Michigan Science Center: An experiment gone right
The Michigan Science Center, rescued from liquidation, is back in the game.
A little more than a year after Ann Arbor businessman Ron Weiser bought its assets to avert foreclosure, a rechristened science center once again is hosting student tours and preparing for an onslaught of holiday visitors — a good problem to have for a gem led by new CEO Tonya Matthews.
“This year we’ve really focused on stabilizing,” she said in an interview Monday. “We’re now beyond the keep-the-doors-open mode to what are our doors open for. We are closing the year in the black. No debt, and operating capital clear through the next two quarters.
“Folks are investing in us with the expectation that we grow. The next piece is thinking forward — strategic planning, what it means to be a statewide institution. There’s a whole world we haven’t introduced ourselves to.”
A reopened science center is unambiguously good news for the city, its museum district in Midtown and the tens of thousands of school kids who make annual pilgrimages to John R. Its return will hit the one-year mark on Dec. 26, another emphatic statement about the resilience of the city’s cultural institutions and the commitment of donors determined to turn adverse economic circumstances into renewal.
MiSci, as the resurrected Detroit science center calls itself, is no different. Like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Historical Museum, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Michigan Opera Theater, backers of MiSci used the existential threat of imminent foreclosure to re-energize a funding base that exceeded this year’s fund-raising goal of $2.9 million by roughly $200,000.
“At the end of ’13 we’ll have more working capital in the bank than we did at the beginning of ’13,” said Tom Stephens, the retired vice chairman and chief technology officer of General Motors Co. who chairs MiSci‘s board of directors. “That’s sustainable. It’s not only working. It’s delivering on everything we said it would.”
