We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jonathan Bijur a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jonathan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

In the 10 years since I became Rediscover’s second ever Executive Director, the organization has grown 10x, from a $150,000/year budget to $1.5M/year. We serve over 14,000 youth with hands-on sustainable maker and STEAM education. That growth happened because of years of incremental improvements in our staffing, programming, client list, curriculum, facilities and equipment, marketing, and financial sophistication. It also happened because of a few leaps into the unknown, opportunities that we grabbed at, projects that we launched with more of a dream than a plan.

One of those was the 2015 expansion of our Tinkering Camp program. Tinkering Camp had been a steady success since its founding in 2011, but was dependent on skilled community members who could only lead camps for a week or two each year. Without really having the money in the bank to make it happen or much of a market analysis in hand, we went ahead and hired full time staff in the hope and expectation that we could then expand Tinkering Camp from three weeks to nine weeks. We had full registration for all nine weeks in the first year. The staff we hired marked the beginning of a Programs Team that brought new skills and energy to Rediscover that we could throw into our school-year programming, curriculum development, and expansion of Tinkering Camp to additional locations.

Around the same time, our facilities situation changed and we needed to either scale up our programming to activate an unused and unfunded part of our facility or consider moving to a smaller location. We lined up an angel donor to fund a new Tinkering Club program, an extension of Tinkering Camp that would provide membership-type access after school for youth in our community. We renovated the unused room into an amazing youth makerspace, enlisted the help of a marketing consultant, launched with a big successful event, and then… crickets. A few kids signed up, but the program didn’t take off. Luckily, the success of the expanding camp and a slowly growing in-school program kept our staff busy, but we ended up closing Tinkering Club after 18 months.

Each new program has meant bringing in new staff. Each new staff member has skills we didn’t know we needed. Every client we serve who loves what we do leads to more. When a child loves Tinkering Camp, their parents tell their school principal, which leads to a field trip, which leads to a birthday party, which gets more kids excited to come to camp. Having good people who enjoy their work providing an experience that children love means that word of mouth is our most effective marketing.

Jonathan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been involved in informal education my entire career. First at museums and libraries, and for the past 10 years at Rediscover, my passion is for creating environments in which youth are free to follow their interests to gain new knowledge and skills. I advocate for a school system that gives youth choice, respects their opinions, and provides them with non-commercial, non-coercive pathways to learn and grow.

Rediscover has a triple educational mission: creativity, sustainability, and community. We want kids in our programs, whether at one of our Centers, at our pop-ups, at schools, or at community events, to explore their own ideas, learn how to turn them into physical objects, use materials responsibly, and work together across differences. We source the materials in our makerspaces from donations of discarded recyclables, offcuts, overstock, and scrap from across LA County. These “rediscovered” materials activate creative play, tinkering, and wild ideation. They also inspire a greater appreciation of the environmental impact of all of the materials in our lives, from plastic packaging to housing construction.

I am particularly proud of the facilitation techniques that Rediscover has developed over the last 20 years. Inspired by the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, constructivism psychology, the Maker movement, assemblage art, and a close study of the links between art and engineering, we have developed techniques for engaging diverse youth with joyous creative experiences. I love joining one of our programs and being surrounded by a group of kids making 20 different projects, intensely focused and enthusiastic to share. Often those projects are made of cardboard and plastic lids and don’t look like much of anything, yet, but I can hear in their voices how much they are learning about form and structure, about creating characters and communicating a story, their satisfaction in being able to express the deeply human desire to make something with their hands. Rediscover’s programs have no screens, no coding or robotics or video instruction. We help kids make things out of real materials, using real tools like cardboard scissors and power saws. It’s an awesome experience for the kids, and for us on the staff as well.

Rediscover operates two Centers, in Venice and Mid City, that each provide 2,500sf of public makerspace resources for youth, stocked with woodshops, crafting zones, sewing stations, and mountains of rediscovered materials. We work with over 70 schools and 30 community organizations to bring our approach to hands-on sustainable STEAM/maker education to thousands of youth ages 5-15. We provide in-school and after school classes, build makerspaces for schools and community centers, and provide free community activities throughout LA. We pop-up camps, community makerspaces, and our annual Cardboard City exhibit of cardboard art with partners like LAUSD and Westfield/URW. We believe every child in LA County should have the opportunity to make projects using sustainable materials. Serving 14,000 youth per year is great, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the 1.5 million youth in LA County, all of whom deserve the opportunity to make hands-on projects.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

In 2010, I followed my spouse to LA as she started a new job in Santa Monica, leaving work I had enjoyed in Boston at the MIT Museum. I became a stay-at-home dad to our 15 month old. (An experience I recommend to every dad!) We explored the amazing parks and family resources of the Westside. I started a parenting blog. Made friends with moms on the playgrounds. I kept in touch with my science museum colleagues from the East Coast, which led to a few consulting contracts in informal science education and helped start my professional network in LA in the STEAM education field. Those occasional connections to my professional life helped me remember that there was a world beyond diapers and strollers.

One of those contacts led me to volunteer at Rediscover, then a mostly volunteer-facilitated youth organization for art and sustainability. When the founding director, Mary Beth Trautwein, launched a new summer camp based on Gever Tulley’s Tinkering School, I convinced my spouse to use two weeks of summer vacation to free me up to lead camp. I loved it, learned a ton about woodworking and youth facilitation, and stayed involved with Rediscover as an occasional volunteer. I came back each summer to lead a week or two of camp and teach a new batch of kids how to drill a hole or design an 8′ dragon sculpture.

I joined the board and learned that at the organizational level, Rediscover was looking for its next new thing. Founded in 2004, Rediscover had launched with a big burst of energy from a community of parents in the 3-8 age range served by the organization, but by 2014 that community’s kids had aged out and most of them had moved on to other interests. When Mary Beth retired that fall, I stepped in as an interim Executive Director, part time.

I was an entrepreneurial kid and come from a family rich in educators and businesspeople. I drew from this history as I imagined ways to expand our family programs, to turn a school field trip into a contract for a semester of programming, to open new sites for Tinkering Camp. As one program led to another and our income increased, both from fees and contracts and because our rising profile attracted new foundations and individual donors, we were able to make the Executive Director position full time and hire Teaching Artists, Maker Facilitators, and support staff. My kids were now in school or day care and I was able to devote more time to the work of growing the organization.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Rediscover has a virtuous circle of interconnected programs that each serve as marketing for the others. An eight year old might come to Rediscover Center on a school field trip and love the activities she’s doing. She tells her parents, who sign her up for camp, where she has the peak experience of her summer. That family tells their friends, and the next season we have a cluster of kids from the same school, and a crew of parents who understand Rediscover and the high quality experiences their children get in our programs. That leads to a conversation with their PTA and a contract for after school classes. As we learn about that school community, we get invited to provide art activities at a local street fair, where we introduce a family from an adjacent neighborhood to our Tool Petting Zoo or one of our monumental Cardboard Art installations. That family signs up for camp and the cycle starts again.

At each stage, word of mouth depends on positive first impressions, unique experiences, and activities that engage youth and speak to something they need but can’t get elsewhere.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rediscovercenter.org
• Instagram: rediscoverctr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rediscoverctr
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-markowitz-bijur-1301865
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/rediscovercenter
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/rediscover-center-venice-los-angeles