Kafi Blumenfield to lead Discovery Cube Los Angeles science museum

Kafi Blumenfield, who spent most of the last seven years giving away money to grass-roots social causes when she was head of the L.A.-based Liberty Hill Foundation, has been hired as the founding executive director of the Discovery Cube Los Angeles science museum opening Nov. 13 at Hansen Dam Recreation Center at the city’s northern edge.

In her new job, Blumenfield, 43, will be responsible for raising money to help meet an annual budget of $4.7 million and for building an audience for the San Fernando Valley’s first major museum.

She will be “the community face” of the new museum, said Joe Adams, chief executive of the new Cube’s older and much bigger sister, the recently renamed Discovery Cube of Orange County in Santa Ana. “There is no better qualified or connected individual in Southern California to lead L.A.’s newest educational destination,” Adams said in a written announcement of Blumenfield’s hiring.

Those connections include her husband, Los Angeles Councilman Bob Blumenfield. The power couple live in Woodland Hills and have a 5-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.

Blumenfield, who has an undergraduate degree in politics from Pomona College and a law degree from UCLA, said she had planned to take a year’s “sabbatical for reflection” and family life after leaving Liberty Hill last November. But she was intrigued when Discovery leaders approached her about heading the museum, whose educational mission strikes her as a new way to continue focusing on addressing the community’s unmet needs.

“Even though I’m not a science expert, it’s been a part of my life and my family,” said Blumenfield, whose father is a retired professor of marine physics at the University of the Virgin Islands. She said that the environment, one of the Discovery Cube’s main focuses, ranked high on Liberty Hill Foundation’s agenda as it helped fund causes such as improving air quality in poorer L.A. neighborhoods.

Most of L.A.’s science-oriented museums are led by administrators rather than scientists. Jeffrey Rudolph, longtime head of the California Science Center, worked in state government before coming to the Exposition Park museum, and Jane Pisano, president of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, previously had been dean of public administration and vice president for external affairs at USC.

Blumenfield arrives with fundraising experience that will be important in her new job. Unlike bigger grant-making foundations, Liberty Hill relies on donors to provide the grant money it funnels to community activists. Its mission, as outlined in its public tax return, includes addressing “some of the country’s most intractable social problems” by “identifying community leaders at the frontlines of change [and] equipping them with the skills and relationships they need to build power and advance social justice.”

On Blumenfield’s watch as director, Liberty Hill Foundation raised about $6.9 million a year on average from 2008 to 2012, while issuing about $4.7 million in annual grants, its tax filings show; she earned $132,000 in 2011, the most recent earnings year available. Adams earned $309,432 as president of the Discovery venue in Orange County, a job that has included overseeing a recent expansion with yet another in the works.

Blumenfield will lead a staff of 24 full-time and 70 part-time employees at the museum, which has 71,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space. Its namesake architectural calling card is a free-standing outdoor cube akin to a larger one that’s long been the Santa Ana venue’s symbol and landmark.

Mayor Eric Garcetti had appointed Blumenfield to the city’s Board of Recreation and Parks Commissioners in January, but she said she resigned from the volunteer post in June when she accepted the Discovery Cube job. The rec and parks board is the city agency that deals most directly with the new museum, including overseeing its contract to lease the city-owned museum building.

Blumenfield said she consulted the city attorney and the mayor’s office and was told she could stay on the rec and parks board while abstaining from discussions and votes pertaining to the Discovery Cube, but she decided “it would be better for the museum” if she removed all conflicts by leaving the government post.

She said her husband, whose district in the West Valley does not include the Discovery Cube, will abstain from City Council discussions and votes involving the museum.

The board of the Orange County Discovery branch made the key decision to partner with L.A. city government to breathe life into a museum site that had stood vacant since it was finished in 2007 because its planned operator, Children’s Museum of Los Angeles County, had gone bankrupt. It also raised about $2 million of the $23-million cost of outfitting and remodeling the site as a science venue.

But Discovery Cube L.A. is on its own now, said Mike Wheeler, an executive of a new entity, the Discovery Science Foundation, that will provide administrative services such as accounting, payroll, information technology and some marketing initiatives and booking of touring exhibitions for both sites. Otherwise, he said, they will raise money and operate independently, each with its own board. The new Discovery Cube L.A. board, on which Adams serves, made the decision to hire Blumenfield.

General admission to the new museum will be $10 for Los Angeles city residents, Wheeler said — compared with $16.95 for adults and $12.95 for children and seniors in Santa Ana (the older museum is free one Sunday a month, with a second day each month free for Santa Ana residents). Projected first-year attendance in L.A. is 180,000.

The L.A. museum’s attractions, aimed largely at children, will include “Helicopter Adventure,” a video-simulated flight over Los Angeles that takes off from the museum and explores the Valley, the L.A. basin and surrounding mountains to trace where the city’s water supply comes from and show what’s needed to keep it pure. It’s part of a heavy environmental emphasis at the museum, whose programs also are intended to mesh closely with the public schools’ K-12 science curriculum.

Wheeler said the new venue will initially depend mainly on admissions as the new board builds its fundraising connections. The Santa Ana museum typically covers 55% to 60% of its expenses with earnings rather than donations, he said.

L.A. officials hope the new venture will turn a white elephant into a beehive of scientific edutainment. The city spent $21.8 million on the previously unused building; now it has fronted an additional $20.4 million for exhibits and some building modifications needed to finally open it under Discovery’s auspices. If a museum had failed to open by March, city government would have had to repay $16.2 million in public funds used for the original 2007 construction.