Philanthropy Sends Amazeum Marching Toward $28.5M Goal

With donated land and a sizable grant from the philanthropic giant Walton Family Foundation, the years-long dream of bringing a family interactive museum to Northwest Arkansas is on the doorstep of reality.

Officials with the Amazeum announced Nov. 5 the launch of a $28.5 million capital fundraising campaign.

The financial scope of the effort was made public five months after details of the museum were officially revealed June 13, highlighted by the WFF’s involvement.

The June announcement culminated a grassroots effort over the course of several years that allowed the project to reach a target fundraising amount and secure a $10 million matching grant from the WFF.

The Amazeum will also accept $700,000 annually from the WFF for the first three years of operation.

It was also announced in June that the land where the museum is to be built — about nine acres near downtown Bentonville — was donated by the Rob and Melani Walton Fund of the WFF. The property is just north of the drive into the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and south of First Presbyterian Church. 

Rob Walton, chairman of the board for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is the oldest son of company founder Sam Walton.

With the announcement of the matching grant from the WFF, which also awarded an initial $370,000 grant to the project in early 2008, a little more than $20 million for the project has been secured.

The capital goal of $28.5 million must be met before groundbreaking, but officials have said the museum will open sometime in 2015.

Neither a contractor nor an official construction date have been announced for the project, which is expected to take 12 to 18 months.

Financial commitments have been made from individuals, families and companies. In addition to the WFF gift, pacesetting donors Nickelodeon, The Hershey Co., General Mills and Wal-Mart Stores Inc./Sam’s Club have also driven support for the museum.

Pacesetting sponsors are the signature donors to the Amazeum, said capital campaign director Holly Hook.

A major gift was also given by the Lee and Linda Scott Family, which now has presenting rights on the project. Lee Scott was CEO of Walmart from 2000 to 2009.

“We would like to capture two or three more [pacesetting sponsors],” Hook said. “We want people to hear the story of The Hershey Co., or Lee and Linda Scott, and why they believe in this project, and then come on board with it.”

Hook, who spent most of her professional career as a teacher, moved from Memphis to Northwest Arkansas in 1996 and has been a proponent for a children’s museum in the area for nearly every day since.

Her enthusiasm for the project is well-suited for her primary responsibility as the Amazeum’s capital campaign director — keeping the financial momentum going.

“Our short-term goal is the construction of the building,” said Hook, the first full-time museum employee hired in 2008. “Long-term goals are to establish an endowment to sustain it so that we open something that is here forever. We want to have an endowment built up and show our donors that we are looking to the future.”

Haiszlip Studio of Memphis has recently completed the first phase of the design process, including construction of the 44,500-SF facility and five-acre site development integrated into the forested site of nearby Crystal Bridges.

Interior designing should be complete by the end of the year, Hook said.

 

Making Miracles

Hook said the group’s ambitions were to develop a facility that would be “small and sweet.” At the Amazeum’s downtown Bentonville offices on Northeast 2nd Street, she marvels at the project’s evolution, from idea to reality.

Upon opening, the Amazeum — one of about 70 children’s museums throughout the country in the planning phase, according to the ACM — will provide a hybrid interactive and discovery center for children and their families.

“It’s not really a museum,” Walton Family Foundation executive Rob Brothers said. “It’s an experiential center.”

Some of the known exhibitions include a Tinkering Studio, water area, climbable tree canopy and exploratory wet lab.

Besides the indoor spaces dedicated to exhibits, meetings and interactive learning, an acre of outdoor space will be utilized for year-round learning.

Hook said the Amazeum, which is operating currently with seven full-time employees, will be marketed to groups as an off-site meeting space for professional gatherings and other special events.

Reaching back to her days as an educator, Hook said the facility itself won’t be the attraction.

“It’s what you can do inside of it; it’s the experience you can get,” she said. “As a teacher, you can make miracles happen in concrete.”

 

Realizing a Vision

Hook’s vision of a children’s museum in Northwest Arkansas began more than a decade ago after arriving from Tennessee.

She had previously taught in a rural district in Shelby County and relished the opportunities to take her students to the Children’s Museum of Memphis.

“It was like taking them to Disneyworld,” she said. “You could just see it on their faces. It wasn’t just because they got to ride a bus. They got to do something they don’t ordinarily do.”

After relocating in 1996, she chose to stay at home in 2000 after the birth of her first child. Outside of story hour at local libraries, the amenities she had been accustomed to in Tennessee were sorely missed.

“I started looking for activities and was shocked at what wasn’t here,” she recalled. “We needed something where children could come together.”

Hook, who estimated she has visited between 25 and 30 children’s museums throughout the country, began working with Janet Geng, the educational curator at the Rogers Historical Museum. Geng had a vision similar to Hook’s and had already spearheaded a successful effort in California.

Geng, Hook said, was a teacher, founder and executive director of the Children’s Museum of Stockton in Stockton, Calif.

She passed away in March 2005, and the push for a project known as the Imagitorium fizzled.

“There were some great ideas; it just didn’t have the support,” Hook said.

It was just a few weeks after Geng’s death, though, that a chance meeting with Bentonville businessman Jim Demaree set Hook on a new course with the Amazeum.

Demaree, whose mother was a rainmaker for the Bootheel Youth Museum in Maldin, Mo., was also organizing an effort among parents, business leaders and educators to meet the needs of area children and families with the possibility of a children’s museum.

“He said, ‘I’ve heard about you,’” Hook recalled of the introduction. “He said he was trying to do the same thing and asked if I wanted to be a part of the board.”

Official nonprofit 501(c)3 status was awarded to the museum entity — Northwest Arkansas Children’s Museum — in June 2006, and the founding board and volunteer committee members were named later that year.

Small donations from local residents were secured in 2007, and the museum became a member of the Association of Children’s Museum, which currently lists 341 museum members in 22 countries.

In 2008, fundraising went public, and the first membership to the museum was sold to philanthropist Johnelle Hunt.

“We were getting some good feedback from businesses and families, and that was good news because donors began to take us seriously,” Hook said.

How serious is reflected in the museum’s net assets, which jumped from $230,503 at the end of 2009 to $799,486 at the end of 2011.

 

Attractive Amenity

The Walton Family Foundation is the country’s 42nd largest nonprofit group, according to philanthropy organization The Foundation, with $1.7 billion in assets as of December 2011.

Its approach, of course, is to keep a low-profile rather than toot its own horn, but the vast majority of the arts and culture amenities in Northwest Arkansas have been aided in some fashion by WFF patronage.

Rob Brothers, director of the group’s Home Region focus area, said the foundation’s overall strategy in Northwest Arkansas is to help provide quality of life amenities that will allow large employers to attract and retain associates at all levels of their organization.

“Arts and culture is a very important part of that quality of life,” he said. “Specifically with the Amazeum, we felt like that was an important regional amenity.”

Brothers said the fact that the Amazeum is a regional attraction aimed at children and families has helped the project enjoy broad support from individuals and businesses throughout the region.

“They have really tried to emphasize that it’s not a Bentonville thing; it’s a regional amenity,” he said.

Brothers said patrons would likely have to go to St. Louis or Atlanta to find something of comparison for the Amazeum. But, he joked, it will not be just a destination for fun and games.

“They are working with the school districts to make sure it’s not just a Lokomotion [Fun Park] or Chuck-E-Cheese’s,” he said. “It’s got an educational component to it. It’ll be really neat.”