At the beginning, they were fabulous, but they got to the point where beyond some of these projects I just outlined, the board wasn’t structured to do more than that. They would get out and beat the bushes, but we didn’t have people on the board, the movers and shakers of the community who could play golf and say to their buddy, I gave the Boy Scout campaign when you were chairman, and now I’m with the zoo and we need $100,000 from your company. We didn’t have that on there. And I diplomatically tried to explain, “We need to get people on here to do this.” And the people on the board at the time really resisted that, and maybe even felt threatened. So I’d make a bold move, if we were gonna move forward, we needed to raise serious money. So Friends of the Zoo is intact, primarily membership services, educational programs, PR, zoo schools, some fundraising. And over here, I establish the Topeka zoological foundation, no membership, a board strictly to raise money. Not competing with Friends of the Zoo, but strictly to do major capital improvement projects.
