Watching a child move around in the Santa Maria Valley Discovery Museum is like trying to keep track of the silver ball as it bounces off bumpers in a pinball machine.
The children are easily distracted and constantly moving, and the museum floor is alive with running footsteps on Jan. 4. In no particular order, they bounce off the exhibits and zigzag across the museum.
Phil and Kasey Kussler watch their daughter Lily, 3, pull fake dollar bills out of the money till at the Coast Hills Money Club exhibit and rush over to the plastic computer to enter her final dollar tally.
With a cowboy hat on her head, she wastes no time after she completes her task, and runs next door to sit on a saddle at the Barbecue Hall of Fame exhibit. Then she pretends to make soup in the chuck-wagon kitchen, after which she sits on the floor by a pile of rocks and wood that is a fire pit. She asks her father to lift her up to the driver’s seat of the green John Deere tractor, and then gets off and rushes back over to the money till.
It’s like that with every kid.
“Daddy, daddy, you have to see this!” a different little girl hollers at her father.
She’s peering between the red curtains at the backside of a rectangular black box covered with stars. Before her father even makes it from the John Deere tractor to the magic-show booth, she’s already bee-lined it for the diner exhibit.
As an adult, it’s pretty amazing to watch in wonder as kids pounce on each new task. But if you look past the children, as adults often do, it becomes apparent that things at the museum aren’t what they used to be.
The paint on the magic-show booth is chipping a bit around the corners. Only one aquarium has fish in it; the other sits vacant, water-stained, and lonely. The floor piano isn’t working quite right and neither are the shadow box or the bubble machine. Those last two exhibits have been with the museum since before it moved to its current location on South McClelland Street in 2004.
Wear and tear within the almost 10-year-old museum space is an indicator of how much the museum has suffered financially over the last couple of years. Donations collected by the nonprofit stagnated nearly to the verge of causing operations to shut down last summer.
Luckily for the museum and for families in Santa Maria and beyond, a group of women stepped up just in time and launched a critical effort to save the museum. As money starts to trickle in again, the interim executive director, Chris Slaughter, and the new board of directors are slowly getting the gears to crank in a forward direction again.
One of the first things the new crew did was clean. Students from St. Joseph High School volunteered their community service hours for two huge deep-cleaning days at the museum. Slaughter said so far, she’s been able to fix big things like the HVAC system and little things, such as replacing light bulbs and screws.
“The list is just so big that we come in every day and just chip away at what [we] can do,” Slaughter said. “We still have a long ways to go; we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Slaughter and her freshly appointed board of directors—which is still in the process of being built—came on officially in October, but many of them started volunteering their time before that point. They took it day by day over the summer and somehow managed to keep the museum alive.
Slaughter and Diane Adam, who is the new board president, were part of the crew that kept the doors open between May and October, and both have been supporters of the museum since their now-grown children were young. Their children grew up in the museum, and both women believe it serves a niche in the community that no other educational organization does. The dynamic duo voluntarily co-chaired a capital campaign drive for the museum from 2002 to 2004. The campaign netted $2 million, which enabled the Discovery Museum to move from its original Town Center West location to the big warehouse in which exhibits are now showcased.
“We came together for the same reasons, then and now,” Slaughter said. “We spent too much time and effort on this place, to help build this museum, it seemed unfathomable that this place would be allowed to close.”
A nonprofit’s curse
What brought the museum to its knees? Well, it was a combination of things every nonprofit has to deal with, and, eventually, its bank account shrunk to almost nothing.
“We operate completely off the community,” Slaughter said. “[With] any kind of public institution, there can be no lapse in volunteer effort and funding and all of those things, and there was a critical lapse in all of those things that could have closed the museum.”
The museum’s economic meltdown didn’t happen all at once, but rather over time. Slaughter and Adam realized the museum was struggling financially when Kelly White O’Neill was the museum’s director in 2012.
Adam said O’Neill called them to ask for help with board development and raising money.
“She didn’t feel like she was being supported properly by the board,” Adam said of O’Neill. “And that’s not uncommon in the nonprofit world.”
Eventually, Adam and Slaughter found out that O’Neill was no longer employed by the Discovery Museum, and that the board had hired a new director, Karen Ortiz May. Around that time the board invited Slaughter, Adam, Kim Davis—CASA of Santa Barbara County’s executive director—and Annajane Lowe, an accountant, to act as an advisory committee for the museum.
In February 2013, the advisory council led a retreat for the museum’s board of directors. During the retreat, members of the advisory council led workshops about the important financial aspects of running a nonprofit, the board’s responsibilities, how to engage the community, and how to recruit the right kind of board members.
“It was a very positive exchange of thoughts and ideas,” Adam said. “We culminated that retreat with a reflection and a commitment … with regard to supporting the museum.”
Adam said the biggest job for a board is to work together with its executive director to raise the money necessary to operate the nonprofit. That could involve applying for grants, knocking on the doors of local leaders and businesses, and throwing fundraising events. The museum needs at least $300,000 per year to operate, and that’s on the shoestring end of the budget.
“It’s incumbent upon the board to facilitate the raising of those funds,” Adam said. “You try and create savings and try not to dip into them.”
The museum continued having a hard time raising money, and lost a board member from an already short-sided team, which made it even harder to accomplish the task. The way Adam describes it, the more diverse a nonprofit board is, the easier it is to do all the things it needs to do—“fundraising, friend-raising,” perpetuating the mission of the organization, and enhancing the physical part of the institution.
The board once again looked to the advisory council for advice.
“Our best advice was that the board of directors needed to dissolve and they accepted that,” Adam said. “That was very difficult to come up with.”
So the four advisory council members decided to temporarily fill the newly vacated seats on the board of directors. Soon after that, the museum’s few-month-old director Ortiz May took a different job.
Left with no executive director, almost no money, and a very small board of directors, the museum’s future was uncertain and it began tentatively operating on a day-to-day basis.
“We couldn’t really invite people to be on the board of directors. We didn’t even know if we would have a museum to be director for,” Adam said.
The dream team
Over the summer, the advisory council/museum board of directors invited the museum’s two biggest donors, the Santa Barbara Foundation and the Hutton Parker Foundation, to visit. Up for discussion was whether or not the museum would live to see the end of summer.
It was a busy day. Children and families were careening around the museum, much like they did on Jan. 4.
“We all sat around in the middle of the museum and said ‘we cannot let this close,’” Slaughter said. “If it hadn’t been for the support of the Santa Barbara Foundation and the Hutton Parker Foundation, we would have had to close.”
The two foundations have supported the discovery museum from its beginnings 15 years ago. Slaughter said the Hutton Parker Foundation forgave the museum’s $500,000 loan on the South McClelland building and took over ownership and management of the museum building so “we can concentrate our efforts on keeping the doors open and growing our operational funding.”
The Santa Barbara Foundation paid for a feasibility study, and together with the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and the Hutton Parker Foundation, provided $15,000 in bridge funding to get the museum through to the end of summer.
Slaughter said the results of the feasibility study gave everyone involved the boost they needed to feel positive about the museum’s long-term sustainability. The study concluded that community members and leaders think the museum is an invaluable part of the Santa Maria community and are confident that it can drum up the support it needs, both in volunteers and funding.
The museum recently received a $20,000 gift from the Wood-Claeyssens Foundation and a $15,000 gift from the Woods Family Foundation.
“Those are the kinds of gifts that are critical at this stage,” Slaughter said.
The museum is currently in bootstrap mode, still trying to pull together a cohesive and diverse board of directors—the goal is between 11 and 15 members—and to pull in enough funding to pay for monthly operating costs, which on the low end run at about $14,000 a month. Leaders are also trying to nab as much volunteer and community support as possible.
In the future, Slaughter sees a museum with more of a science, technology, engineering, and math focus, as well as exhibits that rotate on and off the museum floor, and exhibits that can travel to schools. In her eyes, the museum’s potential is endless.
“There’s no reason why we can’t have programs going on here every weekend,” Slaughter said. “But it all takes money.”
Contact Staff Writer Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 9-16, 2014.