Saturday would have been a busy day at the Children’s Museum in Oak Lawn.
That was executive director Adam Woodworth’s first thought upon waking that morning and peering out his window.
Between school field trips and spring breaks, March is always the museum’s busiest month. And on rainy days, it’s especially so.
But this rainy March day was different.
No families were visiting. No children were playing. The museum was still.
It has been that way since March 14, when Woodworth closed the building’s doors and postponed that evening’s Spring Luau — the nonprofit’s largest annual fundraiser — in light of President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I said, there’s no way we can be open during this,” Woodworth said. “We have too many families and too many children that come through our doors to be open.”
The Children’s Museum, which relies heavily on ticket sales and private rentals, now must find a way to endure the sudden loss of its primary revenue streams for weeks, if not months.
“We have no families coming in, no birthday parties, no field trips, we have no museum rentals, so our entire earned income stream is just stopped at that point,” Woodworth said. “I sat down and started crunching the numbers and said maintaining our staff levels at our full rate, how long can we maintain that?”
It wasn’t long.
To ensure the museum’s permanent survival, Woodworth laid off 13 of his 14 staff members.
A “very gracious” donor stepped in to save the lone remaining part-time employee so she could focus on social media engagement during the shutdown, Woodworth said.
“I had to make the tough decision to say, OK, if our organization is going to continue beyond this, then here’s the steps we need to take,” he said. “We need to cut as much as possible until that point, so we’ll be able to reopen.”
Woodworth said he’s hoping the museum can resume operations by May or June, but is planning for the “worst-case scenario” of August.
If that worst-case plays out, the organization may end up reopening without him at the helm.
“It’s going to depend on what we do over the next three months how long I can stay on,” he said. “I don’t want the organization to have to touch its restricted funding to keep me around. I just don’t want that.”
The museum’s closure is not just a blow to its employees, who now find themselves out of work, but also to its vendors and to the roughly 75,000 visitors across the region who pass through its doors each year.
“We provide a place for families to go and play together,” said Heather Hendrickson, of Mount Greenwood, the museum’s only current employee. “So many places, you go and take your kid and you just watch your kids play. We provide a place for families to engage together.”
The Children’s Museum in Oak Lawn, one of six such nonprofit museums in the greater Chicago area, opened in 2003 and moved into its current 12,000-square-foot space at 5100 Museum Drive in 2009.
Its annual budget typically hovers around $650,000, according to IRS documents, with between 60% and 70% of its operating funds generated through admissions, birthday parties and field trips. It is not associated with the village and does not receive taxpayer funding, Woodworth said.
Children’s museums aim to tap into children’s natural curiosity about the world by using play with toys, games and educational exhibits to help them learn critical thinking and interpersonal skills.
Oak Lawn’s museum caters primarily to children from birth to age 10, but also offers volunteer opportunities for dozens of middle school and high school students each year, Woodworth said.
“The thing that sets children’s museums apart from every other cultural and educational or learning space is that they’re really the only place where adults and children can come to learn together,” said Laura Huerta Migus, executive director of the Association of Children’s Museums, an advocacy organization for children’s museums worldwide.
Huerta Migus said children’s museums serve a critical civic role by partnering with schools, libraries, hospitals and other cultural organizations to promote hands-on learning, literacy development and the dissemination of public health information.
“If children’s museums go away, we really lose an important connector node across the system that serves children and families,” she said.
The Oak Lawn museum’s situation, while dire, is not unique, Huerta Migus said.
All 300 or so of the museums her organization supports nationwide are currently closed and the majority, like Oak Lawn, have operating budgets under $1 million and limited cash reserves, she said.
For that reason, the impact of the sudden closures has been immediate and many children’s museums are now grappling with having to eliminate staff while simultaneously trying to raise or access funding to prevent a permanent shutdown.
The inability to serve children and families in person has required museums across the country to develop new and innovative strategies to engage their guests virtually.
Hendrickson, who is leading the Oak Lawn museum’s revitalized social media push, said it remains a work in progress.
“Normally, we’d just promote things we were doing in the museum and now we’re suggesting things for outside the museum, things people can do at home,” she said.
The response on the museum’s Facebook page has been modest so far, Hendrickson said, but she’s hoping to scale up online engagement and eventually get people accustomed to sharing photos or videos of themselves.
Her most popular post so far has been a riff on the viral Lori Lightfoot memes that have circulated online recently depicting Chicago’s stern-looking mayor standing among the museum’s large blue construction blocks. It received nearly 20 times more likes and shares than the museum’s average Facebook post and even got a handful of people to engage and share their own favorite Lightfoot memes.
While Hendrickson focuses on ramping up the museum’s social media content, Woodworth has turned his attention to fundraising so the museum can continue to maintain its skeleton operations and pay its maintenance and utility bills.
He said the museum should be in solid shape if it can manage to bring in about $10,000 each month.
Through Wednesday, the museum’s emergency fund had raised nearly $12,000 from 44 individual donors.
The early fundraising success has been encouraging, he said, but it’s tough to assess the long-term sustainability given the uncertainty surrounding the virus’ course.
“The hardest part for us and other businesses and organizations is we don’t know when this is gong to end,” Woodworth said.
Once current restrictions are ultimately loosened, it should then take about a month to ramp up operations, he said. And while he’d like to bring back all former employees who want to return, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to do that immediately, Woodworth said.
“It was an abrupt stop, but it’s going to be a gradual open,” he said.
However long it takes, Woodworth said he was confident the museum would survive, likening its current situation to the precarious period after the financial meltdown in 2008, when the organization was raising funds to move into a larger space.
“It was a hard time for us back then, but we got through that,” he said. “We got opened and we were able to serve a lot more families and children than in that little space. And we will get through this, we will get through this.”
zkoeske@tribpub.com
Twitter @ZakKoeske
