News: Rescuing embattled OSV
For an attraction frozen in time for visitors to experience the simpler days of 19th century New England, Old Sturbridge Village has had a complicated and unsettling year.
A $2.9-million debt persists, despite its $3.8-million sale of 826 acres last fall to the Town of Sturbridge. Its staff has been buffeted by cutbacks and on-again, off-again changes in village operations. And, OSV officials recently confirmed, its 2006 visitor numbers reached a record low of 227,000, down from an already disappointing 260,000 in 2005.
But that hasn’t dulled the enthusiasm of veteran Rhode Island education executive and newly named Old Sturbridge Village president and CEO James Donahue for a new, if still evolving, vision for the embattled living-history museum. Named earlier this month to replace four-year CEO Beverly Sheppard, who resigned last March after a disagreement with board members, Donahue, 40, of Providence, throws out upbeat ideas for OSV’s revival like corn kernels to the chickens in its barnyard.
They are, not surprisingly, centered on education and fundraising, two areas in which Donahue has excelled as founder and CEO of the Bradford L. Dunn Institute of Learning Differences in Providence. He envisions the village, for example, as a center for history teacher development, possibly with some one hundred teachers a week coming in for summer training. Making OSV programs more relevant to school curriculum reshaped by the state’s standardized MCAS testing is another prospect he mentions. Then there are the interesting possibilities of linking the village to agricultural and ecological curriculum development and/or partnering with an educational facility. Financially, Donahue notes, the village needs a more diversified mix of beefed up fundraising and endowments and contract income to offset its currently heavy reliance (86 percent) on gate revenue.
Not slated to become CEO full-time until July, Donahue says he’ll spend the next five months looking at other museums’ practices, benchmarking what OSV has done and listening to its staff.
The staff, now an estimated 300 including seasonal – though many longstanding village employees have left in recent months – should have a lot of changes, and rechanges, to fill him in on. For example, the Oliver Wright Tavern was transformed into a craft center last spring after its closure as a restaurant the fall before. But the craft center was dismantled in December, and crafts were returned to the previous education buildings. The hopes for a new revenue stream from non-village visitors taking craft classes didn’t pan out, says Board Chair Bruce Moir.
Despite previous declarations that OSV had exited the restaurant business, a distraction for its focus, the tavern is slated to be reopened for functions in the months ahead. Moir stresses that this time it will be operated by an outside food service manager, which the board is working to select.
Attempts last spring to replace many costumed interpreters in the village with videos and signs has also been rethought. Visitors objected, Moir says, to what he calls "the empty village syndrome."
While the OSV land sale was initially billed as a way to eliminate the facility’s debt, which was $3.5-million at the time, from the tavern’s construction, Moir says the board decided to use some of that money as "bridge funding" to pay for some of a $1.9-million upgrade of village exhibits now underway. It also paid off a line of credit, he says. A $1-million state grant, delayed on Beacon Hill but slated to be received soon, Moir says, will offset some of that expenditure. The prospective sale of the ten-acre site of the former village lodges, priced at $2.95 million, will also let OSV eliminate its debt, Moir says.
Moir terms Donahue "a visionary," who he hopes can return OSV to the forefront of historic teaching, a standing it has lost over the years.
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