Fundraiser for a Glacier Children's Museum is coming up

What do you get when you combine three Montana moms who have backgrounds in business, education, and marketing?

The Glacier Children’s Museum.

It’s not a joke, though, but a new attraction that’s hopefully coming soon.

“It mainly stemmed from a few of us feeling we just needed a place we could take our kids where they could burn off energy and have fun at the same time,” Corrie Holloway explained recently.

Another museum board member, Savanna Andrasko, posted on Facebook at the beginning of the year asking for others to join the project to build a family-oriented museum celebrating Montana culture.

Holloway, Andrasko, and Jaime Bell have held meetings in Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls to raise awareness and support for the museum. The first fundraiser was a family campout on Bell’s Coram property last weekend. Local businesses, including Canyon Foods, Montana Coffee Traders, and Glacier Bank, donated food, and lots of other businesses have donated raffle and auction items for the museum fund.

The goal is to raise money to cover the nonprofit application, permanent location, liability insurance, and mobile exhibits that the board can use as examples of the museum-to-be’s offerings.

“This is a couple-year project,” Holloway said. “We have a long-term investment in it.”

Andrasko has a background in business, Bell taught at Glacier High School before becoming a mom, and Holloway has outdoor education and marketing experience.

“We have pretty good backgrounds to pull something like this off,” Holloway noted.

It was Bell’s background that motivated her interest in the museum.

“I have always been involved with a community group like a school, and I was missing that,” she said.

Bell noted that she’s always loved taking her kids to children’s museums, and thinks the Flathead would benefit from an indoor play area, especially during the winter months.

The ladies’ children range in age from 9 months to 7 years, and there are seven kids between the three of them.

“Our demographic will be anywhere from 1 to 12,” Holloway explained. “When it becomes successful, we would try to include older kids with other exhibits.”

Their vision for the museum is “fun, hands-on, interactive exhibits that focus on Northwest Montana,” she continued. “We feel like that will set us apart from other museums.”

Bell envisions rooms with themes, whether the exhibits are inspired by the lumber or train industry, Glacier National Park, or Native American culture. The board would also like to have a multipurpose space for older kids, once-off classes, birthday parties or events, or traveling exhibits from other museums. They intend to continue having mobile exhibits themselves, Bell noted, so they can go to schools and other events.

As for a permanent location, they’re hoping to establish the museum where it’s accessible to Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls. Right now, they’re working with local educators to plan the initial mobile exhibits, but in the future they’d like to work with Glacier Park, the Kootenai or Blackfeet, farmers, loggers, and more.

“We really think about this as a community effort,” Holloway said. “We really can’t do this by ourselves. With all the expansion in the Flathead, there’s very few things being worked on that are community-centered.”

The next Glacier Children’s Museum fundraiser will be a solar eclipse pre-party 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Aug. 20 at the Coop, with solar eclipse glasses for sale and a host of astronomy-related activities. The museum will also be represented at the last Community Market of the season, probably with a train-themed exhibit.