Make a gift
Thank you for your interest in supporting the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology. Your contribution furthers our mission of exploring the liberal arts and sciences. Here are several ways to support our museum.
Financially
The museum is funded primarily through an endowment that was established by Dr. Gordon Grosscup. When you donate to the Endowment Fund, you help to grow this bequest, thus providing us with a long-lasting gift. Your contributions help us to develop new and exciting anthropology exhibits, provide quality training and research opportunities for our students and continue to enhance our public services.
The museum also has several endowed scholarships that we award annually to students who volunteer in the museum doing research or assisting with curation and exhibit development. By donating to these endowments, you increase the number and amount of awards we're able to offer our students. The museum also has an active-use fund which makes your donation immediately available to us. You can earmark your donation to the exhibit fund if you wish to make such a contribution.
If you're interested in developing an endowment for a specific project or scholarship or funding a major initiative at the museum, please contact our philanthropy team.
Matching gifts
Many local companies will match your gift to the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology, in effect doubling your contribution. Learn more about matching gifts to the university.
Collections donations
Often, families find they have ethnographic or archaeological collections in their homes that they no longer have the ability to care for, or that they wish to see them made available to the public or to scholars. If you have a collection like this that you are interested in donating to the museum, please contact us so we can discuss it further and determine if we would be a good match.
It is important to note that collections are most useful to a museum when there is significant knowledge and documentation of the provenance of the materials. With respect to both archaeological and ethnographic collections, accompanying documentation such as maps, field notes and photographs are important to include with any accession. Additionally, it's important to note that it is illegal to excavate or traffic human remains in the United States and that antiques from abroad may only be imported to the United States with certain permits. Particularly for international antiquities, without evidence of permits or legal importation, such items cannot be accepted by museums.
Collections take space, materials and money to manage and conserve. For this reason, we always welcome financial contributions in conjunction with the collections you wish to donate. Sometimes it will be cost-prohibitive for us to accept a collection donation without associated funds to maintain it. Our primary purpose as a museum is to care for the items in our repository for future scholars and the community and it would be unethical to take your collections if we do not feel we can care for them adequately.
Contributions of time and expertise
During the school year, our efforts are typically focused on our volunteers, so they can gain experience in museum work. However, we also have some opportunities for community members to volunteer in the museum.
Detroit Chapter of the Michigan Archaeological Society
Members of the Detroit Chapter of the MAS have been assisting us in inventorying and re-boxing our collections from recent excavations at Fort Wayne.