Opening the Right Doors: Honoring Jim and Corinne Satrom’s Leadership Gift

Every community has moments when a single act of generosity opens a new door…not just to a building, but to possibility itself. Jim and Corinne Satrom have opened one of those doors for Grand Forks.

This winter, the Satroms made a remarkable $250,000 leadership gift to the Grand Forks Children’s Museum. This gift is one of the eight essential donations needed to unlock a $2 million match from an anonymous donor. Their support doesn’t just move the project forward; it helps swing open the doors to a future where every child in our region can explore, imagine, and discover.

Jim Satrom is the founder of PS Industries®, a company built on a simple but powerful idea: doors matter. Doors are thresholds that protect what matters most. They regulate what enters and exits our lives, from people to weather, from vehicles to floodwaters. Doors safeguard communities and create safe passageways. That same commitment to protecting what matters most is what the Satroms have extended to this museum.

Jim and Corinne’s donation is a door of its own, one that helps to open a place where curiosity is welcomed, where learning feels like adventure, and where families can step into moments of connection that become lifelong memories. For Corinne, who spent years as an educator nurturing young minds in elementary classrooms, this gift is a way to keep opening doors for children long after the school bell rings. It is a door that opens the potential within every child by giving them a place designed for wonder, creativity, and growth.

The Grand Forks Children’s Museum will be filled with doors of all kinds: doors to hands‑on learning, doors to STEAM exploration, doors to imaginative play, doors to understanding the world and their place in it. Each exhibit becomes a doorway into a new idea. Each program becomes a passage into confidence and capability. Each visit becomes an opening into a child’s expanding sense of self. Leadership gifts like the Satroms are what make those doors possible.

With this generous donation, the museum moves closer to unlocking the full $2 million match and with it, the ability to build a museum where children can walk through doors that lead to brighter futures.

The Satroms’ generosity strengthens that momentum, inspiring others to step forward and add their own key to the effort. Their belief in this project will echo through every doorway a child walks through inside the museum. Their gift ensures that the museum will stand as a protected, welcoming threshold for generations, a place where children can safely step into who they are becoming.

Now Jim and Corinne Satrom are helping build doors that open futures.

Katie Mayer, Executive Director, Grand Forks Children's Museum