We know this is an uncertain and stressful time for many of you in our C2C Care community. We remain dedicated to providing resources for small and mid-sized cultural institutions and the invaluable practitioners who care for collections.
As you may know, C2C Care is made possible through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Our current grant would have supported C2C Care through August of this year. On March 31, all IMLS employees were placed on administrative leave, stemming from the March 14th Executive Order issued by the Trump Administration. This means that we do not have access to our funding, which was awarded in 2022.
C2C Care needs your support more than ever right now. If you have representation in Congress, we urge you to reach out to them immediately to let them know how the loss of IMLS impacts your ability to do your work, limits your options for professional development, and inhibits the preservation of our shared cultural heritage. You can also reach out to state-level elected officials to ask them to join in speaking out in support of IMLS.
If you would like to directly support C2C Care, you can make a donation to the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC) which will help us continue to run this program. If you choose to give, you can specify that you'd like your gift to go to Connecting to Collections Care. As the situation stands, we will need to put a pause on new webinars and courses until other funding sources can be found to support programming. We want to assure you, even with this funding loss, you will still have access to all of our past webinar archives and courses that have been opened for self-study.
FAIC also wants to recognize the excellent work done by our Coordinator, Robin Bauer Kilgo, our Advisory Group, and Community Monitors. Their dedication to C2C Care is essential and the foundation of this program.
We also wanted to share some good news: C2C Care is getting a new website! In a few days, community members will get to see a new, streamlined website where you'll be able to access our upcoming programming schedule, an archive of our old programming, and links to our community: connectingtocollections.org. We hope this new site will make it easier to search for past programming, find information you need, and condense the resources we offer to make maintaining C2C Care more sustainable. This new website has been in development for the past year and we're excited to share it with you now.
Thank you for your patience and support. Especially during this site transition, please contact c2cc@culturalheritage.org if you have any questions or concerns.
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Katelin Lee
(she/her)
Outreach Manager
Washington DC
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