If this amazing museum could find success in Garden City, NY, why not a similar venture in Louisville, KY?! Below is the complete story of the Long Island Children's Museum, from its inception. We hope it inspires you to believe in our project as much as we do!
Background
The idea for the Long Island Children’s Museum started as a dinner conversation in 1989 between a group of Long Island business people, artists and educators—parents all. Why, they wondered, didn’t Long Island have the type of institution they visited often on their family travels across the country? That conversation led to a commitment to create for the community an exciting place that would stimulate a child’s natural curiosity and educate them through exploration and play.
The museum opened as a private, not-for-profit institution in November 1993 in a 5,400-square-foot demonstration site donated by KeySpan Energy (formerly Long Island Lighting Company). This prototype museum, featuring five interactive exhibits, was built to test the level of interest, and therefore the viability, of building a larger, permanent Children’s Museum on Long Island.
Community response to the museum was immediate and overwhelming: the projected annual visitation of 25,000 people was exceeded in LICM’s first four months of operation and by the end of the first year, 65,000 people had passed through the museum’s doors. Based on this response, the museum’s board of trustees decided it was time to expand the museum to a larger facility and began a search for a new setting for the museum.
During this time, Nassau County approached the board with the idea of moving to Museum Row, a 15-acre cultural site at Long Island’s historic Mitchel Field. The County offered LICM a 60-year, rent free lease on a former aircraft hangar that would anchor the western end of the cultural site that would also be home to the Cradle of Aviation Museum and an IMAX Theater—with future plans for the addition of a firefighters museum, science and technology center and Nunley’s Carousel.
The museum’s board approved the proposed site and launched a $17 million capital campaign (Moving to Grow) in 1998 for building and renovation of a 40,000-square-foot facility, as well as the design and fabrication of museum exhibits. This public/private partnership has been widely touted by government officials as an ideal model for other museums to emulate.
Construction began on the current museum in 2000. The permanent museum opened on February 27, 2002. The Long Island Children’s Museum today is home to 14 hands-on, interactive exhibit galleries, a 145-seat state-of-the-art theater and three classroom-size learning studios. Indoor and outdoor gallery spaces are interdisciplinary, age-appropriate, and intergenerational, fostering both independent and cooperative exploration, and encouraging concept development and skills building.
In addition to providing opportunities to have fun and learn through exhibit exploration and participation in performing arts programming, LICM offers a wide range of educationally and culturally diverse public programs, including our annual From Generation to Generation folk arts series, daily early childhood programs, art, music and science-based workshops, parenting workshops and more.
The Children’s Museum is committed to providing long-term and sustained access to the museum and its programming to children and families not typically served by educational and cultural institutions or who cannot readily afford visits to our facility. This commitment is visible through ongoing programs such as KICKstart (Kids Ideas Create Knowledge), which provides year-round, supplemental educational experiences to children, families, and teachers in four underserved school districts on Long Island and Juntos al Kinder/Together to Kindergarten, a kindergarten readiness program acclimating Latino families with limited English proficiency (LEP) to the U.S. school system.
The Children’s Museum has received local and national recognition. LICM has been designated a “Primary Institution” by the New York State Council on the Arts—defined by the Council as an organization that “is vital to the cultural life of New York State.” The museum is one of 20 national demonstration sites for the CYBERCHASE Inventive Innovations Program, based on the popular PBS series that introduces and reinforces math and science concepts.
The Children’s Museum is one of the founding members of the Long Island Nature Collaborative for Kids (LINCK). This collaboration has resulted in the designation of Long Island as a national demonstration site for outdoor education for young children. In 2007, LICM was awarded a prestigious Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation’s museums and libraries. The grant will fund the development phase of a program to support children and families served by Nassau County social service agencies.
The Children’s Museum serves more than 265,000 children and adults annually across the metropolitan region and is Long Island’s most well-attended museum.
This is truly inspiring!
