By: Ty Chandler
Meet Catherine Horne, President and CEO Discovery Place and Junior League of Charlotte, Inc. (JLC) Sustainer.
More than 700,000 visitors walk in wonder through Discovery Place and its 3 satellite locations every year. Catherine Horne’s job is to make sure the experience is one they won’t forget.
“I don’t go anywhere in Charlotte where I don’t meet someone and they have a Discovery Place story to tell me,” she beams. “That makes me feel very honored to be entrusted with an institution that has meant so much to a city.”
Horne moved to Charlotte four years ago when she took over as President and CEO of Discovery Place. “I woke up one day and thought, I need a new challenge.”
That challenge meant leaving her post as Executive Director of EdVenture Children’s Museum in Columbia, a position she held since its founding in 1996. It also meant she would have to find a new Junior League home.
“My League career has been really important to me, not only from a personal growth perspective, but also really developing a love and commitment to community service,” Horne declares.
Horne spent more than three decades as a member of the Junior League of Columbia. There she served as president and took on leadership roles for The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. (AJLI). Horne remained involved as a Sustainer.
“My longest friends, outside of college girlfriends, they are all League members,” Horne explains. “We all got to know each other through our League service.”
Now Horne is in a whole new League. “This has been a very delightful, interesting, and exciting move,” says Horne. “The Charlotte Sustainer force is quite a force. Having a place where women can come together and support each other, I think is really important today.”
Horne credits her League experiences in helping develop her leadership skills. And the transition to the JLC felt like a natural fit for Horne because it was an opportunity to continue the Junior League’s legacy through her own leadership at Discovery Place. “I was coming into an institution that was really started by the Junior League,” Horne explained. The JLC founded the Charlotte Nature Museum in 1951, one of the four museums under the Discovery Place umbrella.
“I gained confidence about making big decisions and about going into uncharted territory,” she says. Adding, “The ability to lead, the ability to move people to an idea and a direction for a future, a lot that came from the work that I also did in the Junior League.”
However, Horne admits the demands of being a CEO take up a lot of her time. “Every day is different from the day before and won’t be the same the next day. I try to divide my work into quarters – one quarter is spent on the board and community activities,” she recalls. She says she also spends a quarter of her time with her staff managing projects, and another quarter addressing fundraising efforts. “The last quarter is what I try to reserve for myself to think about where we should be going,” she says, “So that quarter usually gets squeezed a lot.”
Horne also realizes finding that balance may require tough choices. “You can have family, career, or volunteer, and you have to choose two,” she explains. “Your choice doesn’t have to be the same thing year after year. It doesn’t have to be the same thing week after week, but you have to be true to yourself.”
As a chemistry major at Salem College, Horne didn’t feel like she was living her truth. “I didn’t really love it,” she remembers. An art history course changed the course of Horne’s life, even though her parents doubted her career prospects with a degree in Art History.
“I wouldn’t say that I was a risk-taker to begin with,” she says. “I was raised by parents who went to college in the depression, and we just didn’t take risks.”
However, taking a chance has paid off for Horne and through some twist of fate, she has found her way back to science. “It is about stimulating and inspiring learning.” Adding, “Not only is hands-on, open-ended learning important to create the type of problem solvers we need, it is also the place where children discover their careers or future careers, because we make it real.”
Horne’s own path of discovery has taken her to unexpected places, she says in large part due to her willingness to stretch herself.
“You have to practice forgiveness. You are going to make some mistakes. Sometimes you have to undo those mistakes and sometimes you just learn from them and move on. But give yourself permission to try things, to experiment. I want to keep learning, whether I’m in the workplace or retired, I don’t want to stop learning.”
Read this story and all the stories in the fall issue of the CRIER here.
