Erika Floreska, Baldwin resident, takes charge at Long Island Children's Museum. What is her background? What are her plans as president of the museum?

Erika Floreska plans to bring a slice of Baldwin with her when she becomes the new president of the Long Island Children’s Museum in just over a month. On June 3, Floreska, 51, will succeed current President Suzanne LeBlanc, who is retiring after 17 years.

Floreska moved to Baldwin 18 years ago, and soon became a member of the museum. She had two children of her own, and sought out places in her new community that were welcoming environments for her family.

“Part of what connected me to the museum is that my family is mixed-race,” Floreska said. “That’s what the Long Island Children’s Museum is for us. We could come here and see that sort of interactional diversity as a mixed-race family, and seeing families of other races and ethnicities having fun and playing in the museum, it really stood out.”

One of the reasons why she moved to Baldwin, she said, was to raise her children in a community where they would see people like them as well as not like them. “If you look at the students in Baldwin High School, it has people who are mixed, white, black, Asian and Hispanic,” Floreska said. She is fortunate, she added, to have raised her kids in an environment where they learned about, and grew to respect, a variety of cultures.

The hamlet’s diversity is echoed at the Uniondale museum. “One of the things that’s beautiful here is that despite how segregated Long Island communities can be, those differences go away when people come to the Long Island Children’s Museum,” Floreska said. “And you get people from different communities coming together and interacting with each other.”

She started working at the museum about three years ago, but her involvement began way before that. “I found the children’s museum a real home for my family,” she said. “We were members at the museum for many, many years.”

At a meeting in 2020, Floreska offered to help Le-Blanc. “I told her if she needed support or help, I would love to work at the museum, as I believe in the museum’s mission,” Floreska said. The facility’s mission of “making a positive impact on children and families,” she said, is what motivates her to make a difference.

Raising money was what initially caught her interest. “I was looking into doing more fundraising,” Floreska said. “I really like fundraising and community engagement, and six months after I offered LeBlanc help at the museum, she gave me the role of development director.

“Working here for three years, I got to know the staff and see all the inner workings of the museum,” Floreska continued. “And it’s really a tremendous team that works here. They’re really committed, and we all work well together.” She said she believed she would be a great leader because of the team she would be working with.

Floreska spent 30 years in the music industry, at some of New York’s most vibrant cultural institutions, including the Bloomingdale School of Music, the Tectonic Theater Project and Jazz at Lincoln Center. With her background in music, she is most fond of the theater at the museum. “I’m a trained musician,” she said. “So the fact that we have a theater that puts on full productions and on a really professional level, there’s kind of a little heartbeat there for me.”

She said she was looking forward to working on a new exhibit. “We’re developing the first new, permanent exhibit in seven to eight years,” she said. “And it’s about the maritime culture of Long Island, so it’s a very localized exhibit that we’ve developed through programs that have been going on here for years. Now we’re going to turn it into a new exhibit by February of 2025.”

According to Floreska, the exhibit will feature a “fish market (and) a bay house” and will give visitors a feel for what it’s like to live in the ocean. “This is something that is so unique to Long Island culture,” she said. “This will tell the story of a community that we all live in, and how we can take care of it and be good stewards.”

Scott Burman, the museum’s board chair, said he believed that Floreska’s enthusiasm for its current and upcoming exhibits is one reason why she will be a great president. “Erika Floreska stood out from an impressive list of candidates during our national search,” Burman said in a statement. “She has the vision, enthusiasm, and commitment to build on the Museum’s 30-year history and identify new opportunities to support the children, schools, and communities that the Long Island Children’s Museum serves.”