MOUNT VERNON – Mount Vernon’s Science Play-Space children's museum and science center on Main Street was not the kind of place that could easily remain open during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Obviously, we’re designed to be very hands on and to be very intergenerational,” Executive Director Stephanie Calondis Geiger told the Mount Vernon News. “We’re a community gathering place, a place where grandparents and toddlers are together. We’re a place where you are encouraged to touch things. We knew from the get-go that those conditions didn’t match the reality of this virus.”

The nonprofit SPI had no choice but to close its doors in March, not knowing how long the pandemic would last.

 Federal relief funds were available to help businesses and nonprofits that provided basic needs such as housing and food.

“We were neither,” Geiger said. “But we are an important community entity that people rely on to be a place where they congregate and bond as families.”

So SPI approached its long-term philanthropy partners about applying the grant funds in a slightly different way. The partners, including foundations, agreed.

“We were able to get by in 2020 because they said, ‘Make it work, be flexible, be resourceful,’” Geiger said.

The nonprofit also organized outdoor outings in a program called SPI to Go.

“The outings were organized carefully, with calibrated arrival times to different places in our community, and we also developed associated bags of experiments that they could do at home,” Geiger said. “That really worked — gathering families in a public-health-oriented, safe way outdoors doing fun things and then send them off with free things they are going to do at home.”

SPI did not charge families for the outdoor outings. It also lost revenue for much of the year from admissions to its indoor center. It is planning for a “stepped, carefully calibrated” reopening, although exactly when depends on the state of the pandemic.

Fortunuately, SPI, located in the old Buckeye Candy and Tobacco building on Main Street, is provided free space by the building's owner, Kenyon College.

“If we had to pay rent this year to be empty and unused, this wouldn’t have worked,” Geiger said. “Our grant funders allowed us to do alternate forms of outreach and our relationship to Kenyon, all of those things speak to the value of our town and partnerships.”

You can learn more about SPI, make donations or purchase gift certificates on the organization’s website.