(Photos from onePULSE Foundation)
ORLANDO | Last month, when the onePULSE Foundation announced that a deal could not be reached with the owners for the acquisition of the Pulse property, the question that most people asked after “what happened?” was “what’s next?”
onePULSE Foundation’s executive director, Deborah Bowie, says the time has come to scale down the organization’s original planned museum, calling it a “hugely ambitious project.”
“[The organization is] on the other side of some key decisions that were made to adjust the project,” Bowie says. “A lot of people remember the big colorful building and the global competition, but that was pre-COVID.”
Bowie, who came on as onePULSE’s executive director last year replacing Pulse owner and onePULSE founder Barbara Poma, says one of the first things she was told was that they would need to revisit the project.
“We had all these high in the sky dreams that were very ambitious. It was a hugely ambitious project,” she says. “And we probably didn’t help ourselves by boxing ourselves in to the plan of being done in seven years, but it doesn’t happen like that.”
This past January, the board came together in Orlando to hold an in-person strategy session. In that session, it was decided that the museum would be rescaled and that the existing structure located at the spot of the planned museum would be used instead.
“That big, beautiful building had climbed to about $100 million in cost,” Bowie says. “That’s a big project and that’s a big operations cost to maintain month over month. … The world as we knew it before 2020 with COVID is not the same world we’re in now. Things are going to be expensive for a while.”
Part of the rescaling was economic, Bowie says, but part of it was also done to make the space into something that good serve the greater good of the community.
“When I got here, I went out to meet people of the community as the new ED and it opened up a huge opportunity for us to sit down with organizations who probably didn’t have a favorable opinion of us,” she says. “What I learned in those conversations is the organization had not done a really good job of inviting people into our space.”
After speaking with community leaders about what the museum space could be, Bowie went back to the board.
“What I learned is there is a need in this community for a communal space for these organizations to get together,” she says, “whether it is in a working capacity, if they wanted to have a conference. Some of these nonprofits don’t even have an office for their executive directors. I took that information back to the board that there’s an opportunity for us to think about our project in a way where we’re of service to those organizations and the board liked that idea.”
Bowie says that the 44,000-square-foot building that currently sits at 438 W. Kaley Street will be repurposed into a multi-use communal space, including areas that can be used for conferences, trainings and events. She also reiterated that a portion of the space will still continue to be a museum, a prerequisite for the $10 million tourist development tax funds that the organization received in 2018.
As for the memorial, Bowie says onePULSE will be looking for feedback from the community — particularly from the survivors, victims’ families and first responders — as to the next steps.
“Community response is actually happening now, so obviously it takes time to get through that because these are really one-on-one conversations,” she says. “They’re just opportunities for the executive board to hear directly from those who were impacted.”
Bowie says in those talks, onePULSE will start to organize what a memorial will look like, offering up a few possible options, including building a memorial on the property next to the Pulse nightclub, space that onePULSE purchased when it planned to have the memorial at the Pulse location. Another option would be to build a memorial adjacent to the museum.
“That’s the kind of feedback we are going to be looking for from the community,” Bowie says. “Unfortunately though we have to move on from the property itself because we do not own it and that’s just a hard reality.”
