Nonprofit giving children space to grow and play
SLIPPERY ROCK TWP. — At last, children who participate in the nonprofit Kid’s Innovation Playground will have a place to blow off STEAM.
KIP founder and director Lorraine Shaffer began her work fostering interest in science, technology, engineering, art and math — or STEAM — with a vision of a spacious, lasting space children could explore. KIP offers after school educational activities for children from kindergarten to eighth grade, she said.
Shaffer finally found this home through Center United Presbyterian Church, which offered to rent an early mid-century home out to her for only $500, with the church covering costs for all utilities itself. The church owned this little house, once employed for Bible study courses, that had over time become a storage space, since the church didn’t really want to rent out to college students, she said.
“They simply said, ‘Yes,’” Shaffer said. “We’d love to see more kids. They’d canceled their Sunday school, so they’d love to have something that brings the kids, not to their church — because it’s beside it — but just to be doing something for kids.”
A permanent home for KIP had long been a dream for Shaffer, but the indeterminate location of her nonprofit presented a growing threat for KIP’s survival, she said.
“I did start with a vision of having a place for kids to come to, and I just ended up kind of taking it on the road, because we just wanted to do things for free or no cost,” she said.
This meant Shaffer would have to pack her car up and unload items for activities at community rooms. Sometimes, children would ask for items Shaffer had brought before to learn and play with, and she would have left it behind, she said.
“So I had told my board that, at the end of 2023, if we didn’t get our own place, someplace where I could just keep everything in one spot that kids could come to, then we’re probably going to have to dissolve Kid’s Innovation Program,” she said.
KIP’s new home, at 221 Center Street in Slippery Rock, offers a place for everything KIP does, Shaffer said.
One room will become a video production room. There production lights and green screens, used to create visual effects during post-production, can help children produce and mix video, she said. They can, for example, craft book reports by dressing up as characters from books they read and adding backgrounds with the green screens, Shaffer said.
Another room will serve as a robotics room.
“So there’s going to be a mat on the floor for them to do all different kinds of robotics,” Shaffer said. “I’ve got a table there. We do Arts and Bots and some other things.
“It’s definitely small, but it’s our own, and (it has) the atmosphere I haven’t been able for three years now to create, the atmosphere that makes kids feel like they’re in a really great place,” she said. “They love the place. They love the tech. I’ve had 1,000 kids over the last three years go through all different kinds of programs that we had.”
She’s so excited to create an atmosphere with robots on the walls and ample space for building supplies, Shaffer said.
Emily Thompson, a longtime member of both the church’s congregation and KIP’s board, said her son, now age 10, grew enthusiastic about KIP early on.
“My son was really involved and loved the technology and loved the classes,” she said. “My son, he’s tried all the sports. He’s not a huge fan, but he loved sitting at that computer and coding, and doing the hummingbird kit. It was a great outlet for him.”
For many children, such as her son, posing for photographs with robots they’d constructed out of Legos meant as much as it did for baseball players to pose in uniform, she said.
“That’s so awesome, that these kids are so happy doing something that they love, and they’re getting the help to do more,” she said. “And that’s what I think having a home place will be. That’s why I was so passionate about getting her there.”
This new home marks an exciting change for KIP’s STEAM outreach efforts and for her own CUPC church community, too, Thompson said.
