Ogden Nature Center Annual Report

OGDEN NATURE CENTER ANNUAL REPORT Action: To receive report Background The City Council has requested to receive a presentation and annual overview of the Ogden Nature Center. Executive Director, Mary McKinley will be making the presentation. Council Staff Contact: Mavis Hawley, (801)629-8166 Ogden City Council Work Session: March 9, 2021 Page 1 of 1 2020 Operating Budget: $944,549 2021 Operating Budget: $923,240 2020 Operating Income and Expenses: • $1,095,850 - Total support, revenue and gains (includes $115,900 forgiven PPP loan, and $259,000 in CARES grants) • $921,597 - Total expenses 2020 Endowment and Donor Restricted Funds received: $477,856 Endowment: as of 12/31/2020 - $1,707,710 Operating Reserve: as of 12/31/2020 – $351,307 Membership Households: 774 – as of 12/31/2020. Staff: 9 FT, 7 PT (20-30 hrs/week), 2 AmeriCorps – 11 month FT, plus 2 PT Summer Seasonals, and 2 fill-in substitute teachers. No staff members were furloughed or lost their jobs in 2020. Our board of directors made the decision to use our operating reserve and endowment if needed to keep all our employees. Volunteers: Volunteers help with all aspects of the Ogden Nature Center, from digging weeds, caring for our education animals, answering phones, to setting up the grounds for events. Many volunteers come to us from Weber State University. • In 2020, 709 people donated 5,723 hours of service. We saw approximately a 50% reduction in the number of volunteers, as well as the number of hours of service. Core volunteers 1 | P a g e remained steady, with the reduction of volunteers largely due to groups not coming because of the pandemic. We rely on core volunteers to help take care of our animals, help with maintenance, and general support. • WSU students could only volunteer their time online or virtually. Our habitat restoration work was affected as a result, so we had many fewer weeds dug and fewer plants put in the ground. Covid-19 and safety The Ogden Nature Center was closed to the public during April and May, then opened on June 1 Monday – Friday. We stayed closed on Saturdays because we didn’t think we could manage the large crowds that typically visit on Saturdays in June. We opened our gates to the public on Saturdays starting July 11 and offered free admissions as part of the RAMP free Saturdays program. We have continued to close at 4pm so that staff has time to sanitize the buildings at the end of the day. We are evaluating expanding our hours, especially as we approach spring and summer. We continue to require that all staff and visitors wear face masks while inside. Staff must wear them outside as well because we want to model the behavior we want to see of our visitors. All programming is being designed with safety in mind, therefore most is being offered virtually, or when in person, meeting outside and keeping group sizes small. School field trips were cancelled in March 2019. Some school districts are starting to allow them again, and we have begun taking reservations for onsite programming for schoolchildren. Visitation Total numbers for the year are down significantly, since we were closed in April and May, and didn’t reopen on Saturdays until July 11. More people visit and pay admission fees than members who visit at no charge. We recorded a total of 6,907 visitor, in 2020, which does not include those who visited for programs, events, or to volunteer. The numbers for 2020 were down significantly over previous years. People tend to visit during fair weather months, and not much during the winter. If we count the approximately 600 people who visited during the 6-day open house, we had a total of 856 people visit during December before we closed for the winter break on December 24. We continue to have the challenge of not being able to get an accurate count of visitors. Many bypass the Visitor Center and don’t sign in. Membership After numbers dropping by 16% between April, May, and June, we saw an increase in memberships in July. By the end of December, we had 774 memberships, many of which are families. Memberships have continued to rise in 2021. We appreciate our partnerships with Union Station Museums and Dinosaur Park, and through this partnership we provide reciprocal free admissions to our members. 2 | P a g e Animal Care Our captive, non-releasable animals continued to be a priority. All the birds were inoculated against West Nile Virus, and mosquito netting was put up in the spring to keep them healthy. Samson, our Red-tail hawk, is getting old, and has lived with us since 1994. We acquired another Red-tail so that Samson could ease into retirement a little more and took in a non-releasable young female Red-tail. She was named Ontario and came here from a wildlife rehabber. We also adopted an Iguana. We teach about native wildlife and like to have lizards for children to meet so that we can teach about animal adaptations. Iguanas are easier to take care of, better adapted to life in a classroom than a native wild lizard, plus Igor was not taken from the wild. Education Programs Many of our education programs were cancelled in the spring and fall of 2020. Even though we were closed, our staff kept busy. We completely rewrote our K-6 curriculum, which met the new state SEed standards. We also redesigned our programs for schoolchildren so that they could be used in classrooms, outside in schoolyards, or virtually. Teachers were provided with supporting resources to help them teach to the new state standards and provided teacher workshops. iSEE: The Ogden Nature Center entered the third year as a provisional partner in the State of Utah’s iSEE Program in July of 2020. iSEE (Informal Science Education Enhancement) is coordinated through the State Board of Education. We are the only organization north of Salt Lake City to be a part of this state-wide renewable outreach program. The iSEE grant is making it possible to bring our specially designed “Creature Features” program to all first grade public and charter school classes in the state over three years. We are now eligible for line-item status in the state budget and are included in the Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee’s funding priority list and are waiting for the upcoming results from the Executive Appropriation Committee’s funding list for the legislature. As of March 3, 2021, there has been lots of support for and no opposition voiced to expanding the State of Utah’s iSEE budget to add the Ogden Nature Center to the list of organizations receiving line-item status. The annual budget for this program is $225,000. Other partners include Clarke Planetarium, the Living Planet Aquarium, Red Butte Gardens, U of U’s Natural History Museum, Hogle Zoo, Hawkwatch International, and Thanksgiving Point. To view a brief video of our iSEE program, copy and paste it into your browser: https://vimeo.com/504985004 3 | P a g e School Programs • School field trips were cancelled in March 2020 for the rest of the year. Normally, approximately 11,000 – 12,000 students attend around 200 field trips to the Ogden Nature Center, with well over 2,000 adults coming with them as their teachers and chaperones • Over 2,500 Ogden School District students usually attend our field trips along. We do not charge a fee for these students to attend, since we seek out private funding to ensure field trips to the Ogden Nature Center are free to the Ogden School District • Normally we give away naturalist tools for children to take home for continued learning/exploring at home, such as binoculars, plant presses, magnifying glasses, bird field guides, insect id charts, and pond insect ID kits. Once children start coming back on field trips, we will resume these giveaways. • We charged schools $3.50 per student, though our actual cost was $9- $10 per student to provide the program. All first graders from publicly funded schools are currently free thanks to the iSEE program. If our request for line-item status in the state budget passes all hurdles at the state legislative level, all first grade programs will continue to be offered at no charge. • Weber School District recently announced that they are resuming school field trips in March 2021, and we anticipate other school districts will follow suit eventually. Preschool Programs We normally have around 450 preschoolers attend these hands-on programs that focused on sensory experiences that support early childhood learning. These programs were cancelled for the rest of the year in March. They have been resumed. 4 | P a g e Summer Camp 2020 We were one of the few organizations providing summer camp in 2020. Our education staff scrambled and completely redesigned them to allow for no more than 8 children in a camp or group. • We had 118 campers over the summer. Normally we see around 330 • We processed a total of 111 refunds. 61 of those refunds ($366) were for t-shirts that we originally had planned to provide for campers but couldn’t for various reasons. Not including the t-shirt refunds, we gave 50 camp refunds ($3,150). • Not including the cost of staff time or camp supplies, we netted $15,033 after expenses that included registration software and credit card fees. Photos from previous years Community programs Our community programs went virtual, with a slow reintroduction of some programs in the winter of 2020-2021.

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