Group explores potential of a children’s museum in the Valley

WASILLA — Officials with an organization aimed at building healthier families in the Valley are looking to the community for help exploring what it would take to open a children’s museum in the Valley.

Raising Our Children With Kindness (ROCK) Mat-Su, which is part of the Mat-Su Health Foundation, held their first community listening session on the idea on July 30 in Wasilla.

About 10 community members and several children attended the 90-minute presentation and brainstorming session.

“This is 100 percent preliminary,” said Lindsay Prunella, ROCK Mat-Su’s project coordinator. “It’s just to see what the community is thinking about this.”

Children’s museums nationwide vary widely in size and scope, but typically offer interactive, play-based exhibits that focus on learning and experience. Some locations offer memberships, while others charge per visit.

“We are a growing community with lots of growing families, and I think at least we should be looking at something like this,” Joan Klapperich, who directs recreation services for the city of Wasilla, said during the meeting.

Attendees said their top concern about a potential museum is price, including how to fund the museum to start with and how much it will cost adults and children to get in.

“I usually have anywhere from my own three to three extra” said Nikki Rath, who lives in Wasilla with her family. “We’d like to go weekly, but at $10 a piece weekly isn’t going to happen.”

Rozann Kimpton said seniors who are raising their grandchildren or great grandchildren are in the same predicament. Kimpton advocates for grandparents in the area, is raising her own two great grandchildren and last year received the Alaska Angels in Adoption award.

“Finances is always a huge barrier for us,” she said.

Prunella said ROCK Mat-Su recognizes that financing and cost will be big hurdles, but for now they are focusing on just sorting through ideas.

“We just need to figure out what the community wants, and then figure out funding after that,” she said.

Although two museums in Anchorage offer child-friendly exhibits, Fairbanks is home to the nearest museum designed specifically for kids.

ROCK Mat-Su is using Anchorage-based consulting firm Agnew Beck to help gather information about what community members would like in a potential children’s museum. The firm is helping both run the community listening sessions and gathering anonymous interactive data through polling during those meetings.

Data gathered and displayed at the July 30 meeting showed that although everyone who participated agrees that the area does need a children’s museum, attendees disagreed on how far they’d be willing to travel to use it or which ages its exhibits should focus.

Additional listening sessions were scheduled for Talkeetna July 31 and Sutton August 10.