Eli Whitney Museum

I write to thank you for all that we have accomplished with your past support and to ask you for your continued help.

Our experiments help children discover essential things about themselves. That makes a next step easier. Children connect to other children…often from neighborhoods beyond their regular experience.

I offer one story that captures what’s vital in our work. It begins with a 6 year-old girl just adopted to New Haven from China. She came with irrepressible confidence and a ravenous appetite for learning, but few English words. She understood at once that our Workshop is filled with connections and concepts that she could be grasp, literally, and without their not-yet familiar names. She felt at home. She made friends. She made eloquent statements about who she was…all in constructions and colors. As her world grew exponentially, every child and apprentice who coached and guided her felt his or her world grow richer and wiser.

Our work begins with the most fundamental connections: nails, knots, nuts & bolts, wire, tape, glue, and screws. It is a repertoire of experience to be practiced with the same precision as musical notes. It’s the beginning of the confidence and the knowhow to build everything, including (even for children who have not traveled so far) a place of belonging.

When you give to our Annual Fund, you support building competence, confidence, and most important, community.