Children's Museum advisory group Chairman Larry McGee and vice-chairman Allyn Roe (right) explained future plans for the Discover! Children's Museum to the Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce Monday afternoon.
After not receiving funding from the state Legislature, the Discover! Children’s Museum Advisory Group is retooling its approach to raising enough money to launch the facility.
“We have gone back to plan B, and plan B is, ‘Well, we’re going to have to raise more from the national … foundations and the local community,’” said Advisory Group board member Larry McGee. But before the group brings it to the public, it’s going to focus on philanthropic organizations.
An educational museum for children up to 9 years old in Chehalis has been in the works for several years. As a test run, an experimental pilot museum was opened in the Twin City Town Center in February 2014 for a six-month trial run that was later extended for an additional five months. More than 14,600 adults and children from 72 ZIP codes paid for admission to the museum, nearly tripling projected attendance.
To build the proposed new, and permanent, 18,000-square-foot museum and get the operation running, the Advisory Group needs to raise about $3.4 million, which it has been working to raise since January of last year. That total was broken down into three blocks of nearly $1 million apiece, each targeting local, state and national revenue sources, respectively.
The group worked with state representatives Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, and Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, to get another $1 million from the state Legislature this year, but the money wasn’t included in the capital budget.
At the local level $450,000 has already been committed by three organizations. In light of the Legislature’s actions, McGee said, the three organizations extended their deadlines to give to the group time to find alternatives.
As part of the original funding plan the Discover! group applied for several large grants but is still waiting for a response.
“We’ve probably got three-quarters of a million dollars worth of requests out — some of which we’ve only mailed a few weeks ago — and some of which we’ll hear about this year some we’ll hear about early next year,” he said.
Now the Discover board is working with an Oregon-based company called Public Affairs Research Consultants, which specializes in assisting groups in rural communities to get their projects off the ground.
“We will submit, before the smoke blows over, probably 25 to 30 grant requests. And those range from $10,000 to $500,000,” McGee said. “They’re all over the map.”
Once it brings in about $1 million, the group will then start an outreach campaign to raise money from the public.
“We don’t want to start the public campaign until the time is right and the funds are there,” McGee said.
Once the museum is up and running, the group plans on having space for Head Start and Infant/Toddler Learning and Development programs.
The museum will be near the corner of Arkansas and Louisiana streets in Chehalis, along an area that is forever greenspace by covenant.
In February 2014, the Chehalis City Council voted to have city staff work out a lease agreement on city property on Northwest Louisiana Avenue. The museum group proposed a 20-year lease with options to extend it for six additional five-year terms, to total 50 years.
The Children’s Museum Advisory Group, started under the nonprofit Friends of the Chehalis Community Renaissance, and is not an independent 501 (c)(3).
