56 South Bay Accent them at one point with an idea of building a museum school. “Back then, I could see how it would engage the kids I worked with. It was the largest public housing community in America, and at one point, the poorest ZIP code. But these kids were very bright, and very technologically savvy. They had a lot of talent, but not a lot of opportunity,” he explains. “I knew that traditional schooling would evade them, but informal schooling would attract them.” After taking over at McWane, Ritchie managed to start a statewide science competition. He filled two nearly empty floors of the museum with new exhibits, grew annual attendance from 250,000 to more than 350,000, and more than doubled center memberships from 3,540 to 8,900 families. The McWane was also consistently voted “Best Place for Kids” by the Birmingham news. Amy Chauvin, his CFO who also became his friend at Mc- Wane, said she had never worked for anyone like him. “When you first meet him, he comes off as being conservative,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if we were going to get along. But he turned out to be very funny, thoughtful, and kind, with strong family values.” He understood when people had to leave a little early to attend their children’s sporting events or other activities. It was something he himself would do. Chauvin says Ritchie even helped her with her own family, stepping in when she was having some problems with her then-rebellious teenage daughter. “He would take her out for coffee and try to talk to her about grace and forgiveness,” she recalls. “He had certainly done well with his kids, so I appreciated him trying to intervene with mine.” Chauvin and Ritchie developed a friendship that still continues even though, as she says, their personalities were very different. At the McWane, they complemented each other, creating sort of a yin-yang of leadership. “He is the visionary. I used to say he was the guy in the balloon basket. I was the one on the ground trying to pull those strings and keep it from flying off and going astray,” she says. Taking over leadership of a museum that had gone through tough times under a previous director, Ritchie eventually gained the trust of the board, and The Tech Museum’s distintinctive purple dome in downtown collected many other fans at McWane. He became appreciated for his mission-focused, people-centric management style. “He’d start off each staff meeting going around the room asking ‘What’s the mission? What’s the goal?’ We’d all say, ‘Oh no; not again.’ Sometimes, when people got the mission right, he’d throw them a candy bar,” recalls Chauvin. He set up retreats where he’d have staff read books and poems and discuss them, and encourage them to do outdoor activities like hiking and canoeing. In time his reluctant staff came around. “He has a great sense of humor, and doesn’t take himself too seriously,” says Dr. Mark Wilson, currently head of the Jefferson County Department of Health in Birmingham. Wilson, who has been friends with Ritchie since the mid ‘80s, says that Ritchie has a way of pulling people together in relationship-building activities, even beyond work: “He’s fun and he’s a leader. When he organizes a gathering, it is almost always with some planned activity or theme.” life is one in which you are able to help elevate human dignity,” he explains. In high school, his attention turned to other pursuits: student leadership activities, playing the trumpet and running track. After attending Davidson College in Charlotte, N.C., he was accepted to law school at Duke University. That offered an opportunity to jump back into community service. In the summer, Ritchie worked with in a poverty law clinic at Mendenhall Ministries in rural Mississippi. “It was the first time I literally lived on the other side of the tracks,” he says, “that I was truly in the minority.” Later, as an intern for the North Carolina Appellate Defender’s office, he provided legal services for low-income defendants facing death row or life in prison. But once he graduated from law school and began working as an attorney, Ritchie wasn’t comfortable: He found himself doing a majority of commercial fraud and contract disputes, spending less time on his core interests. “The actual business of making a living got in the way of making a difference. As a lawyer in a private firm, I had to choose the jobs that paid the bills.” After more than three years working in law, he decided to return to his roots; he led programs to provide services to public housing and other low-income communities. In the late 1990s, Ritchie decided to take his knowledge of community service to a new level. He obtained a Masters in Public Administration at Harvard, then went back “home” to Louisville to head a United Way-funded organization helping adults with developmental disabilities get jobs. STIMULATING YOUNG MINDS WITH S CIENCE A few years later, in 2004, Ritchie’s career took another turn when he accepted a job at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham. During his time working in public housing in Alabama, he had known people at the Science Center, and had even approached San Jose. NA’IM BEYAH, THE TECH MUSEUM OF INNOVATION
South Bay Accent - Apr/May 2016
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