What is needed
What the house needs in order to begin, what it needs in order to last, and the forms a contribution may take.
Two needs of a different nature
A house of this kind has two needs that must not be confused, and that call for separate treatment, since they do not address the same people nor are they met by the same means.
The first is a need for capital, and it is settled once: acquiring the house, restoring it according to the rules of the craft, equipping the workshops, and holding enough to live through the first year before the house produces anything. This need is considerable, yet it is bounded, and once met it does not return.
The second is a need for income, and it is never settled: paying the masters, feeding and lodging those who learn, maintaining an old building, keeping the house in order. It returns every year, for as long as the house exists, and it is this need that decides whether the house will outlive those who founded it.
What is needed in order to begin
Before any acquisition, one must know whether the house can exist. This means finding the building, securing its availability for the time required, having the condition of the fabric surveyed and establishing what it will allow, and obtaining from professionals in Fez the legal and technical opinions the operation calls for. It is roughly a year of work, and the only stage whose outcome remains open, since it may conclude that the house is not to be found, or not on these terms.
This first stage is also the only one in which the money committed may be lost without leaving anything behind. It is modest against the whole, and it is precisely the stage a clear-sighted support will fund first, because it buys the knowledge on which everything else depends.
What is needed in order to build
Then comes the capital proper. The house first, whether acquired or contributed. Its restoration, entrusted to firms of Fez working in the traditional techniques, over a span counted in years rather than months, for a site of this nature cannot be hastened without being spoilt. The services, which in an old house are concealed and cost accordingly. The equipment of the first workshops. And a reserve for the first year of operation, during which the house spends without yet receiving.
The amount is established item by item, with the ranges proper to a project whose house has not yet been found, and it is communicated to those who consider supporting it. It is not published here, since a figure displayed before the building is known would be a promise that nothing guarantees.
What is needed in order to last
The annual income is the real question, and the house does not claim to have resolved it entirely. It intends to answer it from several sources, none of which suffices alone and whose combination makes for security.
An endowment
In the legal tradition of the country, an income-bearing property — shops, a warehouse, dwellings — may be constituted as a perpetual foundation so that its revenue maintains an institution; it is thus that schools and libraries lived for centuries without depending on the generosity of each generation. An endowment of this kind settles the question instead of deferring it.
The work of the workshops
The productions are sold. The source is consistent with the vocation of the house, but it comes late, for those who are learning do not at once make what sells.
Hospitality
Stays and courses bring a real income, held by rule below the threshold at which the house would begin to arrange itself around its guests.
A neighbouring activity
Distinct from the house in its accounts and in its walls, it is capped by statute at a fraction of annual resources, so that the house never comes to depend on it.
The forms of support
The house may be supported in several ways, and they are not equivalent for the same needs.
In money, for the capital, at once or through a pledge over several years. By contributing a building in full ownership, which removes from the reckoning the heaviest and most uncertain item. By contributing a building in usufruct, which costs less to the one who consents to it, but leaves the walls with their owner and alters what may be promised as to permanence: it must then be said that permanence attaches to the institution and not to the building. Lastly, by constituting income-bearing property as an endowment, which is the most useful form of all, since it answers the need that nothing else covers, and which, for a family of the medina already holding such property, commits less than a payment of equal value.
Each of these forms is received, and each is named for what it is. None opens a right over the house, over the admission of anyone, or over the conduct of the life led there: this is written in the rule, and it holds for all.