“It only takes one person to change a generation. If I can get one caregiver to say, ‘This is worth coming to,’ it will change the lives of that entire family."
- Renee Nixon, Program Manager, DIA Kids
Detroit, MI (April 2026)-When a father walked through the doors of the Detroit Institute of Arts with his four-year-old daughter, he braced himself. It was her second visit (she had come once before with her mom) but it was his first, and he didn't know what to expect. He was a big man, the kind you might picture on a football field, not standing beneath a three-story atrium, looking up at marble walls and museum balconies, unsure of what he was supposed to do, or whether he belonged there at all.
Then something shifted.
Above him, security guards leaned over the railing, waving and calling down to the children streaming in below.
The kids waved back. They shouted. They pointed. And then they ran… not away, but toward the museum, toward the art, toward something that was now, unmistakably, theirs.
Before he left that day, the father found Renee Nixon, the DIA Kids Program Manager, and told her: "I've never enjoyed a day more with my daughter. I feel like I can come here."
That shift, from hesitation to belonging, is exactly what DIA Kids was designed to create. Early childhood learning has always been a passion of the Walters family. Beginning in 2018, Carol Walters helped to co-create DIA Kids with the museum and the foundation provided six years of grant funding to pilot and refine the program. It is a structured, three-session early childhood program serving four-year-olds and their caregivers from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Children visit the museum with their caregivers three times — first to explore mosaics, then to encounter sculpture and finally with their whole families for a museum-wide celebration called Family Day.
Today, the program reaches up to nine schools each year. During the 2024–25 school year, Family Day alone welcomed 367 participants from across the tri-county area. Half of participating schools are new each year, helping the program reach families who may have never set foot inside a museum. In fact, during Session 1 last year, 65% of surveyed caregivers reported it was their first visit to the DIA.
At the heart of DIA Kids is a partnership with HighScope Educational Research Foundation, which provides training and coaching for gallery teachers and leads ongoing program evaluation. Together, they focus not just on what children learn, but how adults engage: modeling curiosity, asking open-ended questions and giving children the space to lead.
The impact is clear.
More than 91% of surveyed caregivers say they feel more comfortable talking to their child about art. 97% say they’re more likely to visit the DIA or other cultural institutions in the future. And 100% of surveyed preschool teachers say they would participate again.
This impact led the Walters Family to make a landmark multi-million dollar gift to endow the program, now called the Walters Family DIA Kids program. But the numbers only tell part of the story.
One father, Nixon recalls, came from a community where time with his child meant throwing a football or kicking a soccer ball. After participating in DIA Kids, he left a message for a HighScope interviewer: now he understood that connection could look different… that it could be as simple as getting down on the floor and making art together.
"It opened up a whole world," Nixon says. "He didn't realize that was something he was capable of."
What began as a single program inside the DIA has become a blueprint for how Detroit’s cultural institutions are reaching families they have never reached before.
Building on the DIA Kids model, Nixon brought the concept to City Sprouts, a community-based early childhood program that delivers arts and learning experiences directly in neighborhood spaces where families already gather. In partnership with Brilliant Detroit and a growing coalition including the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Michigan Science Center, Charles Wright Museum, Detroit Historical Society, and the Detroit Public Library, the program brings together music, science, history, and storytelling under a shared approach.
The connective thread is the DIA Kids’ approach: developmentally appropriate, caregiver-centered, and grounded in the belief that these spaces belong to everyone.
“When you see the success of it,” Nixon says, “other institutions say, we want to be a part of it.”
"It opened up a whole world," Nixon says. "He didn't realize that was something he was capable of."
A preschool teacher described DIA Kids as a "transformation.” She became more willing to try unconventional art projects, to let children lead and to swap "good job" for something more intentional: a real comment, a genuine question, a moment of honest attention. One mother at a City Sprouts session told Nixon she could never have afforded to take her children to these places on her own. After her son participated, he asked if he could learn to play an instrument.
"We dropped the seed," Nixon says simply.
With the Walters Family Foundation’s and Walters Family’s investments, now grown into an endowment, that seed will continue to take root, year after year, in the hands of children and families learning that the museum was always meant for them.
“When you see the success of it,” Nixon says, “other institutions say, we want to be a part of it.”
"It opened up a whole world," Nixon says. "He didn't realize that was something he was capable of."
