to get them by paying 10% of what they could get elsewhere.

No matter how much someone loves trains, they can't eat them.

I think this thread brings up a VERY good point.

But the situation is NOT limited to non-profits.

There has been a steady eroding of trust in ALL of our institutions.

The big problem is in what the solution seems to BE to that lack of trust. Instead of calling for those institutions to be better, people are calling to just get rid of those institutions.

"We want a government small enough to drown in a bathtub", "Defund the police", etc...

It's why we struggled to respond to a pandemic and will struggle to respond to ANY large societal challenge. People just throw up their hands and say "screw it".

So if you want your organization to thrive, you NEED to demonstrate not only are you serving your mission, but that you're doing it in a responsible way.

Do that well and you will find success. Do that poorly and we'll be reading another "quick, we need people to come get XYZ's stuff outta here before it's scrapped" thread.

Umm... are you suggesting these organizations are lying to the government?

I really don't think that it's 'common knowledge' that nonprofits have to report to the federal government, and that if you're at all suspect of a nonprofit, the information and tools are there to do some research at least at treetop, if not ground level. If you want donors to trust you, they need to see that for themselves in many cases.

And I encourage any nonprofit to disclose that, if you want any degree of trust, and even disclose how to get there. If you look at the difference between the perception of 'charities' vs. 'nonprofits', I think most people know there's some substantial oversight and rating of charities, you can look it up on the percentage of overhead, etc.

It's absolutely true that a nonprofit can have substantial salaries, and possibly to the point of embarrassment. But I also don't question for a moment that there are a lot that have no salary at all for their staff/employees, legitimately. If you're paying a salary, it's next to impossible to hid that detail from the IRS, and the typical 'bigger' nonprofit tax filing doesn't let you ignore that either.

It's a lot more typical to find a nonprofit that has about $500 in the bank and no visible means of support other than hope.

I'm not certain of the status of two, but remember RRMPA at Strasburg is a state museum with state employees and volunteers.

Yes, good point... I was referring to the "Friends" of the RR Museum of PA. Not as good of an example as IRM and TVRM to my point that executives receive no salary although it is a good comparison to the "friends" of the Cumbres and Toltec.

My point exactly. No full time museum director is doing it for free.

And if they are, I'd worry about the longevity of the museum.

Add the Engine 557 Restoration Company to organizations which have zero administrative or restoration staff costs (although a relatively small portion of the overall restoration work has been done by contractors).

I would identify a few things that give credibility to a non-profit organization and how we have handled them:

- Transparency and frequent communications with stakeholders. (We maintain a web page with monthly status reports, post frequently on Facebook, have given many presentations to other organizations, welcome visits by individual and groups, and we are involved in one or more special events each year.)
- Low non-program/administrative costs compared to program (i.e., restoration) costs. (In our case, all administrative and financial tasks are done by volunteers and the web site is donated. Admin functions are done in volunteers' homes or in our palatial 60 square foot world headquarters and job site officer, a donated former outdoor smoking shack located in the Engine House. Our major non-program costs are the portable toilet and insurance. Essentially everything else is closely related to the restoration.)
- Low fund raising costs. (Grant requests and solicitations are done by volunteers with an annual cost of a couple of hundred dollars for postage and supplies.)
- Low staff costs. (Our president and project manager has been a volunteer for the last ten years overseeing the project on a full-time basis. I have volunteered 15-20 hours a week for the last ten years doing book keeping, fund raising, most of the publicity, and researching for original technical data. The vast majority of the restoration has been done by volunteers, at least 130,000 hours to date. Contractors are only used for tasks requiring skills and equipment we don't have, such as turning wheels and axles, upgrading brake controls to be PTC compatible, and overseeing the more difficult portions of the boiler overhaul.

A statement that we often include in funding solicitations, "No government funding has been received or requested."

IRM and TVRM still apply.

I didn’t download the report because I don’t need my email address added to another list to get passed around for more spam. However, do note that the synopsis was painted with a rather wide brush. Nonprofits come in many shapes, sizes and missions. Is it fair to lump our small nonprofit in with another the size of, say United Way for example? I think not. But having not read the full report, I don’t know if or how they might have broken it down into sizes, types or sectors so I can’t really get my knickers in a twist over this yet.

Sam brings up a good point. If you can find a way to give back to the community in some fashion, the way the public perceives you may get bumped up a couple notches on the positivity scale.

Since I'm not interested in being a woodpecker in a petrified forest, I'm simply going to say this thread is filled with error and speculation (at least the WAG about IRM compensation was dispatched by actually using publicly available disclosures) and if there's growing institutional distrust-that's an excellent development-even if the spill wets "our" carpet.

How long do you think people are going to tolerate lachrymose laments like this, while there's a lot of people dealing with too much month at the end of the money.

He wants to resolve Ukrainian frustration? Mission drift, much, little Lindsay? It'd be a damn shame if Ukraine was invaded because of our biolabs.

What about our frustration? Talk to a woman who can find or afford formula, or people dropping C-Notes to get a fill up. I'm looking at $80 to top off a damn Subaru.

The disgusting subway between elite schools, corporations, charities, lobbyists and government- all of whom love to tell us how hard and selflessly they work, although the problems seem to being worsening exponentially for everybody but them.

What the hell are you on about Superheater? Nothing after that first rambling sentence has any relevance to this thread. Take it to Facebook or "Beer-thirty" with your buddies.