Please Touch Museum Director retires
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
By: Peter Crimmins
pcrimmins@whyy.org
The woman who took a minor children's museum from a small space on the Ben Franklin Parkway into the restored Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park is retiring.
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By expanding the Please Touch Museum to 4 times its size with the move to Memorial Hall, Nancy Kolb created the tipping point for a planned Centennial District, where a World's Fair was held in 1876.
Laura Foster will be Kolb's replacement. Foster has been with the museum for 17 years and helped direct the move.
Kolb says the past 15 months have been turbulent, and Foster will need to stabilize the organization.
Kolb: We are 11 months away from the day we opened. We moved from 38,000 sq feet to 157,000 sq feet. We've had a lot of change. What we need now is to make sure the place gets on very firm footing, both staff-wise and financially.
Kolb says the museum's still needs to raise 15 million dollars to complete its 88 million dollar capital campaign.
More from WHYY:
Listen to Nancy Kolb's This I Believe Philly Essay