“They are trying to make money off a tragic situation and trying to make this a tourist attraction when I myself need a lot of financial help,” he said. “I called. They just turned me down. They said they didn’t have the funds to help any of the survivors or the families.”

Jessenia Marquez, who lost her cousin at Pulse, said her daughter, Kassandra, now 26, who was also at the club that night and fled the shooting, had been unable to hold down a full-time job since the attack, and though she had received $25,000 to help her cope with her trauma, that money had now stopped. “There is no respect for those still suffering,” Ms. Marquez said.

Ms. Alvear, who lost her daughter and sits on the museum’s advisory council, says the critics are wrong about Ms. Poma and the impact of the project.

“I wish they would come and sit down and speak to Barbara,” she said. “That’s what I did. I met her. I wanted to see her face.” She discovered, she said, that Ms. Poma is a “beautiful person. I saw it in her face.”

The memorial and the museum, she said, would not merely be tourist draws but would operate as ambassadors for the message of the power of love.

“It can transform people’s lives if we do it right,” she said of the project, “and we are going to be doing it right. Our kids’ lives are never going to be in vain.”

Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting from Florida and Susan Beachy from New York.