Bishop Museum
welcomes $18M
endowmentThe gift is expected to
yield about $900,000 each
year for the vast collection
A Big Island kamaaina has bequeathed about $18 million to the Bishop Museum, one of the largest endowments ever given the private institution.
The legacy of Maude Woods Wodehouse, a Keauhou ranch owner, "gives the museum the means to preserve the great collections of Hawaii and the Pacific for which it is home, to study them, and to tell their stories to the people of Hawaii and the world," said museum President William Y. Brown.
Brown said the charitable remainder unitrust established by Wodehouse will generate about $900,000 income each year.
"This gives me a lot more security on the budget ... in keeping staff positions."
Brown laid off nine employees in April, noting then that the budget had been reduced from $12 million to $11 million.
"It was a difficult thing to do," he said yesterday.
The gift does not mean those jobs are restored.
"Connecting it to the work force reduction is not the right way to look at it right now," said Brown. "The Bishop Museum has significant financial challenges and we need to do what is needed to protect the collection and advance its mission."
Wodehouse, who died July 2 at age 87, was a member of Daughters of Hawaii, a nonprofit corporation founded in 1903 by seven women who were daughters of American Protestant missionaries. The organization, among the first in Hawaii set up for historical preservation, operates and maintains Queen Emma Summer Palace in Honolulu and Hulihee Palace in Kailua-Kona.
The endowment will be administered by the C.N. Wodehouse Bishop Museum Trust, which supports charitable and education programs of the museum.
Other top gifts that help maintain the museum were the original investment from founder Charles Reed Bishop, currently worth about $10 million, and the Waterhouse family trust, currently valued at $18 million.
What Wodehouse recognized was the tremendous effort required to preserve a collection as vast as that held in the Kapalama facility, said Brown. It is much easier for a donor to single out a particular program or project to support.
"What I think is underrealized here is that our collections are among the top 10 collections in the country. We are in the same league as the Field Museum in Chicago. We have something really important to the whole world," he said.
There are 24 million items catalogued at the institution, 95 percent of which are not on exhibit. The items include 80,000 historical objects such as a feather cloak that belonged to Kamehameha the Great. The leading collection of animal and plant life of the Pacific is held there.
The collection of 4 million shells includes many species of mollusks now extinct, Brown said.
"What we have needed for a long time is the protection of our cultural and natural history collections," he said. "I hope to build on this, to persuade others who'd like to contribute to something that will be here for centuries."
A charitable remainder unitrust provides income to an individual or a designated beneficiary based on a payout rate of the fair market value of the trust assets, which are determined annually.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
