By Chelsea Hadaway
chadaway@scbiznews.com

When she first took on the mantle of executive director of the Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry almost three years ago, Georgina Ngozi made it a priority to learn the people and its needs, reaching out to community leaders for input.

“I invited them to morning tea to explore ways of working together,” Ngozi said. “That laid the foundation for the museum’s future goals.”

She met with the directors of the Ronald McDonald House, Trident United Way, the South Carolina Aquarium, Gibbes Art Museum, among others.

It was this early shaping of relationships and goals that has helped carry the museum to where it is today — celebrating its fifth year with even more growth and reaching an even wider audience.

Ngozi was propelled by the part of the museum’s mission statement to serve all children in the community.

As part of this effort, the Children’s Museum partnered with MUSC to open up the museum once a month to serve special needs kids. The program has received more funding than requested two consecutive years and has broadened to include more groups.

The museum has increased the diversity of its audience by 25% to 30% since Ngozi began here, a feat helped along by a collaboration with the Junior League of Charleston.

“We shared the goal of diversifying the audience,” Ngozi said. After putting their heads together, the museum and the Junior League launched “Free Friday Family Fest,” where the museum opened up to anyone free of charge. The museum offered dinner and a music performance to everyone who came.

“I was in awe. You saw Hispanic, Asian, white, and African-American children sitting at dinner together, laughing and eating,” Ngozi said.

The first event hosted about 150 people and has grown to include around 600 people in its third year.

Ngozi is looking into a program to bring in kids from homeless shelters.

With all the growth, the museum is looking to expand its space and capabilities. Within the next year, Ngozi is hoping to break ground on expanding into the train shelter next door on Ann Street. It would house their offices, a restaurant, a conference center and an education supply store.

The museum also will be adding new exhibits and an open theater where kids can write, direct and act out their own plays.

Ngozi’s favorite part of her job is creating new opportunities for kids to discover what they can do and seeing the wonder in their eyes.

She attributes her passion for serving children to her first job as a candy striper in the pediatrics ward of a hospital in her hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y., when she was 12. Her experience seeing children that were abandoned, neglected and afflicted with terminal diseases etched a focus into her life.

“I felt a deep and abiding need to show children love,” she said. Since then, she has worked with children and youth in every job, including stints in juvenile detention centers.

But her most recent jobs were at children’s museums, including the Children’s Museum of Houston and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the country’s oldest children’s museum.

When she was recruited from the Brooklyn museum to be executive director here, she was ready for the move.

“I had forgotten about the snow,” Ngozi said, who had become used to much warmer weather.

Moving down to the South Carolina Lowcountry wasn’t completely uncharted territory.

Her father was born in Beaufort, and she had visited eight years ago to research an exhibit on Gullah culture for the Houston museum.

Ngozi now considers Charleston one of the most beautiful places she’s lived and is drawn to the warmth and simplicity of the city.

But coming to a city where the concept of a children’s museum is new can be challenging, she said.

“We have to demonstrate how this children’s museum supports other children’s organizations,” Ngozi said.

She also has to battle to assumption that the museum is just recreational. She described the museum as an “educational landscape for family learning.”

“It’s a place for children to discover their own unique abilities and design their own learning,” she said.

Although play is a part of the museum process, play shouldn’t be discounted.

“In many ways, play is synonymous with learning,” she said. “And what we no longer see, they see for the first time.”

Reach Chelsea Hadaway at 849-3142.