Anatomy of a Miracle

It came to her in a dream.

No, really. It seems such a hokey thing to say. But it’s true.

Allyson Loos had a dream. In it she was walking through a wonderful place with her daughter Bianca. At first, the setting wasn’t important. She was with her daughter. The daughter she lost at 13 months. The daughter whose laugh she couldn’t forget, but would never hear again.

She was with her daughter. It had been a year since Bianca passed. The dream was a blessing. In it, Bianca showed Allyson around a children’s museum.

“I just knew right then that that was supposed to happen,” Loos says, a decade later, tears welling up in her eyes. “I was supposed to do it for her. It’s that simple.”

Loos is sitting in a side room at Food & Thought, the organic grocery and restaurant, surrounded by some of her closest friends—the five women and one man who helped turn her dream into a reality. She starts crying. Pretty soon there isn’t a dry eye in the place.

Barring any setbacks, the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples is scheduled to open next month. Inside, it is a whimsical world full of places for children to explore, places that will teach them about the world on the outside and the strength they hold within.

The finished product is both exactly as Loos envisioned it and so much greater than she could have imagined, 30,000 square feet of adventure and joy for families to treasure. In the coming months, Loos and the five women—Julie Koester, Nancy Ross, Kim Buckheit, Lisa Van Dien and Brenda Prioletti—will be applauded for their accomplishment. They’ll point to the man, Joe Cox, who became the point person and now executive director for the project, as the catalyst for its completion.

The opening will seem effortless. And by this time next year, the museum will likely have integrated itself seamlessly into the fabric of our community. After all, we’ve been hearing about it for years. We’ve watched anxiously as that peculiar building on Livingston Road popped up.

But the story behind it is one of seemingly impossible goals met and of a small band of dedicated people holding on to a dream.

Literally, a dream.

Enter the Catalyst

The story of the golisano Children’s Museum of Naples actually starts in the mid-’90s in London, of all places. There, a young man planned a journey around the world with his best friend after their college graduation.

“(We) had always said we’d put off working as long as possible and go travel the world,” Joe Cox remembers. “We had a whole itinerary planned out. Do the whole thing for £1,000.”

But before the trip could happen, the best friend got a job offer in Hong Kong that he couldn’t refuse. Cox was suddenly left rudderless. He still didn’t want to get a real job. He hadn’t really thought of what he was going to do next.

A chance conversation with a biology professor led to an intriguing possibility—an internship in Florida. The catch? He had to get his application in the next morning.

“So I looked at the poster he had up in his office of what it was, and it was this girl, wearing what looked like a safari outfit, on her hands and knees holding this big snake talking to a bunch of kids,” he says. “There were palm trees outside the school window. I thought, ‘I could do that.’”

Six weeks later, he was sitting in the first-class cabin of a British Airways flight bound for Miami. That was the end of his cushy accommodations.

“I got picked up in the crappiest old van you’ve ever seen,” he remembers, “and we headed across the Alley toward Naples. But we didn’t stop in Naples. We drove out to the old Briggs Nature Center off 951 … to this run-down shack at Rookery Bay. And my boss looks at me and says, ‘Did you see that nature center about four miles up the road? Be there tomorrow at 8:30 in the morning.’”

Plunging In

When they finally decided for sure that they were going to build a children’s museum, the band of six women thought it would be easy. Well, maybe not easy, but certainly not hard. This was Naples after all—the land of endless philanthropy. This was the place where just two years before a glamorous wine festival made its splash on the scene raising millions for children’s charities.

“Naiveté was our greatest gift,” says Lisa Van Dien.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” Julie Koester adds.

On average, from the moment of conception to the doors open to the public, it takes about 10 years to build a children’s museum. But at that moment, none of the women dreamed it would take longer than half that time.

“They asked how quickly it could be done,” says Mary Sinker, a children’s museum consultant whom the Naples group hired in 2006. “I said if you had everything in place—the money, the property, the permits, the exhibit designs—then it would be 18 months to two years. They said they wanted to do it in nine months, then a year.”

“Several of us had young children, and we just assumed they’d be growing up (in the museum),” Van Dien says. “Now they’ll be junior docents.”

In many ways, the women should be proud it happened this quickly. The word “luck” is thrown around with reckless abandon when the women talk about how they got to this point.

But it was something more than that. Each of them saw in the project something they wanted for their own families, for their children and in time for the grandchildren they hope to have.

Several of them were looking for a place for children with developmental disabilities to be free to play and interact with their peers on equal footing.

That’s actually how Cox, who is deaf in his left ear, got involved in the project. By the time he met Loos in 2004, Cox had risen from an intern at the Conservancy to the director of the Nature Center. Loos hoped to have her autistic son, Ben, attend a summer camp there. In a conversation about Ben with Cox, the plans for the museum came up.

“She said, ‘I’ve got the plan in my car. Do you want to see it?’” Cox says. “I thought, ‘Why not?’”