The Children's Science Center is
a local nonprofit organization based here in Northern Virginia.
We get started over a decade ago,
and our mission is to instill a love of learning and science,
technology, engineering, mathematics among all children and our large community.
We had a vision for a world-class,
science center here in Northern Virginia.
It was all about filling a gap.
In 2015, we opened our first end-term operating site at Fair Oaks Mall,
in Fairfax, Virginia, and here are the children science in our lab.
We serve about 50 thousand people a year,
and we continue to serve our community outside our walls,
and other 20 thousand a year.
We have very significant capacity challenges.
We always knew that we needed a bigger science center for our population here.
We serve about 2.5 times the industry average and capacity of visitors in our state.
So, our great project going forward is building
a full-scale science center that will serve children and adults to like ages 1-101.
We have a tremendous opportunity.
We have been given a donation of land that is north of Dulles Airport,
on a major highway, on Route 28,
and here we can build a science center that is both inside and out,
because the development that we're building the science center within has
a 150 acres of natural park land along a major stream valley.
That requires a significant amount of capital and funding from all sources.
One of our great challenges had been attracting that strategic partner that we need,
and we have found that partner.
They are very large science museum that wants a large presence in Northern Virginia.
It's a great relationship.
However, it's one that we have to take care of very carefully.
They're still in the process of deciding how much,
and if they will make a huge investment in this effort,
and this is an eight figure investment.
So, this is not a small undertaking.
We are just beginning to enter
our conceptual design phase and building
our master plan for what this building would look like.
What are all the galleries that are going to be within it?
As we're starting that process,
we did bump into a bit of a challenge.
We sat down with the developer for one of our meetings,
and the developer share that there will be another very large museum.
That will be right beside us in the development,
and the architecture for the renderings
that we've seen for this museum are very distracting.
Very large. It's hard to sell your museum
when you have one that looks like a national monument right beside you,
and so immediately, we were worried.
We didn't feel any better after talking to our partner.
They were not happy.
They felt like this was a big enough issue that we
should consider walking away from this developer.
Why would this developer put a big museum like that right beside us?
So, it was a very tenuous moment,
because by the way,
it took us over a decade to get this land.
We turned over every rock,
we looked in every nook and cranny of Northern Virginia.
We talked to every government entity,
every developer, and this is it.
This is the place,
and so walking the way is not an easy thing for us to do.
Actually, the solution started before we reach the challenge.
We made a really critical decision during this process to bring in
a museum design team that would be very favorable to our major partner.
We use the design firm that they had used for many years,
and so there was a lot of trust with that particular design group.
It felt like there was no way that we could have any problem or
any backlash from our partner with the design that this firm
would come up with because the partner's health is such high esteem.
Everything that they had done for them.
The other part of the solution was the problem itself,
and being able to go back to the developer and say, yes, that's exciting.
There's another museum here.
There could be a lot of interesting synergies that
happen within museums once they're opened one day, that's wonderful.
But we actually have a problem here,
and we need your help to solve it.
We are not going to be able to get the buy-in from
our partner or not going to be able to get the buy-in from our funders in
the community to build our museum if we look
like the ugly stepchild of this big fancy museum.
So, we need to change something here.
So, when we approached the developer,
the developer was very sympathetic to our situation.
They got a great job of listening,
and between the designer and the developer,
we went through a series of iterations at looking at what
are other sites in that large development,
it's a 500 acre development.
So, there's a few choices,
and we were advertising a museum that would be science in her inside and out.
So, we needed to be closer to the nature trails.
We needed a prominent position in that development.
Our final solution is really a wonderful solution.
We have found a way to optimize our site in the development.
We have a large museum on one end,
and we have ourselves and we bookend the retail village of the community.
If you can imagine them all,
we're Macys on one end and they're Bloomingdales on the other,
and we each are anchoring the community at our future home.
Yael Grushka-Cockayne (@grushkay)Associate Professor of Business Administration
