The Long Island Children's Museum spends its days handing toddlers the controls. On Thursday night, October 8, the grown-ups took the building. More than 350 business leaders, philanthropists and longtime supporters filled the museum on Garden City's Museum Row for its annual Cupcakes & Cocktails gala and raised more than 800,000 dollars to keep hands-on play within reach of every Long Island family.

A gala that played like the museum

The theme this year was Illuminate the Power of Play, and the museum took it literally. Instead of a standard rubber chicken evening, guests moved through a live music lounge, watched a yo-yo performance artist work, and sat down at stations to customize candles, bracelets and body oils, the same kind of make-something-yourself experience the museum hands to children every day. Dinner, signature cupcakes and cocktails rounded out the night, and co-chairs Genevieve DellaFera and Patricia Cadilla ran the room.

The point underneath the fun was serious. Museums and other cultural nonprofits are leaning harder than ever on private generosity, and one strong night at a gala can carry programming that public funding no longer covers. The museum says the money raised will go to educational programming, accessibility and inclusion initiatives, community outreach and the hands-on learning that fills its exhibit floors, with a particular focus on families who face financial or physical barriers to visiting at all.

Three honorees, three kinds of giving

The museum used the evening to honor three supporters. Bank of America took the 2026 Community Impact Award, recognition for a partnership with the museum that has now run more than 20 years. The Frank and Janet DellaFera Family Foundation Trust was named the 2026 Partner in Play for its sustained family philanthropy. And The Viscardi Center, the Albertson based nonprofit that educates and employs people with disabilities, received the 2026 Nonprofit Partner Award for its work alongside the museum on inclusion.

Museum president Erika Floreska framed the three together as partners in the same belief, that every child needs a place to play, discover who they are and make memories with the people they love, and that no family should be priced or shut out of that.

Where the money actually lands

If you have ever taken a child there, you know what the gala was buying. The museum is a 40,000 square foot building at 11 Davis Avenue in Garden City, on the Museum Row campus it shares with the Cradle of Aviation and Nunley's Carousel, with 14 interactive exhibits, a working theater, art studios and programs that pull in hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. It is chartered as a museum by the New York State Board of Regents and holds accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums, the highest national recognition a museum can earn.

Gala dollars are what keep that building generous. They underwrite sensory friendly performances, subsidized visits and the staff that makes a rainy Tuesday with a four year old survivable. The museum is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and weekends from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and it is closed Mondays.

The next one is already on the calendar

The museum has set next year's Cupcakes & Cocktails for October 7, 2027, and is already inviting businesses and community supporters to take part. For everyone else, the takeaway is simpler. One of Long Island's best family institutions just banked a strong year of support in a single night, and the people most likely to feel it are the kids pressing buttons in Garden City this winter.