Image: Eashing Chapel at The Rural Life Living Museum (The Rural Life Living Museum)
The Surrey museum secures £150,000 from public donors to avoid closure and plans new income strategies
The Rural Life Living Museum in Surrey has announced that its three-month fundraising campaign has successfully raised the £150,000 it needed to stay open.
The museum in the town of Farnham said it has survived “hand-to-mouth” through ticket sales and donations for 50 years.
Owned and operated by the Old Kiln Museum CIO, the fundraising campaign was launched in response to rising costs which saw expenditure begin to outstrip income with a risk of closure.
Public donations have since secured the museum’s financial future, with over 2500 individual donors.
The £150,000 will be used to solve “an immediate cash flow crisis”, return capital borrowed from its reserves and bring in professional help to guide its income-generation strategy.
The museum now says it plans to launch its first Patrons scheme, a Corporate Sponsorship programme and events in 2025.
The museum’s director Ed Fagan said: “Realising you need help is hard, asking for help is even more difficult.
“I was never sure that we would reach the target, and besides the money raised, we, as an organisation, have learnt so much during this process.
“The validation from understanding just how many people care about this place has been invaluable, alongside all those individuals who offered support in kind, and many who came for coffee to talk to me about what we were doing, to offer advice and guidance from their own experience, or in some cases, to check that we had not forgotten anything!
“This fundraising campaign is a current high point, from the lowest ebb, and I can’t wait to move forward from here. Being the custodian of Madge and Henry’s legacy was never going to be easy, but we have proven that it has a future, that it is well loved and deserves to be here, for all, forever.
