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I think in your position where you have possibly only a year left - I would be looking to team up with other ventures, that might welcome collaboration.
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Returning to this point, yes I agree that we are more or less out of time to set up as intended on our own patch under our own steam. I am still probing in various places to see whether anyone is game for taking the project on as a whole, but it's big and it's difficult and that is one of the reasons it doesn't exist already. It's inherently a big project because of its broad scope, and the broad scope is designed-in as part of the concept.
Working museums of vintage technology tend to form around clusters of industry 'veterans' who are sufficiently forward-thinking and generous to turn their hobby - preserving what they know and care about - into a publicly beneficial venture. This is good in one way because it focuses available skills and resources into concentrated hubs, but it has the significant limitation of subdividing all the different branches of technology in artificial ways.
There are very few tape recorders at the BVWTM, which has its main focus on domestic radio. Back in the day, tape recorders and radios came from the same makers, were sold in the same shops and catalogues, were used in the same home for the same purposes (listening to music). But now we have an artificial divide where you might have to visit two museums to see a Ferguson radio and a Ferguson tape recorder that were side by side in the shop window. This is not a criticism of the Wireless Museum, it does what it says on the tin par excellence. It's an observation that topic-specific museums that are ideal for dedicated enthusiasts who want to see a particular thing, are not ideal for helping people with a general curiosity about how things work to find their feet, see the big picture and start learning the principles.
Having arrived at this concept and made it a deliberate policy to cover a wide range of material, it's more difficult to integrate with existing organisations that tend to be tightly focused. We can't go to an organ museum and offer them our collection of organs with the condition that they also take the CNC lathe (because it runs from perforated paper tape like the roll-playing instruments) and a chunk of telephone exchange (to show how the crossbar relays are related to organ relays) and a bench counter-timer (to show other applications of frequency dividers) and so on. They will only take the organs, in which case that aspect of the MEET concept unravels and the collection devolves into separate items bearing little relationship to one another.
In one sense, it is the concept that I want to preserve and promote, over and above the collection which will generally find takers if only piecemeal. If that can be passed on reasonably intact, then we have found the solution.