At the end of the day, DMS has ~2200 members paying an average of ~$40 a month or around $88k/month gross revenue. Revenues from machine time, sales of materials gross a few thousand - and typically skip the general fund. Donations to the General Fund are intermittent. Mandatory expenses - rent, utilities, insurance, housekeeping, etc - are a goodly percentage of this. Committee allocations are another chunk of the gross margin. Toss in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month worth of expansion then you have available cashflow which is markedly less than half of our gross revenues. Membership numbers have subsequently flatlined at best, thus finances are tightening.
Against this reality it baffles the mind that there’s a seemingly widely-held impression that the honorarium program has been seen as a way to supplement one’s income to a significant degree.
A better path to making a living as a maker is to make things and sell them on the open market. This is a more viable path than teaching classes at DMS for honorarium because there’s orders of magnitude more opportunity out there than the meager tens of thousands of potential free cashflow through DMS.