BERSALES
The annual Gabii sa Kabilin last Friday, albeit dampened somewhat by the sudden downpour, showed once again that the Cebuano and tourist alike have time for local heritage and history.
As we continue to celebrate the National Heritage Month, one must note, however, that private museums and heritage houses exist largely because of their owners’ resources. Take the cases of the Jesuit House of 1730/Museo Parian sa Sugbo, Casa Gorordo Museum, the Yap-Sandiego House, the Archdiocesan Museum of Cebu, and my own home base, USC Museum, to name a few.
They all exist because their owners spend time and money on their precious heritage assets.
There is very little government support, if at all, for these private entities.
And daily ticket sales cannot even match the huge financial requirements needed to simply clean and maintain these assets.
Other than the meager funding from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, through its annual competitive grants program (that is, if you get the one-time grant) we know of virtually no other source for financial support from government.
Unfortunately, culture always takes a back seat when other more pressing needs like poverty alleviation confront a developing country like the Philippines.
And so one can perhaps understand the absence of financial support, whether in the form of outright subsidies or through tax breaks/incentives from government.
And yet these same local governments benefit from the mere presence of heritage assets because an increasing number of visitors and tourists will really look for them.
Given this impasse, I think there is an untapped resource, at least for Cebu City and other highly urbanized cities, in the form of business process management firms and other multinational corporations.
The United Kingdom and Hong Kong, for example, tap their large corporations to buy hundreds of tickets of philharmonic concerts, museum exhibition openings, and other heritage-related events.
If large companies in Cebu, especially those at IT Park and the firms at MEPZA I and II, would actually buy tickets for museums wholesale as a form of corporate social responsibility, imagine the financial windfall and the kind of cultural education that will ensue to workers and employees who may have no time for history and heritage.
This possibility hits two birds with one stone, as it were: the private firm is able to provide a socio-cultural timeout for its employees while the heritage asset gets much-needed support from the private sector.
I believe it is time to explore this avenue for the sake of museums that are barely surviving.
And who knows, down the line even museum catalogues might be published courtesy of the philanthropy of these companies.
So I pose this challenge to the heritage groups and to these companies. It is time to sit down together and ensure that our heritage assets will survive into the future.