From the President: How we use your donations

by Tony Hanson

As an organization we spend a fair amount of time and effort raising funds. We are grateful to our many members, seminar attendees and donors for their generous financial support. A look at our balance sheet shows that we are presently in a very strong financial position.

Some of you may wonder about that. It is easy to spend money, but it is a little more challenging to spend money in accordance with the mission and goals of our organization. Our philosophy is to hold on to our funds until we identify opportunities to invest in meaningful and appropriate ways.

One example of this philosophy in action is the Heritage Lab located in the Genealogy & History Division on the 8th floor of the library. Our organization spent a little more than $50,000 in 2018 to fund the construction of the room and pay for the purchase of the i2S CopiBook Scanner that is available there for public use.

We recently identified several more opportunities:

• $4,180 to fund a service contract on the i2S CopiBook Scanner.
• $3,095 to pay for a subscription to NewspaperArchive.com.
• $7,500 to fund the Bockstruck Scholarship for the Genealogy & History Department staff for the next five years.

With these donations we crossed the $800,000 threshold for donations to the Genealogy & History Division of the Dallas Public Library since our society was established in 1955. You can read more about our donation history on our website.