Imagination Ball gives Children’s Museum a financial and emotional boost

Portland Press Herald

PORTLAND — Having covered nonprofit fundraisers weekly for the past 13 years, I have seen hundreds of auctions where ordinary people raise their hands — and their bid numbers — to protect the organizations and initiatives that matter to them. Never is that impulse stronger than when they feel that something they love, like the Children’s Museum & Theater of Maine, is threatened.

A month before the Children’s Museum’s first Imagination Ball on May 9, the nonprofit announced that $224,000 in federal grant support it was expecting over the next three years had been canceled. Just last week, that cancellation was reversed — at least for now.

The Imagination Ball — a new name and theme for the museum’s largest annual fundraiser — happened to be during those weeks when the museum’s initiatives related to diversity and inclusion were most clearly at risk.

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