Jane Zatkowsky has her hands full these days.
In the past year, since establishing a board of directors for the i play Children's Museum, it's been a seemingly endless stream of community events, networking opportunities and family-friendly outings, trying to gather support for the interactive museum she hopes to create in Springfield.
The museum has made some forays into the public domain, including an event at the Springfield Mall one weekend a month since January.
"In January, we had a Just Laughs event at the mall, with an improv theater group and a pantomime group from Manassas," Zatkowsky said. "They came out and put on an hour-and-a-half-long show. They were really good, the kids were mesmerized."
Many of the children who participated in the January event came back in February, for an afternoon of creating visual art ranging from decorating strips of clay to making collages from paper and paint.
"We had kids collaging with different materials and globbing it up on paper with paint," Zatkowsky said. "We even had an artist come out and talk with the kids about being an artist. Some of the kids talked with her at great length, which was wonderful to see."
DESPITE ITS lack of a home, the Children's Museum is a dream of Zatkowsy's, one that she hopes to bring to reality within the next two years. The monthly events in the Springfield Mall are only one way in which she and her board members are trying to engage the community, to bring in volunteers and possible donors to help bring the museum to life.
"The biggest part of this project is we have to have active community members," she said. "We cannot spend a lot of money on administrative costs, our money has to go toward programming and services. We need to make sure we have strong community support, we need to start enrolling people for memberships for this ethereal children's museum. "
Families in Fairfax County very often fall into a rut when it comes to entertaining their children on weekends, Zatkowsky said.
"A lot of families don't know what to do with kids on weekends, they feel they need to spend money to entertain them," she said. While many families have the money to spend, the question becomes trying to find something different, instead of going to the local mall to hang out together.
In April, Zatkowsky and her board will unveil their initial start-up spending plan, which will be their way of asking for donors to supply the $100,000-$150,000 needed to establish the museum once a location is secured. Some of that money may be raised through community events or partnership with schools.
"We'd love to create a traveling exhibit, something PTAs could rent, or maybe a musical event at their schools," Zatkowsky said.
Donors will be listed on the museum's Web site, which Zatkowsky said she hopes to have up and running by the end of March.
Looking to other children's museums across the country, Zatkowsky admitted her initial hope to have the museum open by 2008 may not be possible.
"Statistically, it takes between three and three-and-a-half years to put this together, so I may have been a bit naive when this started last year," she said.
But once the i play museum opens, it will be one of a handful of family-oriented museums or art galleries in the region.
"There's another children's museum looking to open in Loudoun, and they have $2.5 million in their bank account and all kinds of support," she said. "When they open, and the national children's museum opens in Washington, plus with the Lorton Arts Foundation to the west, we'll be placed beautifully in the middle here in Springfield."
Zatkowsky said she's been attending community meetings and talking with people involved in the revitalization effort in Springfield in the hopes of finding a home for her museum. In the meantime, the museum will be featured at various festivals this summer, including Springfield Days in June and the Burke Centre Fall Festival and possible Celebrate Fairfax in July.
All this work can be draining, Zatkowsky said, adding she's hoping to find more people with the time and energy needed to attend meetings and plan events.
"But when see families getting excited and kids making great stuff, it's easy to keep going," she said. "I get recharged every time I get to talk about it."
The museum is already a member of the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce, which provides opportunities for partnership with other for-profit groups in the region, said the Chamber's executive director, Nancy-jo Manney.
"We as a chamber support our for-profit members to be involved with nonprofit members or groups in community," Manney said. "It's also a way for nonprofits to find board members."
A children's museum would bring more families into Springfield for recreation on weekends, Manney said, which would help contribute to the area's economy.
"Any kind of development is good for the area," she said. "Right now, a lot of her work is about securing the intellectual and physical resources to get started, but we firmly believe everything you give comes back to you."
Zatkowsky said new board member Gaea Honeycutt is the kind of person she needs more of, level-headed and grounded in the practicalities of getting a non-profit organization started.
"I met Jane at a networking event a while ago," said Honeycutt, who wanted to use her grant-writing background to help her community. "I didn't formally join the museum board until January, because Jane said she wanted to wait until the time was right."
The lack of small, independent bookstores and hands-on museums in the area fuels the need for the children's museum, Honeycutt said, and she's glad to be part of its creation.
"It'll be a long time, a few years out, but I'm really excited about the prospect of bringing in people from other parts of county," she said. "This has the premise in being a fabulous cultural institution that everyone can be proud of once it opens."