The Nakusp and District Museum Board (NADMB) is looking to hire a new employee.
In that effort, they have reached out to the Village of Nakusp and the Regional District of Central Kootenay (RDCK) in an effort to obtain the funding needed.
Linda Dixon, president of the NADMB, made her proposal to the village for why the museum board is asking for this funding.
“What we would like to do is expand, so that we’re not just having stuff for people to come and look at, but we’re creating events that depict the lives of the people who founded the town who used these pieces,” she said. “There are so many good stories.”
There are over 5,000 pieces in the museum donated over the years by locals ranging in topics from everyday life in Nakusp, to the area’s logging and mining history.
One thing people will find interesting comes from the area’s mining history, a punch clock designed to keep track of the miners after they had gone underground to know who was where.
“If you look at it, it’s this beautiful old cabinet, and on the dial the logo is made by International Business Machines, 1937,” said Dixon. “We have a pre World War Two IBM. That’s just scratching the surface of the wonderful stuff we have in that museum.”
The NADMB is asking the village and the RDCK to partner and give them a base funding, enough to employ someone from May to September for minimum wage. The museum will be able to provide all of the employer costs like Employment Insurance and Work Safe from its admissions.
Normally volunteers help run things when the museum is open for the season, but like many other organizations, it is feeling the effect of volunteer burnout.
“Right now our volunteers have gone down quite a bit and that’s going to be one of our big focuses in the new year, to get our Friends of the Museum up and running again and to get our museum base much more vital and vibrant,” said Dixon.
Along with hiring an employee, the museum board would also like to create an education program going into schools to try to link what the students are learning to what was happening in Nakusp during the same time period.
Once this funding is taken care of, the NADMB would like to develop programs related to facets of what the museum can do.
“We feel that with that we would be able to bring the museum up to a more professional standard too,” Dixon concluded. “We would like an employee that we can have as a continuity for the museum, who we would train in museum procedures and keep getting more training every year to raise the quality of the experience these artifacts really deserve, because they’re so incredible.”