Wisconsin Public Television University Place Entrepreneurship in Society  Ruth Shelly Developing New Space: MCM's Only Local Initiative  November 16, 2011 UP660  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. 

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