cc >> Jeanan Yasiri: This course
is offered through the UW School of Human Ecology at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison.
I'm Jeanan Yasiri. As we begin today, I'd like to
extend thanks to our partners in supporting this course:
the UW Office of Corporate Relations,
the UW College of Engineering for their technical,
and financial support which is provided by the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation, which is committed to advancing academic
education in entrepreneurship. I'd also like to thank our media
partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their University
Place crew for taping today's lecture.
I'm quite pleased to introduce our special guest today, Ruth
Shelly, executive director of the Madison Children's Museum.
Ruth is a native of Milwaukee where she began volunteering at
the Milwaukee Public Museum in the eighth grade.
She graduated from the University of Wisconsin
Milwaukee with her dual interest in art and science, and that led
to a career in museums across the country from Albuquerque to
Santa Barbara to Atlanta and finally to San Diego.
In 2003, Ruth returned to Wisconsin to become the
executive director of Madison Children's Museum, and in the
past eight years she and the museum team acquired a new
building through the generosity of Jerry Frautschi.
The team raised more than $10 million to renovate the
structure and fill it with new exhibits, and the museum opened
to rave reviews in August of 2010.
Since then, the facility has welcomed 300,000 visitors.
Unique to this endeavor was the museum's only local initiative
where the organization focused on using only local people,
products and processes that involved our local community.
The museum has won four national and regional awards that
recognize that approach as a best practice in the field.
So I asked Ruth to come and share with us the museum's
experience in developing their new space and their commitment
to the entrepreneurial only local movement.
Please join me in welcoming Ruth Shelly.
[APPLAUSE] >> Ruth Shelly: Well, thank you,
Jeanan. And thanks all of you for your
attention this afternoon. As Jeanan mentioned, I am
executive director of Madison Children's Museum, and I
represent 68 people and 111 volunteers who have helped
Madison Children's Museum achieve its goal of a new
building. I'd like to present our only
local initiative in the spirit of entrepreneurship and then
offer some reflections at the end with some dialogue in terms
of how you feel this particular movement is entrepreneurial.
Here we are at our new building on Capitol Square.
May I ask if any of you have visited Madison Children's
Museum? Oh, great.
Do any of you happen to have kids?
I figure all of you were a kid at one point, so you'll be able
to relate to what we look at. Our new building offered many
options. We used to be at a tiny museum
at 100 State Street, 8,000 square feet.
As Jeanan mentioned, through the generosity of Jerry Frautschi,
we were able to acquire this building in 2005 and then
develop it into a new children's museum.
When you have the opportunity to develop a new museum, you have
many, many choices to make, and it was in this overwhelming task
of developing a new museum with being able to go in any
direction possible that we decided we would take a
direction that was specifically going local.
And this was a natural outgrowth of Madison Children's Museum
commitment to the environment. We had always been a very green
museum. In fact, in the late '90s we
were one of the first museums to ever do an exhibit developed
totally out of natural materials, and so this was not a
foreign concept to us. But as we watched the
environmental movement progress, we realized that people were
equating natural with green. And think about it, if you are
developing an exhibit and you want to use a natural material,
you might choose bamboo. Okay, renewable resource.
But think about the fossil fuel that you would have expended to
take bamboo and ship it to Wisconsin.
It mitigates the benefits of using a renewable natural
resource like bamboo. And so we decided to go beyond
green by going local and by keeping everything in the local
economy. As Jeanan mentioned, we focused
on three specific aspects: using local people, using local
products and using processes that involve the local
community. And the picture that you see
here is the entrance lobby so our new museum.
We were inspired by a commitment to local talent.
And I'll have to step back a minute here and talk about how
museums, which I've been in for over 30 years, typically develop
their buildings and exhibits. It's very typical to hire an
architect who's got a brand name out of your area to deal with
exhibit designers and fabricators who are not in your
local area but rather in a company that might be on either
coast or in Chicago, to meet with them with many trips back
and forth by plane to develop ideas and designs that used to
go back and forth through FedEx and now are shared through web
links, and then finally to have everything fabricated in some
far off workshop and shipped to the museum, installed, the
fabricators leave never to be seen again.
As we thought about developing the new museum we realized there
was tons of local talent right here in town, that we didn't
need to go far beyond in order to find the skills we needed.
In addition, as an outgrowth of our green initiative we decided
that we really wanted to use reclaimed, repurposed and
recycled materials. We wanted to use materials with
low embodied energy. Now, this might seem like a
somewhat strange concept, but if you think about this table, for
example, this table involves all kinds of energy already in it.
There are people who grew the trees, who cut them down, who
sent them to the sawmill, who took them to the carpentry shop
where the table was designed and built and then shipped to be
used at the university. Think about all of the energy
that's embodied in that table. Well, in our case, we wanted to
use things that had low embodied energy, meaning that we were
going to be using things that had already been made that
didn't have much energy inputted in order to make it effective.
And so rather than creating a new table, we would use an
existing table. And even with new products, we
were looking to get directly back to the source so that the
amount of energy that was used to make that product was as
little as possible. In addition, we wanted to model
sustainable behavior. We're a children's museum.
We are raising the next generation.
We want kids to realize that they, too, have a responsibility
for the Earth and can adjust their behaviors to be as green
as possible. And finally, we wanted to put
health first. In fact, back in the late '90s
when we began as a children's museum to look at being green
and natural, it wasn't that we wanted to take care of the
planet, it was because we wanted to build the ultimate healthy
environment for children. And so our exhibit director, who
tended to be very allergic and who had very allergic kids,
allergic to everything, started doing research and discovered
that the typical materials that are used in exhibit design,
think of carpet, Plexiglas, fiber glass, contained many
toxins that were not good for young children's health.
And when you think about little kids, where are they?
On the floor putting things in their mouths.
Their respiration rate is twice ours.
Their immune systems are underdeveloped and so we really
wanted to build a healthy environment, which, in turn, is
healthy for the environment as well.
Thinking about local people, as I mentioned, many museums want
that brand name architect, but we looked at Wisconsin
architects and discovered that our talent was right here in
town. And so we went with The Kubala
Washatko Architects of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and in
this big blown out space, which is our building before we
started renovating, you can see our architect, Mark Lefebvre, in
the hard hat toward the wall. The Kubala Washatko Architects
are masters at sustainable architecture, and we wanted to
go with them because we wanted the greenest possible building.
You may be familiar with their work because they did the
renovation of the Unitarian Meeting House right on campus.
They also designed the world's greenest building,
platinum LEED rated, the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center
in Baraboo, Wisconsin. And so we went with a local
architect. But not only that, we went with
local contractors, specifically Findorff.
You've seen their cranes all over campus.
We worked with them from the beginning and negotiated our
contract with them along the way so that they could work
hand in hand with the architect and suggest cost saving measures
as we progressed. Down in the lower picture you
see our local contractors from Madison Gas & Electric who
installed solar panels on the clubhouse on our roof.
And throughout, we used only local people to build the
building. We used many local people as
designers, craftspeople and fabricators.
And this was not such a big stretch for us because unlike
many children's museums, we have an in-house design team and we
have in-house craftspeople. And so all through our 30-year
history, we have had been designing and making our own
exhibits. Now, moving from an 8,000-square
foot building to a 56,000-square foot building was more than our
in-house team could handle. But fortunately, they had a
network and brought in all of their friends who had a
diversity of skills. You can see here one of our
craftsman was working on an adobe hut that ended up in our
Wildernest or early learning center.
Other people laid stone. A mosaic artist who made
beautiful mosaics on the floor using broken crockery and tile.
Over on the right, this is also in our "Wildernest"
early learning center, these reading nests were made
out of packed Earth and straw. Down in the lower left you see
our pies. You'll see them again in our pie
shop where we decided we didn't want to use any plastic fruits
or vegetables because all of them have some trace amounts of
lead, and so we contracted with local fiber artists and they
went to Goodwill and St. Vincent's, bought sweaters
and coats and used their skills to craft all of our fruits and
vegetables out of what you're wearing and will eventually give
away. We also worked a lot with local
artists. In fact, our building represents
more than 120 local artists' work.
And on the left, you see a beautiful mural that's in the
lobby of our elevator that goes all the way up to the roof, done
by Spring Green native Richard Haas.
This is actually a piece of recycled art.
It used to be in the vestibule of a downtown condo.
And when the condo changed hands, the new owner didn't want
this mural anymore. She donated it to us and donated
it to us in time for us to be able to build the barrel vault
in which the beautiful mural now sits.
It has images of south central Wisconsin all the way around it
in all four seasons of the year, and including images from UW,
Bascom Hall, the Red Gym and the Carillon Tower are also there.
On the right, you see a wonderful sculpture by junk
artist Dr. Evermor. These are our love birds on our
green roof. Dr. Evermor has a sculpture park
up on Highway 12 across from the Badger Ammunition Plant.
If you've ever been up to Wisconsin Dells, you might have
seen his creations along the side of the road.
Or you might have seen his birds on Patterson Avenue.
He has two giant 30-foot birds there.
We contracted with Dr. Evermor to do this wonderful piece
that's made of all recycled materials from Wisconsin's past.
So the body of the bird is an old cheese kettle.
The beaks are blacksmith tongs. The eyes are surveyors' markers.
And he gave us a list a mile long of where all the pieces
came from and how they harkened back to Wisconsin's industrial
past. You can see other examples of
artists. Here on the left, we have a
magnet wall. All of those tracks are
removable and kids can put them in different positions and then
run balls down those tracks, but each track contains a xylophone
key. So they play different tunes as
they go down. On the right you see a wonderful
mural by local children's book author Kevin Henkes and his wife
Laura Dronzek. If you've ever read "Lilly's
Purple Plastic Purse" to a niece or nephew, this is the artist.
And then in front of those green leaves and in the lower inset,
we have two benches that were made for us by the UW graduate
students in woodworking where they were challenged to use
recycled materials to create benches for us.
The bench under the leaves is one of my favorites because the
top of it is made up of very tightly curled fire hose that
was actually recycled from our building, and then they curled
it very, very tightly to make the top of the bench.
Local employees, and boy we really expanded our staff.
At a time when many businesses are laying off or reducing the
hours of employees, we went from 30 people on the payroll in our
old building to 68 people on the payroll now, of which 24 are
full-time. Absolutely every single person
except one who worked on the building is from Wisconsin.
And we are thrilled with our role in workforce development
because we hire a lot of students.
High school students, college students, lots of interns.
And think about the wonderful first job experience you'd get
working at a children's museum in contrast to flipping burgers
somewhere. So we work with the YWCA, with
the Urban League, with Commonwealth Youth Development
and work very hard to build a diverse workforce and to offer
that initial job experience. We also, as I mentioned, have
more than 111 volunteers. They work in every aspect of our
building from on the floor to behind the scenes.
And these volunteers are the lifeblood of our organization
because as a nonprofit, we would not be able to run the size
operation we do without their wonderful contributions of
service. Well, moving to local products,
remember it was people, products, and processes, the
biggest product that we recycled was our building.
In fact, the greenest thing you can do is recycle an old
building because think again of that concept of low embodied
energy. If you've got an existing
building as ours was, built in 1929 as a Montgomery Ward
department store, there's all that cut stone, all of that
concrete, all of that steel, all of that glass already there.
If you're able to recycle a building, you don't need to buy
it all over again. You don't need to go back to the
raw materials and mine them all over again.
And we found in our repurposing of this building that we were
actually beneficiaries of a quirk of history.
We think about the economy today, and think about the
economy in 1929, not the best year to open a new business,
Montgomery Ward had the grand idea that they were going to
build four additional stories on top of this building.
And so they engineered it for four additional stories that,
sadly because of the Great Depression, were never built.
In our case, we inherited a building that was built with
incredible engineering, incredible load-bearing.
And that's the one reason that we were able to put an
accessible green roof on the top because we have up to three feet
of dirt, full size trees, a clubhouse, a pond and stream,
all because of the misfortune of an earlier generation where they
were not able to expand and we were able to use their
engineering for our advantage. We also repurposed a building on
the other side of our building, our log cabin.
You may have seen it as you've gone down Dayton Street.
We really wanted to do something with local history, and one of
our, thinking of an innovation, our education director came in
with a newspaper clipping one day and said, hey, there's a log
cabin for sale in Milwaukee, wouldn't can be great if we had
a log cabin on site so that we could talk about local history
in the 1830s and 1840s when Madison became the territorial
capital? Well, it ended up that that log
cabin in Milwaukee didn't work out, but the log cabin world is
very small. Word got out that we were
looking for a log cabin and the Nature Conservancy contacted us
because they had property in Walworth County that had a big
house on it. And as they started taking down
the house so that she could restore the land to prairie,
they discovered that the walls were this thick.
And as they pulled off the sheet rock, they discovered the house
on the property had been built around and entombed the
ancestral log cabin. And so a family used to live
in this log cabin. Six kids were raised in this
cabin and late 1830s and 1840s. To our knowledge it's one of the
oldest log cabins in the state. And we contracted with log cabin
restoration experts from Old World Wisconsin and they
reassembled the cabin log by log in a very authentic way.
And so now we have a wonderful living history classroom on our
parking lot, and it serves as a great landmark for the museum as
well. As we talk about local products,
we also wanted to emphasize Wisconsin natural resources.
And this is the Wildernest, the area in our building
for kids five and under. And I can't begin to tell you
where all of this stuff comes from, but it's all from within
100 miles of Madison. So look at the floor.
You've all heard of the emerald ash borer, I'm sure.
There are private owners of Wisconsin woodlands who had many
mature ash trees. They really didn't want these
ash trees to fall to the emerald ash borer and so they harvested
them, donated the trees to the museum.
We had the trunks locally milled and dried and made into a
beautiful ash floor which you see in this picture.
The huts that you have seen in this and earlier pictures were
all made of local clay and straw.
The stone on the side is from Fond du Lac and Door County.
The little goat cart that you see is built on top of an old
baby buggy chassis that we were able to acquire.
The slide that goes down into the space was a hallowed out log
from one of our contractor's backyards.
And the list goes on and on. But everything from within
100 miles of Madison. We also used a lot of
manufacturers. And the best place to see them,
Wisconsin manufacturers, is in our bathrooms where the Bradley
Company, as in Allen Bradley of Milwaukee, specializes in
reclaimed and recycled bathroom fixtures.
And so all of our stalls are made out of recycled milk jugs.
In fact, every stall represents 16 milk jugs that were saved
from landfill. Our fixtures are all made by
Kohler in Kohler, Wisconsin, with low flow and dual flush
toilets. The sinks by Bradley Company
have photovoltaic panels in the top so that the faucets run by
energy from the lights in the room.
There are no batteries. There are no electrical
hook ups. We have waterless urinals.
And also our fancy hand dryers. We have Dyson hand dryers that
dry your hands in 10 seconds. The kids love them, in fact we
really didn't even need exhibits because they just wanted to dry
their hands. In local products we also used,
as I mentioned, a lot of reclaimed materials.
This is a view of Possible-opolis, which is our
second floor. You'll remember that in the
Wildernest, our youngest kids area, we used all materials
within 100 miles of Madison. On the second floor, we strived
to use only materials that were recycled, reused or repurposed.
And so when you get to the second floor, the first thing
you see is the floor which we acquired from a decommissioned
high school in south Milwaukee. And they gave us a call and said
you've got two days to pick up this gymnasium floor if you want
it. So we got the gym floor,
beautiful maple floor, pulled out all of the nails and relaid
it in this confetti-like pattern which really has been a great
surface for the kids. You see building materials here,
blocks made out of old street signs, planks made out of
recycled water bottles, giant tinker toys that we crafted in
our own shop. Again, everything from some
place else. And you can see some before and
after pictures here. We pulled a plane out of the
woods about 100 miles from Wisconsin and turned it into our
tinkerer's bench which is a wonderful platform for kids to
take things apart. One of their favorite things to
do is when we bring out old typewriters and we put old
typewriters on the tinkerer's bench and they type away and
think it's the greatest thing in the world.
My own daughter wanted a manual typewriter, and I said, Maggie,
why do you want a typewriter, you've got a computer?
And she said, mom, if you have a typewriter, you don't need a
printer. And I was like, okay.
So to each his own but great fun.
Our climber on the right is a two-story climber and you can
see that one of the globes in this climber used to be a buoy
that we got from Lake Michigan. The black and white globes are
farm turns that are from agricultural use, and the big
green slide going down was pieces of leftover water park
slide that we got from Wisconsin Dells.
In our way back machine, there are all kinds of reclaimed
materials in this particular wall which is designed kind of
as a mad scientist's dream. All different art projects going
down. You can see an x-ray cabinet
from UW. There's a dentist chair in
there. An old phone booth with a rotary
dial phone. None of our little kids have
every dialed a rotary dial phone before.
All fun things, including, on the far left, chemistry
glassware that was blown by the glass blower on campus who does
glassware for all the labs on campus, and he did a wonderful
display of fanciful glass tubes that the kids can bubble air up
through. Again, reusing materials from
all different sources and creating wonderful stories for
parents and grandparents to recognize objects and say, oh,
man, I used to play pinball on this kind of mechanical pinball
machine, and the wonderful stories that ensue are really
heart-warming. We also, as I mentioned, use a
lot of processes that involve the local community.
And the process represented here are artist residencies.
I talk a lot about our bathrooms because we have eight
destination bathrooms. We had eight different schools
each adopt our eight different bathrooms.
And we had an artist in residence go and work with them
to create ceramic tiles for each bathroom.
And so each school got a choose a theme.
The red one that you see there is the under the sea theme, and
the kids made beautiful under the sea tiles which are
now permanently mounted in the bathrooms.
Down below, you see the geometric shape bathroom, and
the two images on the right are all of the chairs in our artist
studio. We went to UW SWAP and bought
every hardwood chair we could find and then had an artist in
residence come to our old building and the kids painted
all of the chairs in very fanciful shades.
Here's the finished product of our art studio, you can see some
of those chairs, as well as 13,000 bottle caps.
We worked with every single Madison public school in their
art classes and gave them bottle caps where they could draw tiny
little pieces of art, the size of a quarter.
They pasted them in the bottom of the bottle cap, and then we
hired an artist to fill those bottle caps with resin, we
sorted them all by color and then students from Shabazz High
School designed murals for us from the columns and the walls
of our art studio. And volunteers and staff glued
up 13,000 bottle caps. You can see my little friend Zoe
here who actually found her bottle cap in one of the
columns. We also did a lot of class
projects. We engaged local third through
fifth graders to research what life was like for kids their age
in the 1830s and 1840s Wisconsin.
And they went to primary sources and looked up to see what the
inside of the log cabin should be like so that they could work
with historians to define what furnishing should be there, what
people ate, how they lived, and it became a much more meaningful
experience as a result. On the right, you see the
graduate woodworkers at UW working on the class project for
build our benches. We have eight artist-designed
benches, but not only did they build them, they had to go
through the whole process of developing a proposal, showing
it to their professor, being funded if they were good enough,
and then finally following through, all using reclaimed
materials. We did a lot of university
collaborations, particularly with university artists.
This particular piece, called Rhythm Face, was designed by a
UW professor in musicology who developed a software program
that recognizes your face, grabs on to it and then reacts as you
move. And so if you're here in the
dentist chair, the camera looks at your face, grabs on to your
features and as you make funny faces, it makes sound.
And so as you open your mouth, a barking seal might come out or
an air raid siren. And the kids love it but not
only that, we have a camera that takes their image down to their
lobby. So as you come in the front door
you see all these people making funny faces on the screen in the
lobby. We also worked with 26 artists
to develop 26 letters of the alphabet, all about a foot high,
and that artist alphabet is throughout the entire building.
We, as staff, chose 26 quotes about childhood and creativity
and innovation and have those quotes now inscribed all through
our building. We also have a little postcard
book now that has all of the quotes and the alphabet letters
with it. You can see on the right, one of
our favorite exhibits, the human sized gerbil wheel.
As you go in our building, kids are going around and around on
this gerbil wheel up above, and the quote below it, I don't know
if you can read it, says fun is good, which was a quote by
Theodor Geisel, or Dr. Seuss. We also collaborated a lot with
volunteer groups. You see on the left, the
three-story atrium in our building where we have Gertrude,
our cow, going up and down. The kids can crank the cow over
the moon and back again. And around that void in the
middle of the building is a beautiful train set that was
donated to us. We had seven retired model
railroaders work with us for over three weeks to install this
beautiful train set in this lobby area.
And it goes around and around with local photographers' images
behind so that all of the scenes that you see are also from
Wisconsin. Well, what has been the impact
of all of this only local initiative?
We've had wonderful, wonderful attendance.
As Jeanan mentioned, more than 300,000 people since we opened,
and we had 284,000 in our first year.
We expected 130,000. So it really has been over the
top. In our old building, we had 1900
memberships, now we have 6500 memberships.
And so the community response has been fabulous.
Here you see an image of our building on opening day.
We've also had a lot of awards, and I have to smile at this one
because I took this picture in May of this year and we had,
what, five awards. And that's now up to 14 on our
trophy shelf in the lobby. Literally awards for everything
from our flooring to our rooftop.
But the biggest one that we just received last month
on October 25, was the National Medal for Museum Service.
And this is a big deal. It's the Oscar, the Pulitzer
Prize, the Nobel Prize of the museum world.
And you've probably never heard of it before.
It's awarded by the Institute of Museum a Library Services
federal agency, but the reason you haven't heard of it is that
no museum in Wisconsin has ever been awarded it.
And while all of the awards that we've received have been very,
very meaningful, this one is particularly meaningful because
it's about service, and it's not just community service in our
new building but going all the way back to when we were founded
in 1980. And here you see the press
conference where we unfurled the banner for our national medal.
I think the best thing, though, is that our impact has been in
civic pride. If you count up everybody who
gave something to the new Madison Children's Museum, from
a bottle cap to a million dollars, we have more than
15,000 people who have been involved in this project.
And when you're thinking about going only local, that kind of
community investment is just incredible.
We really are a museum, not only for the community, but one that
was built with the community. Well, all of this makes you
think about entrepreneurship, and I was flattered and honored
and somewhat perplexed when Jeanan called me and said why
don't you do something on entrepreneurship because I
didn't particularly think of ourselves as entrepreneurs.
But it caused me to reflect what entrepreneurship really means
and how it applies to our particular situation.
And I actually had to look it up to get a good definition, right?
And when you look up the definition of entrepreneurship,
it comes from an old French word that means undertaking.
And to be entrepreneurial can be as simple as starting a new
business. But it usually, especially in
today's vocabulary, has the added umbrella of undertaking a
new business with innovation, with a certain amount of risk,
and with the creation of wealth. And so when I thought about what
we had done with our only local initiative, certainly a lot of
what we did was innovative. If you come in and walk under a
cow, it's not without a certain degree of risk.
And creating wealth, well we're a nonprofit.
But I measure our wealth in different ways.
When I think about our 6500 member families, when I
think about the wealth of civic pride, when I think about the
fact that 32,000 people come and visit us every year on our
Access for Everyone program where we provide free or reduced
admission, we really have a great deal of wealth but it's
coming back in a different form than what you would typically
think of as profit. What else can we learn from the
museum's story in terms of entrepreneurship?
As I was thinking about our own lessons learned,
entrepreneurship, for me, arises from limited resources, not deep
pockets. Many of you, in thinking about
becoming entrepreneurs, might think I need an angel investor,
I need unlimited funds, I just need to be able to try things
out and fail and be able to start again.
All of that is true, but, in our case, entrepreneurship arose
from limited resources. We actually had our exhibit
budget cut from $3 million to $2 million because construction
costs were coming in high. And so we sat down and thought
we can't buy everything new, why don't we try using things that
are recycled or reused? And that was truly the impetus
for going with recycled, reclaimed and repurposed
materials because we couldn't afford everything new.
But look where it led. And I think that when you are
faced with limitations, you're innovation and your
entrepreneurial spirit is even further inspired because you
have to rise above the obvious money can solve anything kind of
ethic. I also felt that
entrepreneurship, in thinking about our project, arises from a
team effort and not from an isolated genius.
You think about individual inventors, but they're rarely
acting alone. And the reason that I have the
elevator in our museum on the screen is that it is the only
thing I could think of that was my personal idea.
And everything else was somebody else's idea.
We were debating how to accommodate the fact that we had
to move big exhibits up and down through the building, and at the
same time we had to build a passenger elevator, and we
couldn't afford both a passenger elevator and a freight elevator.
And so the old Montgomery Ward store, which had two passenger
elevators side by side, I suggested that maybe we could
combine those into one elevator that could serve to move both
freight and people. Well, it was the best thing we
ever did because now we can take 30 kids up at a time.
We have another senior program where we work with adults with
early memory loss, and the elevator opened one morning and
I saw 10 people in wheel chairs in the elevator.
And it was like, oh, this is great.
And all became clear that it all arose from the fact that we
couldn't afford two elevators. But it's the only idea that I
ever had that came through in the new building.
Everything else was everybody else's idea.
And then when we had this elevator, somebody else said,
well, we've got this big of an elevator, why don't we provide
entertainment in the elevator? And so on the lower right you
see piano students who, on our opening day, were playing piano
pieces as people rode up and down the elevator, and so we had
live elevator music. In every single case, if I look
at an exhibit area in the building, I cannot remember who
thought of any particular thing because it was truly a team
effort with so many different skills coming together.
Truthfully, entrepreneurship might be recognized after the
fact. As I mentioned, we were kind of
forced into using reclaimed, recycled and reused materials.
And we always knew in our early learning area that we wanted to
make it out of natural materials, and as the project
progressed, we realized that, hey, we're really focusing on
using local materials, local people, why don't we make that
our theme? Why don't we limit ourselves to
using local people and local products and local processes?
And so the realization that we were doing something that had
kind of a theme really came sort of after the fact, and then it
became our brand. And so oftentimes you're doing
something entrepreneurial or innovative and you don't
recognize it until later. And now that it's in trying, and
here I have a picture of our Pie in the Sky Diner, that
dining counter has been used by the museum for 20 years.
We have recycled it over and over again from an ice cream bar
to a juice caboose, now the Pie in the Sky Diner, and you
remember I was talking about making all of those fruits and
pie crusts out of recycled coats and sweaters, you can see a
young baker down below. But then once you've got it
started, entrepreneurship can become a guiding principle, a
self-perpetuating philosophy. I use the example of our water
spout machine here, which is the only thing that was designed by
somebody outside of Wisconsin because there's only one person
in the country who designs water exhibits for children museums,
but I think about that every morning as I go into work
because kids control jets of water that send balls up to one
spout and then to the other and then it goes down into this
vortex of water and it gets kicked out again and the balls
go over and over and over and recycling all the way through.
And the kids love it. They're mesmerized for hours.
In fact, you may have noticed on the second floor there was a big
port hole kind of thing, and on the second floor you can look
down through the floor where we've cut a hole to be right
above the vortex so you can see the vortex spinning down in.
And for me, that's kind of symbolic in terms of how once
you get an innovative process started, it just keeps going and
just keeps building on itself. At this point, there's no way at
Madison Children's Museum that we would ever hire somebody
outside of Wisconsin. We always think twice whenever
we are purchasing something to be sure that we can source it
locally first. We look for caterers and food
providers who use local crops. All of this just keeps
perpetuating itself because what started as an innovation became
a lifestyle, and it's just a wonderful thing.
And finally, excuse me...
I want to underscore that entrepreneurship, even though it
may begin as a local effort has certainly happened for us,
it can have national impact. We were just thrilled to win the
national medal because it shines light on all of the 15,000
people who helped us build the new children's museum.
But we had the challenge, when the national government called
us they said, okay, you can come to Washington but you have to
choose one community member to come with you whose life has
been positively impacted by the museum.
Just one. I mean, we've served tens of
thousands of children and families.
So I want back to the staff and I asked them to recommend who
they thought would be a good representative for the museum.
And one person floated to the top, and you see him pictured
with me here. His name is Ben Perreth.
Ben was a normal kid until age seven,
when he had a brain hemorrhage. And his mother came into his
room and saw him in a coma, rushed him to the hospital.
He had brain surgery, multiple radiations, had to relearn to
walk and talk three times and ended up without use of one arm.
And so Ben came to us wondering if he could volunteer because he
had taught himself to juggle with one hand.
So he was our one-armed juggler. And we used him at community
events and he loved interacting with the kids.
He had a gift for being with people.
And finally our visitor services team said, well, why don't we
hire him. And so now Ben is on staff as a
visitor services associate. And he wrote the most compelling
story of how the children's museum had changed his life
because up until that point no one would give him a chance
and he had been so depressed, while the children's museum had
given him, not only a volunteer opportunity but then a job.
It was his life's dream. Well, we, the children's museum,
did have a positive impact on Ben, but he had an equally
positive impact on us because by engaging with Ben, he taught us
to be sensitive to people with special needs.
And since then, our whole special needs program has
blossomed. And so I just want to highlight
how even if entrepreneurial efforts start small or start
local, they can have national impact because on December 5,
Ben and I will be going to Washington and meeting the first
lady and getting the national medal, and all of that has
terrific impact on the rest of the country as they see what
we've done in little Madison with our little children's
museum and can think about how they, themselves, can interact
locally with local people, local products and processes that
involve the local community. And so I thank you for your
attention because it's fun for me to reflect on what we've done
at Madison Children's Museum, and again, I have to underscore
that I speak on behalf of all of these staff members, all of
these volunteers and 30 years of people who preceded us in
building the foundation for the new museum which you can see in
an aerial view here of our lovely green roof.
And I want to invite all of you to come because we encourage
adults to come through as well to see the wonderful art, to
enjoy the architecture. All you have to do is stop in at
the front desk, introduce yourself, we'll give you a
visitor badge and you can wander through for free.
On December 9, we're going to have one our quarterly adult
swim nights, which is 21 and over, and that's when we open
the building just to adults. And the last two ones have been
sold out with 600 people a piece because we have live food
and bars-- Live bands, food and bars, and
adults like yourselves can enjoy the new museum and have fun
as a kid. So, with that, I'm eager to
answer any questions you might have.
And I told Ruth that you, of course, put your hands up and
then I hand off the mic. And I'm so glad that you closed
with the fact, Ruth, that the Madison Children's Museum is for
much, much more than just the children in our area.
It is an absolutely awesome space.
And in fact, every time that I've been there it's only been
with adults, so I'm yet to actually take a child.
I'm curious about a couple of things.
Kind of going all the way back to as you were considering being
part of this only local initiative, did you do any kind
of cost analysis to determine whether or not it was going to
cost more or less to really be committed to only local, and how
did that impact your decision whatever you did learn?
We did not do a formal analysis, but we knew in our
hearts that it was going to cost less because in the traditional
museum mold of hiring an outside design company to design and
build exhibits, there is such a premium on freight, and as we
looked at transportation costs skyrocketing, we knew that we
would be better off in sourcing locally.
But since then, the additional benefit has been that all of our
contractors and providers are easily accessible to us.
You remember I mentioned there was one person who was not
local, our water exhibit designer.
That exhibit has had its challenges.
I can't tell you how many times we wished we could have had Tom
come in from San Jose to come fix it but he can't.
In contrast, there are all of our other local contractors not
only are accessible and eager to come in and fix whatever might
get broken, and trust me we have a lot of stuff breaking at a
children's museum, but they want it to look good because they're
here and they see it all the time and their friends and
relatives and colleagues come through and, hey, isn't that
your piece? And they want to make sure that
it's in the top working order. And so in answer to your
question, Jeanan, we never did a formal analysis but it just made
sense, and it continues to make sense as we've got local
contractors and providers standing behind what they
install. >> Hi, my name's Natalie.
I was kind of wondering what it is you do on more a day-to-day
basis as the director. >> What I personally do on a
day-to-day basis? >> Yeah.
Well, that's a really good question because as executive
director I have a whole host of duties but it goes in about
roughly half, two halves of my job.
Half being fundraising and half being management.
We are not a state or city supported museum.
We're a private nonprofit. And so we have to raise $460,000
every year out of contributions and grants.
And that's in addition to all of the money that comes in from
admissions and memberships. Essentially every dollar that
comes in the door through admissions and membership, we
have to raise another dollar. And so half of my job is
fundraising. And the other half is management
of a business. I have six people
that report to me. Our director of exhibits,
director of education, our building manager, operations
manager, guest experience manager and finance manager.
And so keeping those departments all working and talking to each
other, that's my full-time job. >> Hi, my name is Rachel.
I was just wondering what are some of the future goals for the
museum? >> Future goals, that's a really
good question, and you can see it here.
If you look at this picture and look at the floor right above
the purple sign that says Madison Children's Museum,
we have 8,000 square feet of unoccupied space.
And in three years we hope to be able to open that space
specifically with interdisciplinary exhibits that
focus on science, so there'll be a science theme, and
specifically for children 9 to 12 years old because we do great
with kids up to 8, 9 and then age 10 they start to age out.
And we know from our feedback from parents that they want
exhibits for older kids so their kids don't age out of the museum
and/or so they can bring in families with mixed aged
siblings. And knowing the intellectual
power of Madison and the lack of a natural history museum or a
science center, they really are expecting the children's museum
to pick up the slack in terms of science programming.
So we're working on expansion even though we've only been open
a year. >> Hi, I'm Carly.
It's not very important, but I was just really curious, you
were saying the alphabet exhibit how all of the 26 letters
started a saying, and I was wondering what the saying was
for the X. >> For the X, it is from a book
by Shel Silverstein, you probably all know him from your
childhood, and the saying is X is for xylophone because
X is always for xylophone. [LAUGHTER]
I just gave a Shel Silverstein book
to my nephew for his first birthday this month.
I'm glad you asked me one I could remember, but it is
distinctive. >> Ruth, I'm curious whether or
not this experience that you've had and that you have been able
to share, obviously on a national level, if you know if
it's inspired other museums or colleagues like that to do the
same? >> Oh, thank you for asking
that. I serve on the board of the
Association of Children's Museums.
There are more than 300 children's museums nationwide
and for the first time, the board, instead of meeting in
Washington, decided to go for regional museums to have their
board meetings. And so we hosted at Madison in
September. And I was just blown away and
humbled by their response because they came to our museum
and said oh, my gosh, this is different from whatever I've
seen before. And children's museums, if
you've been to them, tend to have kind of the same exhibits
over and over again, and I think what my peers found particularly
exciting is that Madison Children's Museum truly
reflected our community. And they were inspired to go
back and think differently about how their own local talent and
products could make their museums more distinctive.
And when you think about children's museums, they're
remarkably noncompetitive. There are eight children's
museums in Wisconsin. They're all about an hour and a
half away from each other because that's about as far as a
kid will ride in the car, and we find that we are remarkably
collegial, and so parents who go to children's museums tend to go
from one children's museum to other.
They put it on their itinerary when they're traveling.
And I think that our experience, especially since we've now won
two awards from the Association of Children's Museums from our
only local initiative, has really inspired other museums to
look at the treasure trove of talent and resources within
their own community. And with our second award from
the Association of Children's Museums, we will be developing
an "only local" website that documents our experience and
shares it with the industry, and so our national impact will just
be even more facilitated by that experience.
Hi, I'm Hannah. I have a question, I think I was
walking past your museum one night and I noticed that there
was an event, I guess, on the roof.
I think it was an adult event, maybe a party.
I was wondering if you rent it out?
Do you make profit? >> Absolutely, yes.
We have a brisk facility rental business, and it's designed for
two reasons. One is that, as I mentioned,
we're a nonprofit and we use the income but it helps us reach a
whole new audience, and as we are moving forward in our
sustainability goals, we see our building as a teaching tool.
And so we're eager for not just kids to come, but their parents,
their grandparents and adults like you without children so
that they can see how you can take an old building, make it
work and have it operate in the most sustainable way.
So we've had weddings, bar mitzvahs, adult birthday
parties, board meetings, creativity leadership seminars
where companies like American Girl want to get off-site and
they want to go to a creative place to be able to have their
team meeting. It's really been a wonderful
side business for us and it just expands our audience and makes
sure that the building is used outside of that 9:30 to 5:00
time frame. Great question.
Yes, sir? >> Hi, Ruth.
I just wanted to ask you how our state government and the current
political atmosphere affects or does not affect the children's
museum. >> That's a good question.
The children's museum, by definition, is apolitical.
We intentionally want to stay very neutral because our donors
are from both political persuasions.
It was very interesting to be on Capitol Square during the
protests of last February and March and how it impacted our
business because initially there were two days off of school that
none of the parents anticipated because all the teachers stayed
home. Well, we had tons of kids coming
in because their parents didn't know what to do with them.
Here they had off of school and they hadn't planned for it.
But then as the protests became more intense and traffic and
parking became at a premium, the suburban parents stayed home but
striking and protesting teachers were bringing their kids with
them to the capitol. But the kids could only protest
for so long so we see a lot of parents bringing their children
to the children's museum for a break and then going back to the
capitol for the protests. We just had a bin at the front
door asking people to deposit their protest signs here before
they went in, and that way we maintained political neutrality.
I guess in terms of the political situation, back with
the former governor when I first arrived, I was at an event with
him and we talked about the new children's museum which was
still a dream in our eye. And Governor Doyle said to me,
said to the group actually, that before he made a decision he
always thought about what impact it would have on the children of
our state. And I think regardless of
political persuasion, that has always been a guiding mantra for
me. Before making a decision, what
impact will it have on the next generation coming up?
And regardless of which side of the political spectrum you're
on, I think that's a really good guideline for life.
Well, I want to thank our students for their very
thoughtful questions, and I know they join me in thanking you for
your marvelous presentation and an awesome experience.
[APPLAUSE]