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Erika Floreska takes charge at kids’ museum By Ben FIeBeRT bfiebert@liherald.com
Courtesy Maureen Mangan
eRIKA FLOResKA, OF Baldwin, in front of the Pattern Studio exhibit at the Long Island Children’s Museum in Uniondale, will become the new president of the museum on June 3.
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 Continued on page 19
Making a splash for pancreatic cancer research Patrick Dolan survives annual bone-chilling ‘Polar Plunge’ fundraiser By Ben FIeBeRT bfiebert@liherald.com
The fact that swimming weather was many weeks off didn’t stop Patrick Dolan from plunging into Baldwin Harbor for a good cause last month. Dolan, who has lived in Baldwin for six years, endured 40-degree water and similar temperatures on March 11. Each March for the past five years, Dolan, 37, the director of channel partnerships at the tech company Pixis.ai, has hosted, and taken part in, what he calls a “Polar Plunge” to raise money
for different causes. This year he raised $3,700 in honor of his father-in-law, who died of pancreatic cancer last April. The bone-chilling tradition started in 2018. “My brother did polar plunges all the time,” Dolan said. “As he suffers from drug addiction, I asked myself, how can I find a way to be connected with my brother?” Dolan has lost a cousin to drug addiction, and wanted to support his older brother in any way he could so his brother wouldn’t head down the same path. So, for his first plunge, Dolan raised money for a non-
profit called Shatterproof, headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, which focuses on drug addiction and the impact it has on addicts’ families. Dolan utilized social media to raise awareness of the swim and money for Shatterproof. “Facebook had these tools to make it really easy to raise money,” he said. “So that’s where this started, and then it obviously kind of grew from there. His brother, he noted, is doing well, and Patrick said he was “incredibly proud of him.” “Every year, the plunge would be in honor of some-
body,” he continued, “and I tried to attach myself to a charity that’s relatively unknown, that I feel like that person would be proud to support.” This year the cause was personal once again, as Dolan raised money for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, or PanCAN — a charity that funds
research into the nearly always fatal form of the disease — in honor of his father-in-law. “He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019, during Thanksgiving,” Dolan recalled. He described his husband, Carlos Dolan’s, father, Jose Maisonet, of New Haven, ConnectiContinued on page 19