On the third Saturday of most months, Kids ‘N’ Stuff Children’s Museum opens its doors an hour early, just for members. Coffee and donuts from the Foundry Bakehouse and Deli are out, the exhibits are quiet before the crowds arrive, and kids are already elbow-deep in whatever that month’s project happens to be: extracting DNA, building gumdrop towers, or lighting up a hand-drawn reindeer with a tiny paper circuit.
This is “Member Morning”, a monthly program the museum built for its most loyal families, the ones who show up again and again and, the museum says, still deserve something new each time. Running it well for a full year takes real planning: supplies for eleven different hands-on activities, marketing, food, and facilitation for every session.
That full year of programming is now funded for 2025, thanks to a $1,000 grant from the Dobbins Family Foundation, brought forward by Owen Dobbins, the eldest member of Generation Four.
The grant covers all eleven 2025 Member Mornings (the museum skips September for the Festival of the Forks), each one built around its own theme — DIY DNA extraction, National Quilting Day, Urban Beekeeping Day, an early Halloween Spooktacular, and an LED holiday card-making session to close out the year. In 2024, these mornings drew an average of 35 visitors each, many of them families who make a full morning of it downtown afterward — coffee at the museum, then lunch or shopping on Superior Street.
“Kids ‘N’ Stuff continues to be a place for families looking for a fun, educational, and inspiring place for children to learn and grow,” one museum member, Sarah W., wrote of her family’s experience. “It’s wonderful to see how the museum continuously evolves with new exhibits and programs that keep my children excited to return on a regular basis.”
Owen’s grant is part of the same tradition that brought new mirrors to Heaven’s Least Ballet earlier this year: each grandchild in the Dobbins family is given funds of their own to direct toward a cause in their community. It’s a deliberate choice by Bill and Karen Dobbins to teach philanthropy by doing it, not just talking about it, starting as early as the next generation is ready.
For a museum that depends on the same families returning month after month, a grant like this is quiet but essential — the kind of support that doesn’t announce itself in a ribbon-cutting, but shows up instead in eleven Saturday mornings where a kid gets to build something, learn something, and want to come back. That’s Education dollars turning into something that looks a lot like community, one third Saturday at a time.
Priority area: Education · Next-Generation Giving (Generation Four) · Grant Year 2024 (funding 2025 programming) · Kids ‘N’ Stuff Children’s Museum