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Women veterans memorial in financial trouble

The foundation that maintains and operates the nation’s only major memorial to female veterans is hurting for cash and has launched a fundraising campaign it hopes will help maintain operations — and ultimately stave off closure.

But despite a two-year shortfall in funding for the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, closure is not imminent, according to retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, the foundation’s president.

“We all go through tough times,” Vaught said Wednesday. But “there is no question that we’re going to meet our financial requirements. And we will be open. We will continue to be open. We will work our way through this.”

The memorial, located on a 4.2-acre site at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, is the only national memorial honoring what the foundation estimates are the 2½ million women who have served in the armed forces. Dedicated in 1997, it is visited by some 200,000 people each year, according to the foundation.

The foundation employs 39 full- and part-time employees at the memorial and the foundation headquarters in nearby Arlington, Va. But it is struggling to pay their salaries, rent on the foundation’s offices and for items such as the foundation’s roughly $12,000 monthly electric bill.

To that end, Vaught recently launched a campaign to help raise the needed funds. The “Circle of 500” aims to get 500 people to donate $1,000 each.

That e-mailed plea sparked concerns that closure was imminent. Vaught said that’s not the case. “We have no specific plans to do that,” she said.

In the past, the foundation, which has an annual operating budget of about $2.7 million, has relied upon a combination of private donations and congressional appropriations.

But congressional funding disappeared during the past two years; in each of the three years before that, Congress had given the foundation $1 million.

The House version of the 2010 defense appropriations bill pending in Congress includes $2 million for the foundation.

Vaught said she is “reasonably confident” that Congress will approve the money. If it does, she said the funds would cover the portion of the foundation’s 2010 budget not covered by normal fundraising efforts; would allow the hiring of a historian, an oral historian, a director of information technology, and other needed employees; and pay back debts incurred in order to remain in operation the past two years.

“We are very fortunate that some of our vendors who supply various things to us have been very understanding,” Vaught said. “Some of them are waiting, and we pay them when we can.”

The foundation has gotten by the past two years through attrition — six employees have left, none via layoffs — and some “surprise bequests,” two of which totaled around $50,000, she said. In past two months, Vaught said the foundation has raised $40,000 — some of it from the initial response to the Circle of 500 call.

Vaught said the $500,000 the foundation hopes to raise through that effort is roughly what she needs to get through the rest of the year — and to the point where the congressional funds, if appropriated, become available, she said.

“Somehow, I’ve got to bridge between where we are today and when we’re able to draw on those funds,” Vaught said.