The Pikes Peak Children’s Museum, a nonprofit run in Colorado Springs since 2005, is homeless once again.

The museum operated at 2565 Airport Road, a storefront in a strip mall in the city’s southeast quadrant, until late July when the organization’s lease expired, entered 2024 without a brick-and-mortar location.

The president of the Pikes Peak Children’s Museum, Catherine Roosevelt, a mother of two, said the organization declined to renew its lease because of rising rental costs and safety concerns with the locale.

“It was never meant to be a permanent spot and rent was holding us back from making investments and changes,” Roosevelt said after the closure.

Without a location or rent, some of those changes included running intermittent pop-up events and in-school field trips while hiring a marketing team to redo the nonprofit’s website, helping augment the museum’s pool of volunteer staff.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt said she is not giving up on a permanent location.

“We saw a need for space,” Roosevelt said. “I put my career aside to get this space going in our community so that kids could have a safe place to grow and play and learn but also a place for parents to go and have their cup of coffee.”

In the search for a permanent location the problem is a simple one — money. The solution is much trickier, Roosevelt said.

In researching how other cities funded children’s museums, Roosevelt said it often came down to finding wealthy donors or a shift in political and bureaucratic inertia.

“Museums are not a great business model,” Roosevelt said. “They don’t tend to be profitable.”

In July 2021, a year after the opening of U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum in downtown Colorado Springs, the museum operated with at least a $1 million deficit, The Gazette previously reported. Then in July 2022, under new leadership, museum staff said they ended the year in black but still owed long-term debt.

Unlike the Olympic museum, Roosevelt said the Pikes Peak Children’s Museum would cater more to local families with young children than tourists. Seventy miles north in Denver, Colorado’s Springs’ larger counterpart sustains a museum of a similar stripe.

The Denver Children’s Museum’s 47,000-square-foot facility located on a 10.5-acre plot downtown has thrived for decades. According to museum staff, its revenue model consists of visitor admission fees, a membership program, donations, fundraising events, grants, corporate sponsorships as well as income from the museums café and gift shop.

The museum also benefits from being a part of Denver’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD), a unique sales tax within Denver’s seven-county metro area that devotes 1 cent on every $10 spent to fund cultural organizations including the Children’s Museum.

But that’s not the case in Colorado Springs. Instead, Roosevelt is grassroots fundraising with events such as the organization’s Noon Year’s Eve balloon drop. Roosevelt said she faced pushback from families after the museum added an attendance fee instead of making the event donation optional.

“Please understand families make choices like this all the time,” Facebook user Brooke McCarty commented on the museums’ event posting. “Would I rather spend $50 for a 2-hour event per person or save that money for season passes to the North Pole for right around the same amount per person?”

As a parent, Roosevelt said she realizes families with young children who would frequent the museum are often penny pinching. That’s why Roosevelt has been trying to expand the museum’s network of connection with politicians, other nonprofits and community leaders.

Jariah Walker, Executive Director of the Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority, met with Roosevelt about a future home for the museum, but said no urban renewal project has been established.

“It would be something that I’m sure the board would have an interest with,” Walker said.

He noted that such a proposal must be well-planned because upon its approval a 25-year clock begins for that project to collect tax reimbursement as it generates sales or property tax revenue, which is not the character of a nonprofit, Walker said, rather a business.

In the meantime, Roosevelt said she will keep searching for Pikes Peak Children’s Museum’s long-term home.

The Denver Children’s Museum’s 47,000-square-foot facility located on a 10.5-acre plot downtown has thrived for decades.

Courtesy of the Denver Children’s Museum, Scott Dressel-Martin