Our Partners

One of the Children's Museum's defining ideas for its expansion in 2004 was that we would affordably rent office space to other organizations that work with or on behalf of children. We call these organizations our partners – currently they are Child Watch (www.childwatchofpittsburgh.org), two Pittsburgh Public School’s pre-K classrooms (www.pghboe.net), Reading Is FUNdamental Pittsburgh (www.rifpittsburgh.org), SLB Radio Productions (www.slbradio.org), Sense of Place Learning (www.senseofplacelearning.org) and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE) (http://upclose.lrdc.pitt.edu/). Recent collaborations with our partners have been fulfilling and fun, and made an impact. Just to name a few – summer camps and the Solar Concert Series with SLB Radio Productions, Read Across America with RIF, and providing snacks and activities for the waiting room of Allegheny County Family Court with Child Watch. The research that UPCLOSE has conducted here on learning in a museum setting assists us immeasurably as we develop new activities and exhibits (http://tinyurl.com/UPCLOSEPaper).

We found that by sharing office space with like-minded organizations  in an incubator type setting, we don't lose needed space, privacy or control - we gain valuable relationships and unique ways to benefit all of our audiences. And that adds to the fun and unpredictability of working at the Children's Museum each day.

Blogger:  Suzanne McCaffrey, Associate Director of Marketing and Multimedia Communications

Moving Out of My Parents' Basement

One of this year's successes was the maturation of one of our former partners, ToonSeum (http://www.toonseum.org), a museum of cartoon art.  ToonSeum came out of Wos Studios, which became our partner in 2005.  ToonSeum created its own gallery in a hallway of the Children's Museum in October 2007, and moved into its own venue in the Pittsburgh Cultural District in October 2009.  This is an excerpt from ToonSeum founder Joe Wos' experiences as a Children's Museum partner:

…Two years ago I approached the Children’s Museum with a proposal to create a cartoon art gallery at the museum. It was a museum within a museum, a ToonSeum, one of only four museums dedicated to cartoon art in the nation. (The others are in New York and California.)

The Children’s Museum acted as an incubator space for our museum. Don’t let the venue fool you – we presented some pretty grown up exhibitions too, from Zippy to MAD Magazine…I like to think we brought a little older, and perhaps odder, audience to the Children’s Museum. We view ourselves as somewhere between The Warhol and the Children’s Museum, both physically and aesthetically. We present the most Pop of all Pop Art, and present it to kids and their families.

And now the ToonSeum has grown up too. We [moved] into our own space in downtown Pittsburgh’s Cultural District… I know we will continue to work closely with the Children’s Museum, and I will continue to perform there as well.

The Children’s Museum was a teacher, and in many ways a parent, to a new organization. And now, like so many comic book geeks who have gone before us, it’s time to move out of our parents’ basement and get a place of our own.

Blogger: Joe Wos, Founder of ToonSeum and Children's Museum performer