Discovery Center Finds Executive Director to Bring Project to Life

Backers of the Ventura County Discovery Center, the hands-on children’s museum planned for the Civic Arts Plaza, have hired an executive director to oversee the project, the first important step in bringing the project to reality.

Mary Anne Isaac will leave her job as executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History Foundation in Albuquerque to take her new post the second week of February. She will oversee all aspects of the museum, and will be largely responsible for raising the roughly $22 million needed to build and run the facility.

“This is big, but it’s not daunting,” Isaac said of the task ahead in a telephone interview. “The expectation is that I will serve as a catalyst to bring together a lot of the elements already in place, and help identify the things that aren’t yet in place.”

Volunteer board members have raised only about $900,000 since the concept was hatched in 1994. Isaac, the center’s first salaried employee besides an administrative assistant, is expected to hire about 10 staff members, including museum planners and fund-raisers, in the coming year to boost the fund-raising effort.

“We really have to bring in people who have done this many times before. None of this is new for her,” said Kathleen Wiltsey, president of the center’s board of directors. “This is our process of being born. Now we’re going professional, and we’re in the big leagues.”

Board members chose Isaac from a slate of six to 10 serious candidates because of her experience raising funds, marketing and overseeing the construction of a large-format theater at the New Mexico museum, Wiltsey said.

Isaac joined the New Mexico museum in 1992 as director of marketing, and became executive director in 1995. She raised $5 million to build an Iwerks theater, and landed a federal grant for a planetarium, she said. Raising $22 million is just more of what she has done before, she said.

“What’s big in New Mexico might translate differently in California,” she said. “But the net results are the same.”

The 63,000-square-foot Discovery Center is planned for the east side of the Civic Arts Plaza, and is envisioned as a museum where children can touch the exhibits, take apart machines to see how they work and conduct messy experiments.

Center backers are also planning a neighboring commercial center that would include an Imax theater, retail stores and restaurants. Caruso Affiliated Holdings of Santa Monica, operator of the Promenade at Westlake, has a contract with the city to build the stores.

Even without a building, the museum has been active, Wiltsey said, setting up volunteer-staffed family science nights at schools.

Isaac replaces Carrie Glicksteen, the museum’s volunteer executive director.

“Carrie gets high points from us,” Wiltsey said. “She brought us to this point.”

The board--which is comprised of volunteers from science, engineering and teaching--has ideas for the make-up of the museum, including transparent walls that give children an inside look at escalators or indoor plumbing, and exhibits sponsored by local companies.

Isaac, however, will make many of the final decisions.

“This is an extremely rare opportunity [in this field],” Isaac said. “You rarely get to work with an organization from concept to reality. And from what I’ve seen, all the ingredients are there. There’s talent, expertise and some tremendous community support.”