If you follow the news, you’re probably aware that there was a temporary freeze on all federal grants and loans. It’s still unclear exactly what would have been affected by the freeze but it was blocked by a U.S. District Court Judge and then rescinded by the White House. Even still, some government funding saw delays and is still unavailable to a few programs. While we wait for the courts to determine what can and cannot be done in terms of government funding for money and budgets already approved by Congress, the future is even more unclear for federal budgets after March. The current budget was a temporary stopgap to prevent the government from shutting down and only goes until March 14th, 2025.
Here at Phillips Wharf, it is also unclear what, if any, effect this freeze and future freezes or budgets might have on our programming. Our primary concern is that we currently have a federal grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We are wrapping up year 2 of a 3 year grant, which means the third and final installment of funding should become available on July 1st when the federal fiscal year begins. However, without knowing what budget will be approved, it is unclear if funding will be granted to NOAA for disbursement to programs like ours. The bright spot here is that the Bay Watershed Education and Training program, which is the program our grant is through, is not currently on the chopping block due to the new administration’s priorities. However, we know from past experience that this administration does not prioritize funding for STEM education, especially when related to the environment and climate.
Until the government budget is approved through July, the fate of this funding is uncertain, which is frustrating because that’s a large chunk of our grant funding. For example, in 2024, approximately 42% of our revenue came from grants and 70% of that grant funding was from NOAA. For 2025, we are applying for a few different grants so our expected grant revenue is subject to change. Our goal is to receive a major grant to assist with renovations of our building, so between that and other programmatic grants, our forecasted grant revenue is $110,000, which is 57% of our forecasted total budget of $193,000.
This budget is quite a bit larger than our 2024 budget, again, because of the renovations we are planning for the additional building space that just became available and is now part of our lease with the Town of Easton. In addition, our projected payroll costs are higher as we hired our Education Coordinator in the fall and we expect to pay that position throughout the year. Other budget expenses are relatively small as we work very hard to keep costs low so that donations to our organization go directly to doing our work with education programs and caring for our animals. In 2024, we spent approximately $12,000 on payroll just to take care of our animals, which includes feeding, water changes, and aquarium maintenance. This is a big reason why we want to get our aquarium space open to the public as soon as possible; we spent a lot of time caring for these animals and we want you to have the opportunity to visit them more frequently than the occasional Fishmobile program.
This discussion of financials is all to say that losing out on the 3rd year of our NOAA grant would certainly throw a wrench in our plans for 2025 but it won’t be the end of Phillips Wharf. We’ve worked really hard to regrow our organization after the COVID-19 pandemic and we’re very proud to say that 2024 was the first year since the pandemic that we brought in more than we spent. The time in between was only possible due to federal government support during the pandemic and the savings maintained after the property in Tilghman was sold off, which would not have maintained that property for long but allowed us to relocate and rebuild in a much smaller capacity.
It might seem strange to discuss financials but nonprofit tax documents are publicly available so our financials are not a secret. You can find older 990’s on the irs.gov website and once we have our 990 for 2024 completed, it will be available on guidestar.org.
