Freedom Center could close
Written by
Mark Curnutte
DOWNTOWN - The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, hailed as a beacon of freedom worldwide, could close by the end of 2012 if it can’t find $1.5 million a year to cover its future budgets.
Contrast that grim prediction to the pomp and pride of Aug. 23, 2004, when the museum’s opening drew thousands to the middle of the city’s riverfront. Dignitaries in evening gowns and tuxedos attended a daylong festival that featured choirs and bands, a procession across the Roebling Suspension Bridge and the lighting of an eternal flame dedicated to the slaves who crossed the Ohio River to freedom and were escorted to safe places farther north.
Freedom Center leaders have aggressively cut costs and are seeking new sources of revenue.
“We’re operating the museum and programming at bare bones,” said Kim Robinson, Freedom Center president and chief executive. “We’re scratching and clawing.”
Freedom Center board co-chairs the Rev. Damon Lynch Jr and John Pepper, the former Procter & Gamble CEO and chairman, are calling on potential donors here and abroad, private and corporate.
The Freedom Center, which has paid off its mortgage and owns its building, is considering raising money from tenants, naming rights, investment in other nonprofits’ social programs and bringing in a full-scale restaurant -- with a liquor license -- to replace its existing cafe.
Pepper wants the center “lit up morning, noon and night.” Facility rental peaked at $464,000 in 2006 and has dwindled to a projected $156,000 in 2011.
“We must develop a sustainable business model to continue operating long-term,” Robinson said.
Freedom Center leaders opened their books to the Enquirer. They acknowledge a flawed initial business plan and vow they are now getting it right.
“We humbly yet earnestly call on the good citizens of the community to help us,” Robinson said. “Now is not the time to give up. It’s the time to come together and help us fulfill the great promise of this institution.”
They’re also appealing to people who have never visited.
“Give us a try,” said Lynch, citing Freedom Center research that shows just one-third of the museum’s 1.135 million visitors through its first seven years have come from Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.
![[Image: attendancebig.jpg]](http://local.cincinnati.com/local/graphics/freedom/attendancebig.jpg)
They’re not giving up on the founders’ original plan of giving the museum to the federal government and having it assume the roughly $3 million in annual operating costs. Prospects of ceding it to any of three federal departments in the near future is unlikely, given the sluggishness of the national economy and push to shrink government.
Total operating expenses have been cut by two-thirds, from $12.5 million in 2004 to $4.6 million a year. More reductions will bring the budget to $4 million moving forward, Pepper said. The center sliced the full-time work force from 120 to 34.
Annual revenues are projected at $2.5 million, with about $250,000 coming from the federal government, but nothing is expected after this year from the state, county or city. The city provided a $300,000 grant in 2011 after giving no money to the center in 2009 and 2010. The Ohio Cultural Facilities Commission authorized an $850,000 grant in February after Pepper signed a personal guarantee.
![[Image: revenuebig.jpg]](http://local.cincinnati.com/local/graphics/freedom/revenuebig.jpg)
The Facilities Commission, which must give formal approval to institutions’ financial and programming soundness before state money is released, has reviewed the Freedom Center’s budget through Nov. 30.
“We’re very encouraged by its progress toward financial goals this year,” said Kathleen Fox, commission executive director. “We’re very impressed by their energy and determination.”
The commission only can release money appropriated by the Ohio General Assembly.
The center opened to commemorate and teach the abolitionist movement that helped to free African slaves from the American South in the 19th century, and to celebrate Cincinnati’s role at that time. Today its goal is to connect modern struggles for freedom and modern forms of slavery to the lessons of that past.
The center has won national and international acclaim for creating the first permanent, museum-quality exhibit examining contemporary slavery, “Invisible: Slavery Today.” Contemporary slavery ensnares 12 million to 17 million people worldwide, with practices ranging from forced child labor to sex trafficking of girls and women.
“The mission is right, the course is right,” Pepper said. “We need to become more engaging to bring more families and young people through our door.”
Critics blast center as inflated, disconnected
Robinson, Pepper and Lynch admit the January 1997 study forecasting annual attendance of 310,000 was inflated, “three times too high.” It was conducted by AMS Planning & Research, a national arts and entertainment research firm with offices in California and Connecticut. Actual attendance leveled off at 113,000 in each of the previous two years. It’s on pace for a slight increase in 2011.
Some critics locally say the large number of students who visit the Freedom Center on field trips pads its attendance and fails to generate revenue. Not true, Robinson said. The center receives $6 per student from the school districts, and the $6 difference from the regular $12 admission is made up by private donors who support the center’s educational outreach, he said. Nearly 44,000 students visited the center in 2010, bringing to 316,000 the number who have visited since the start of 2005.
The Freedom Center’s attendance is higher than the median annual attendance of 80,000 for museums across the country analyzed by the American Association of Museums.
Local critics don’t want another dollar of public money spent on the center. They say it grossly overstated its attendance and resulting economic value to the city and region in years leading up to its opening and still presents an exaggerated picture of financial benefit.
“My position and COAST’s position is we want it to survive and thrive and be a nice addition to the city -- without tax dollars,” said local attorney Christopher Finney, who leads the anti-tax group Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST) and is former chairman of the county’s Tax Levy Review Committee.
Finney said he also doubts the economic impact studies conducted for the Freedom Center by the Research and Consulting Division of the Economics Center at the University of Cincinnati, including one in September that credits the center with a $26 million benefit to the region.
“It’s fantasy,” Finney said.
COAST argues that at least one-fourth of the center’s visitors are part of school groups that do not stay in hotels, eat in restaurants or shop.
Study authors hold to their findings, which say the Freedom Center is responsible for 259 jobs and $8 million in household earnings and is part of a cultural amenities lineup in Greater Cincinnati that attracts and retains “new economy knowledge workers.”
Cincinnati USA Convention & Visitors Bureau leaders say the Freedom Center has helped to attract convention business to the city. Since 2006, organizers of a dozen major conventions and events have cited the Freedom Center as one of the primary draws. Major League Baseball’s first two Civil Rights Games and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) national convention and youth meeting are on that list.
Still, detractors remain in Cincinnati’s black community and among anti-poverty activists.
They have said the Freedom Center is aloof and disconnected from the people now enduring harsh economic disparity – Cincinnati’s African-Americans, especially. In its early years, they say the Freedom Center played to a national audience, not the local community, and the community hasn’t forgotten.
In 2009, Cincinnati NAACP chapter President Christopher Smitherman told the Enquirer that the Freedom Center had failed to do “substantive outreach to local African-Americans.”
Since then, the center entered partnerships with existing social programs for at-risk mothers, single fathers and high school and college students who need mentors.
Elected to City Council in November, Smitherman now says he sees “incremental steps” and a “sea change” in the Freedom Center’s attitude and outreach to African-Americans.
“Our goals and aspirations in this building connect to their goals; there is a tremendous list of `unfreedoms,’” Lynch said in reference to a primary center acronym R-I-G-H-T-S (racism, illiteracy, genocide, hunger, tyranny and slavery). “We want to work together to close the gap. This (building) can be Mecca.”
The building and land, valued at $72.5 million by the Hamilton County auditor, is paid for. Its remaining $27 million in debt was retired in 2010 by cashing out investments, additional institution reserves, a major gift from Pepper and his family and debt forgiveness by a group of lenders.
The center stands in an architecturally significant building in the middle of The Banks. After years of delay, that development is now ahead of schedule with the first 300 apartment units 98 percent occupied and with construction of another 300 units and more retail space expected to begin in the summer.
“We were on an island for a long time,” Robinson said. The center invited its new residential neighbors to a reception in August and even sold a few memberships.
Potential partnerships with other like-minded institutions, such as the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University and Atlanta’s Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, could help drive the center to become a national repository of study. Such affiliations could bring to fruition the original Freedom Center goal of being a place of research and scholarship.
Two of the Freedom Center partners in “Invisible,” Polaris Project and International Justice Mission, were announced Wednesday among recipients of an $11.5 million donation from tech giant Google to fight contemporary slavery.
Beyond the Freedom Center’s anti-slavery stance, other local civic observers would like to make the building a safe place for discussions and programs that address racial and cultural intolerance that makes the region and city one of the nation’s most racially segregated. A fledgling center program called “Faith to Freedom” teaches clergy and lay congregational leadership the spiritual underpinnings of the Underground Railroad and challenges them to apply those to contemporary social issues.
A major Freedom Center supporter is James Stewart, a history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., and founder of the organization Historians Against Slavery. His group is attempting to establish an air of abolitionism on college campuses and in communities and resurrect the model of historians who redirected national conversation toward issues of social justice.
The Freedom Center and city of Cincinnati could play a significant role toward achieving that goal, he said.
“These exhibits are precious materials,” Stewart said of the Freedom Center, which he visited this month. “In partnership with the larger community, the center must use them to build programs that powerfully advance social and economic justice in Cincinnati. If it begins doing exactly this, its long-term future is bright and well worth supporting.”
Quote:About this story
I started my reporting in September to try to better understand the complicated relationship the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center has with its hometown and why the center was winning increased respect nationally.
As the Enquirer’s minority affairs and social issues reporter, I had written about the institution for the past three years – its retooling efforts on its fifth anniversary, hopes to be nationalized as part of the federal government and the opening of major exhibits such as “Invisible: Slavery Today,” its groundbreaking permanent exhibit on contemporary slavery, and “Without Sanctuary,” a traveling exhibit of lynching photography.
Over the course of several long meetings, I listened to Freedom Center president and chief executive Kim Robinson, presiding board co-chair the Rev. Damon Lynch Jr. and board co-chair John Pepper.
The Enquirer received unprecedented access to the center’s financial records. I conducted dozens of interviews with anti-tax activists who oppose more public investment in the center, local politicians and scholars, human rights activists and advocates nationally who support its mission.
Mark Curnutte
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20111...eakingnews
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Freedom Center could close
