Inland Seas Plots Major Expansion Of Its Suttons Bay Campus, Goes Public With $11.1 Million Fundraising Campaign

After years of bursting at the seams, Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA) finally has some room to spread out and grow.

At a public unveiling Wednesday afternoon, the Suttons Bay nonprofit announced an ambitious expansion plan that will see it convert the neighboring Millside building into additional educational space, as well as boat storage and maintenance.

In order to raise funds for that renovation project, ISEA has also gone public with a capital campaign that has been in the “quiet phase” for the past four years. The fundraiser, dubbed the Campaign for the Future of Great Lakes Education, has so far raised $8.1 million of a $11.1 million goal. According to Executive Director Fred Sitkins, ISEA is hoping to come up with the remaining $3 million by the end of the year, so demolition at Millside can start at the beginning of 2026.

“That timeline indicates that we should be done with construction by the end of 2026, so that we can open the new facility in January of 2027,” Sitkins tells The Ticker.

While ISEA has been keeping the Campaign for the Future of Great Lakes Education mostly under wraps since it was launched in 2021, the nonprofit’s growth in the meantime has been visible for all to see. In 2022, ISEA purchased a property to the south of its existing headquarters, earmarking the land for future expansion. In 2023, the organization’s big news was the acquisition of a new schooner, which allowed it to expand its ship-based programs. And last year, ISEA took over stewardship of the nearby Leo Creek Preserve, a boon for its watershed protection and preservation programs.

All those milestones, Sitkins now reveals, were possible because of the campaign.

“Everything we’ve accomplished so far has been paid for through that $8 million that we've been raising,” he shares. “So, the organization is debt-free and plans to continue to be.”

Each milestone has also been in service of ISEA’s mission – which, ever since the organization was founded in 1989, has been about offering “hands-on experiences aboard traditionally-rigged tall ship schooners, along the shores of the Great Lakes, and in local rivers, streams, and wetlands.”

Demand for those programs has hit exponential growth in the past decade. In 2014, ISEA had a staff of four people and was delivering 100 programs a year. Now, the staff is up to 11 and the number of programs is up to 320.

The growth has had its drawbacks, though – namely, the fact that there simply isn’t enough space at ISEA’s current facility to accommodate everything.

“In the spring here, for instance, we're juggling six classrooms at a time,” Sitkins explains. “And all those students need to put their stuff somewhere. They all need a place to eat lunch. And we don't have space for that. Kids will eat out in the pavilion on our south property, but in May, it’s not always pleasant to be outside. The upstairs space at the Millside building will serve all those purposes, as well as being able to host our training events, conferences, donor recognition events, and those types of large group activities.”

While the vision sketched out four years ago had a lot of foresight for what ISEA has undertaken since, Sitkins says it did lack one crucial detail: the acquisition of the Millside property.

“Before ’21, neither of the adjacent properties were available,” Sitkins explains. “The south property became available right after we did a major renovation to our existing building, and we moved on that immediately. And we tried, at the same time, to enter conversations with the owner of the Millside property. But at the time, there was a boutique hotel/restaurant slated for that building.”

In visioning sessions for the fundraising campaign, ISEA leaders resigned themselves to never getting their hands on the Millside property. “We moved forward saying, ‘OK, we’re just going to develop the south lot and work with what we have,’” Sitkins says. Such a direction would have required the construction of a brand-new building, and the campaign’s fundraising goal was actually priced out based on such an eventuality.

Then, on December 30 of last year, Sitkins got a phone call. The owner of the Millside building was entertaining new offers to buy the building, and the realtor wondered if ISEA wanted to make a bid.

“My first impression was, ‘I can't do that!’” Sitkins chuckles. “We’d been working hard to figure out the plan for the south property, and I was feeling like we might have a hard time raising the money it was going to take just to do that. I thought, ‘There's no way I can come up with more cash!’ But when we started researching it and got the architects involved, it became clear really quickly that [Millside] was actually the same square footage of what we were planning to build on the south property. And because we're not having to start with all the site work that's involved in digging a foundation, the cost of purchasing the Millside property didn't add a penny to the campaign. We got all of that for, in essence, no additional cost.”

ISEA ultimately paid $1.3 million for Millside. And while the building needs a lot of work – “We’ll basically scrape off the entire upper level and rebuild, because it’s so dilapidated,” Sitkins says – it offered big advantages beyond the simple perk of not having to build from scratch. In particular, the building’s lower level is already just about perfect for boat storage and maintenance – something ISEA needs urgently. The nonprofit currently leases space for those purposes at Discovery Pier, but has to vacate by August to make way for the new Freshwater Research & Innovation Center.

“One of the reasons we got excited about the Millside building is that it has this dox plank construction, which is very sought after, but nobody does anymore because it costs so much,” Sitkins says. “Basically, it’s like a parking garage down there. It’s got this wide-open span in the basement, which is perfect for our shop, because we're bringing in those long spars and everything to get refinished. So, we’ve already done the demo to the lower level. We're going to install the garage doors in the next couple of weeks, and then we can occupy it over the winter.”

Beyond the Millside renovations, ISEA is also eyeing campuswide improvements – including walking paths and “interactive educational art displays” – to join together the three parcels into “one flowing campus that is publicly accessible and inviting.” Longer term, the organization hopes to build a hybrid indoor-outdoor educational space on the south property, where watershed education students could “have quick access to the bay.”

“It’s not a focus of this campaign, but that will be the next thing,” Sitkins says of the south lot project.