Larry Sandler is reporting in the April 20, 2006 edition of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that the Milwaukee Public Museum is selling its interest in the Tirimbina Rainforest Center (located in Costa Rica) for $500,000. See Museum Makes Deal to Shed Rain Forest: New Foundation Will Take Over Acreage in Costa Rica, Preserving Its Mission, April 20, 2006. To a certain extent, the sale keeps the center all in the family. The buyer is the newly formed not-for-profit corporation Pura Vida Foundation. Milwaukee philanthropist Lynde Uihlein was one of the original financial backers and advocates of the Tirimbina Rainforest and she...
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is behind the Pura Vida Foundation and acquisition. According to the Journal-Sentinel, Ms. Uihlien said “I am overjoyed to be actively involved with Tirimbina again, and I intend to continue the mission of education and preservation.”
The purchase will add $450,000 of cash to MPM’s coffers and will also reduce MPM’s debt by $50,000. Possibly of greater long-term importance, the sale apparently will avoid alienating advocates of the Rainforest project who apparently threatened to cut off future contributions to MPM if it sold Tirimbina. See M. Johnson and S. Schultze, Museum’s Rain Forest Up for Sale: Donors May Balk if Center is Actually Sold, Milwaukee J.-Sentinel, July 12, 2005.
The result is clearly a positive one for MPM from a financial point of view. That is particularly true given the fact that MPM’s initial investment was $250,000 and the Tirimbina operation was largely self-supporting, according to the Journal-Sentinel. Museum officials portray the sale as consistent with MPM’s mission, noting that MPM no longer conducts research at the center. That puts it outside of MPM’s core mission, according to MPM board chair, John Schlifske. The question is whether that is an after-the-fact, self-justifying assessment.
We visited the museum last summer and saw many of the same dioramas that we saw forty years ago. MPM was a leader in the development of dioramas, with museums around the world adopting that unique way of presenting information. Today, those dioramas look old and dated. Yet, rain forest and ecology are hot topics both scientifically and politically. So when politicians and some at MPM argue that the core mission is local they may be arguing for stagnation. What could be more mission-related for a natural history museum than to own a working lab in another part of the world? Would we all enjoy going to museums in the United States and Europe if their founders and backers had said: “Why should we go to Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and other far-off locations? They don’t support our local mission.” Those explorers didn’t have airplanes or the Internet to make all the world look local. There is a long tradition of those associated with museums doing exactly what MPM did when it established Tirimbina.
No doubt the Tirimbina decision is a good one financially. But it also is one of the byproducts of the poor governance that led to the financial crisis at MPM. Museum supporters should be quick to question whether Tirimbina was really outside MPM's core mission. We would argue that that answer to that question is not as obvious at those quoted in today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article assert. We hope the arrangement with the Pura Vida Foundation somehow gives MPM the continued ability to draw on Tirimbina and the Foundation’s efforts in developing MPM displays and events.
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