How a Carlson Alum Opened a New Children’s Museum

Children pretend to canoe in the Mississippi River and discover constellations in the night sky. Others play with engineering gadgets or draw their own masterpieces on an art wall. Some young adventurers even climb 30 feet to walk among clouds.

Cassie Miles, ’07 BSB, helps create these fun experiences in her role as CEO of the Great River Children’s Museum, which opened earlier this year in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

“Our mission is to shine a bright light on the power of play to spark children’s learning, strengthen families, and build community connections,” says Miles, who grew up in a small town near St. Cloud. “It’s different than what people might think of when you say the word ‘museum’— here, you can touch and play with everything. That’s the whole point.”

Building this new community space in the heart of downtown St. Cloud has been a yearslong process. Miles took the CEO job in July 2020, becoming the museum’s first paid employee. In years prior to that, a dedicated group of volunteers had been working to create the nonprofit children’s museum.

“It was an all-volunteer Board of Directors, and they had received a donated building in 2018,” Miles explains. “They were ready to renovate and launch into the project, and then they got a grant to hire me to do that.”

Miles worked to build the museum into the bright, joyous place that it is today. She put together large-scale fundraising campaigns, collaborated with an architect and exhibit designers, conducted community outreach, and eventually hired her 25-person staff.

“Cassie has a remarkable ability to rally people around a shared vision,” says NeTia Bauman, CEO of the Greater St. Cloud Development Corporation, a regional economic development organization. “Her leadership is shaping something far bigger than a museum. She’s helping drive a project that strengthens downtown, enhances quality of life, and signals that greater St. Cloud is a place where families, creativity, and community truly matter.”

Rooted in Entrepreneurship

Miles’ drive to build an organization from the ground up largely started in her classes at Minnesota Carlson. As a first-generation college student, she double-majored in Finance and Entrepreneurship. Inspired by seeing her parents run their own businesses, Miles envisioned her career going in that same direction.

She even started her own business with classmates in Carlson’s Entrepreneurship in Action course. The group created Gopheropoly, the first University of Minnesota–themed Monopoly game.

“That gave me a great foundation for understanding how multifaceted starting a business is,” she says. It was also her first experience of work entwined with play—an idea that would come back years later at the children’s museum.

Miles’ Entrepreneurship in Action team partnered with the University to get permissions for using Goldy Gopher and other trademarked branding, and they found a manufacturer to make the parts, including little metal game pieces like an actual Monopoly board game. “We assembled all the games ourselves, and then we sold them direct-to-consumer,” Miles says. “We made about $50,000 for our business and then shut it down at the end of the school year.”

A Tumultuous Early Career in Finance

After graduating from Carlson in 2007, Miles moved to Chicago where her then-fiancé (now-husband) had been accepted into graduate school. Although she’d dreamed of pursuing entrepreneurship, she took a job in the finance department of a privately owned bank. Her role focused on interest rate risk management.

Not long after Miles started that job, the U.S. housing market collapsed. “It’s a story that would make a good movie someday,” she says, explaining that the bank was shut down by the government and taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Amid widespread layoffs, Miles was one of the few employees retained to continue working to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the bank, she says. “That really sent me on a career path that I wasn’t necessarily planning for, but I knew that I had to be flexible.”

Miles soon transitioned into working remotely for a hedge fund based in New York. In 2012, she and her husband, Vincent, moved back to Minnesota, where Vincent would open his own psychology practice in St. Cloud and the couple would start their family.

While settling down in Minnesota, Miles says she felt eager to contribute to the community. “I wanted to do something more local. So, I joined the board of a local theater in St. Cloud and became the board chair there for about seven years. That was my only avenue to connect with my community because I worked from home for investment companies that weren’t located here.”

Pivoting to the Museum

Like Miles, her husband also started to get involved in the community. In 2018, the Great River Children’s Museum’s Board of Directors asked Vincent Miles to join because of his background in clinical psychology.

When the board was ready to hire a CEO in 2020, Vincent mentioned it to his wife. “I remember as she started to process the idea, I could see in her eyes that this might be a good fit,” he says.

Vincent abstained from the hiring process to avoid conflict of interest, but, he says, “the rest of the board members knew Cassie was the right person and the perfect fit for this—and when she got hired, she really hit the ground running.”

For her, the career shift was not only a way to connect with the community but also a jump back into the world of entrepreneurship that she’d explored at Carlson. And, it brought playfulness back into her professional life.

“This was truly a start-up,” she says. “The board brings the strong expertise behind childhood development and how influential play is in children’s lives, and I stepped into my role to build the business side of that.”

Miles created organizational systems and helped the museum get its first major financial donors. She also coordinated renovations of the museum’s building and worked to promote the museum throughout central Minnesota. All these efforts led to the museum’s grand opening in June 2025.

“It’s amazing to see her hitting her stride,” Vincent says. “Cassie is super intelligent, and she can make sense out of things that are chaos at times. She really likes to figure out, ‘How can I make something better?’”

She says this ability to navigate uncharted territory can be traced back to her days at Minnesota Carlson. “Carlson helped me understand how important it is to be resourceful and not just immediately knowledgeable,” Miles says. “Of course, you want to be knowledgeable, but to be able to adapt and figure things out is a superior skill.”

Inspired to Play

Through all this, Miles says she’s drawn inspiration from her son, who she describes as constantly curious. He was about two years old when she started the job and about six-and-a-half when the museum finally opened.

“My son got to witness the journey, which for me is really huge,” Miles says. “I wanted to build something for him and because I want all kids to have what he has, which is a space to learn and play and be young at heart for as long as possible.”

The museum has eight main exhibits. Climber to the Clouds is a 30-foot-tall structure that children can climb while learning about the weather. Great Big River, which includes a 35-foot-long water table, and Headwaters both teach children about Mississippi River environments. Everyday Engineering and Tinker Workshop each feature hands-on activities, and Community Connections inspires children to learn through role-playing. The Oxbow Outdoor Exhibit is a sensory garden, and Great Explorations is a space specifically designed for children younger than three.

A Wider Impact

Bauman, of the Greater St. Cloud Development Corporation, says she believes the Great River Children’s Museum will boost central Minnesota far beyond being a resource for children and families.

“From a community and economic development perspective, this project is a game-changer for the entire region,” she says. “It will increase tourism, support surrounding businesses, encourage new investment, and strengthen downtown as a place where families want to be. More broadly, it helps position the greater St. Cloud region as a vibrant, family-friendly hub, which is key to attracting and retaining both talent and business.”

Miles intends to support these broader community goals as she leads the museum for years to come. “We will grow and evolve our programming, both as we understand our greater capacity, and as our community evolves and we understand more of what they need from us,” she says.

As Miles considers the regional influence of the museum, she reflects on her own childhood, growing up in the small town of Annandale, near St. Cloud.

“I want kids in central Minnesota to have the same access to really cool, inspiring opportunities that others do,” she says. “You’re not limited by a small town. Big dreams can happen in a small town.”

Miles is living proof of that.

Photos by Dan Gunderson