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Centering DEAI in Staff Recruitment and Hiring

This article is part of the “Inside the Curve: Business as (Not Quite) Usual” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Angela Henderson, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

Like many cultural institutions and recreational venues across the country, the pandemic forced The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis to close its doors to the public in March 2020. What started out as a two-week closure became three and a half months. Institutional priority shifted to the safety and well-being of our staff, volunteers, interns, and visitors. Although the museum was closed to visitors, our need to act as a community anchor became more important than ever before. Museum staff worked hard to provide virtual experiences for online visitors that were both engaging and worthwhile. With the support of our board of trustees, we also were able to continue paying all staff during the entire closure without any furloughs. Because of these efforts, the museum continued to operate with a full staff throughout the closure.

In July 2020, the museum reopened to the public at 25 percent capacity with mask mandates and additional cleaning and safety protocols in place. Visitors were encouraged to purchase tickets online prior to their visit. Because on-site staff members were included in the museum’s capacity figure, those staff members who could work remotely were strongly encouraged to do so. Staff members working on-site were required to conduct daily self-health screenings and temperature checks upon entry. We also tracked daily staff, volunteer, and interns’ comings and goings in order to be prepared to perform any contract tracing, if necessary.

In fall 2020, as a result of decreased visitors and revenue, the museum made the tough decision to reduce the number of staff members by 5 percent. During this same time, the museum took a long hard look at staffing, visitation, and revenue projections for 2021. Fortunately, spring 2021 saw an increase in museum visitation, necessitating the recruiting and hiring of key positions across the organization. When we began the process of hiring again, we had rededicated ourselves to ensuring that our hiring practices were purposeful, inclusive, and equitable, to ensure we sourced and selected diverse candidates.

The Summer that Changed Everything

In the midst of challenges presented by the pandemic, the civil unrest during spring and summer 2020 also created opportunities for the museum to reexamine how we source, recruit, select, nurture, and retain staff members, especially people of color.

The injustices suffered by George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other African-Americans sparked difficult listening sessions and conversations both in our museum and throughout the country. To help with this very important work, in fall 2020, the museum engaged the expertise of Decide Diversity, a training and consultant firm that fills the gaps that traditional diversity and inclusion programs unintentionally create. These gaps are often seen in an organization’s lack of access and equity in practices; representation in exhibits, marketing materials, partnerships; inclusion of diverse people in leadership positions, and inclusive decision making.

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis originally opened in 1925. Keeping in mind that it took nearly 100 years for our institutional culture to become what it is today, taking things to the next level and changing the perceptions of the community, our staff and volunteers, and our visitors will not happen overnight. The work we have begun with Decide Diversity is the first step to recreating our work environment and culture, and ensuring it is diverse and inclusive for all staff and volunteers.

Concurrent with the museum’s work with Decide Diversity, museum leaders decided to rethink and restructure the talent acquisition manager’s role with a strong emphasis on diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI). As DEAI talent acquisitions manager, I am responsible for the sourcing and recruitment of job applicants, as well as working closely with each department and its designated hiring managers—who, along with other duties, are responsible for staffing their particular departments—to further establish and maintain a work environment that is diverse, equitable, accessible, and inclusive for all. I previously worked in the museum’s community initiatives department, and before then held positions with Dayton Public Schools and the Indianapolis Public Schools Innovation School Network, where I saw firsthand how the lack of equity in education affects our youngest citizens. To my professional experience, I add my own personal history, as a mom of Black children and the daughter of two working class parents. This role supports my passion for working to combat and unravel systems that have been stacked heavily against communities of color.

Recruitment/Sourcing

Creating a diverse hiring pool of candidates that represent various cultures and backgrounds while remaining true to the work-related tasks required of various positions is directly connected to where and how candidates are informed about available jobs.

Although the museum has historically tracked recruiting and sourcing information, we are being much more purposeful in our efforts to determine where candidates are coming from. We have increased our scrutiny of established sourcing activities, including career sites and job fairs, to see how many applicants they pull in and how many are hired. We have also begun to identify missed opportunities to reach a more diverse candidate pool through community and neighborhood engagement. We work with various community partners, including the museum’s own Community Initiatives department, Fathers and Families, Inc., Dress for Success, and several college and university partners. We now post open positions to new or under-utilized talent recruitment networks, such as Ascend Indiana, which allows employers to create organizational profiles where they can post open positions. Ascend Indiana also suggests candidates from their pool of job seekers, allowing our hiring managers to send personal invitations to these qualified candidates.

As we incorporate these additions and tweak other recruitment and sourcing activities, we are challenging ourselves as a division and an organization to track data that we can use to move the museum in a direction that not only shows that we are the “biggest and best children’s museum in the world” for our guests, but also for our staff, volunteers, and interns.

Screening Applicants for Diversity and Staff for Bias

A large institution like The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis requires a large, talented staff. Our organization is made up of nearly twenty-four departments with more than 330 employees. More than eighty of these employees serve as “hiring managers” for their departments.

As DEAI talent acquisitions manager, I work closely with the hiring managers throughout the sourcing, recruitment, and hiring process. Together, we discuss the scope of the posted position as well as ways to ensure equity and diversity within the candidate pool, identify other sources for recruitment, and establish hiring timelines. We openly talk about how they plan to incorporate DEAI strategies in the hiring process and how they can address—or avoid—their own biases that may have an impact on who they hire.

The first step to sourcing a more diverse candidate pool is to have a clear understanding that biases exist in all of us. Working to address and correct these biases will help to minimize them in the recruitment, hiring, nurturing, and retaining of staff members. People are naturally inclined to want to socialize and work with people they feel they have something in common with or that they can relate to. For some departments, this proclivity extends to selecting candidates in the likeness of themselves. As we do the work to identify homogeneous groups, we note that this could signal that there are biases that need to be addressed and that tools and resources are needed to help correct them.

Creating a culture that emphasizes and places a high value on DEAI and its impact on our community requires purposeful action. For the recruitment and placement piece of our business, DEAI involves making sure we are equitably and consistently giving all under-represented groups an opportunity to be considered and hired for jobs at the museum. We want our hiring managers to know that being purposeful in our DEAI efforts is essential to achieving our ultimate goal of hiring the right people for the right jobs. Hiring a candidate who doesn’t meet the job requirements simply because of their race or gender does an enormous disservice to the individual and the organization.

Responses to Unprecedented Challenges Create Lasting Change

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is changing the culture of the organization and developing an even more inclusive workplace and workforce. This work is not limited to HR; it is the work of everyone in the museum. We are expanding decision-making to include staff and volunteers at all levels of the organization and have established a DEAI task force. In pushing for change, the DEAI task force is looking at five key areas of museum business:

• Neighborhood Inclusion
• Internal Inclusion
• Equity & Accessibility
• Establishing a DEAI Learning Culture
• Hiring and Retaining Diverse Staff, Volunteer & Interns

2020 brought about changes and hardships we could never have imagined, but it also brought about a tremendous opportunity for The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis to examine who we are and who we want to be. It has forced us to prioritize what matters most to us as an organization and in doing so has reminded us that we are about and for all children and families; we must do our part to look like and be a safe space for everyone.

Angela Henderson has served as the DEAI Talent Acquisition Manager at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis since April 2021. Previously, she served in a number of community educational support roles, and was a Community Activist Fellow for the Wayfinder Foundation.

New Hand to Hand: The Power of We

The latest issue of Hand to Hand, “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” is now available! Read each article on the ACM blog, and find the full issue PDF in the Hand to Hand Community on ACM Groupsite.

This issue shares stories from local and regional museum groups, ranging from long-running networks to those formed in the past year, as well as local cross-sector groups serving children and families.

In addition to the universal issues facing our field, experiences can vary widely from location to location. The pandemic intensified our need for connection and collaboration—and local and regional networks came together to address local issues, pool resources, and share in community.

Read the issue to learn more about these inspiring networks!

The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish

Northwest Association of Youth Museums: Regional Network Powerhouse
Alissa Rupp, FAIA, FRAME | Integrative Design Strategies
The Northwest Association of Youth Museums has thrived since its start in 1989 by embracing collaboration over competition.

Guerilla Networking: Connecticut Children’s Museums Organize to Pursue State Funding
Jen Alexander, Kidcity Children’s Museum
Connecticut’s nine children’s museums came together to advocate for statewide funding in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supporting Leaders | Building Healthy Organizations: An Interview with Darren Macfee, Museum Roundtable Facilitator
Interviewed by Mary Maher
For more than twenty years, the Museum Director Roundtables have been a model of supporting leaders as they navigate the ups and downs of the nonprofit world of children’s museums.

Hive Minds and Transient Networks
Sam Dean, Scott Family Amazeum
Located in Northwest Arkansas, the Scott Family Amazeum recognizes the value of collaboration across sectors, participating in networks with community leaders, business leaders, creatives, and more.

Collaborate to Advocate: The Power of Collective Voice
Michael McHorney, Children’s Museum of Eau Claire; Deb Gilpin, Madison Children’s Museum; Anne Snow, Children’s Museum of LaCrosse; Andrea Welsch, Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac
The state of Wisconsin has the most children’s museums per capita in the United States. As a state-wide museum network, Wisconsin Children’s Museums demonstrates the power of strategic solidarity to support each other and advocate for children and families.

Community Education Network Supports Children and Institutions during the Pandemic
Rachel Carpenter, Children’s Discovery Museum; Hannah Johnson & Candace Summers, McLean County Museum of History; Shannon Reedy, Miller Park Zoo; and Dr. Diane Wolf, Bloomington Public Schools District 87
Many organizations serving children in Bloomington/Normal have come together to leverage resources and better serve learners and educators in Central Illinois.

Kindred Spirits: Q&A among Seven Regional Museum Networks
Africa Play Network, NorCal Small Museum Cohort, Louisiana Children’s Museums, North Carolina Science Network, Ohio Children’s Museums, Small Museums Collaborative, Virginia Children’s Museums
Learn more about seven regional museum networks around the world, and what each is able to accomplish by working together and embracing collaboration.

Hand to Hand is the quarterly publication of the Associations of Children’s Museums (ACM). ACM champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Northwest Association of Youth Museums: Regional Network Powerhouse

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Alissa Rupp, FAIA, FRAME | Integrative Design Strategies

The strength of the association is not that it encourages museums to converge or imitate each other. If anything, it has strengthened their individuality, as each museum team is encouraged to find and cultivate its own voice, and anchor itself in its surrounding community.

In 1989, a group of children’s museums in the Pacific Northwest came together to set a collegial standard that has persisted: they decided to collaborate, rather than compete, and to stake a regional claim on the emerging field of children’s museum professionals.

In Washington State, along the I-5 corridor, children’s museums in Everett, Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia joined the Oregon museums in Portland and Salem to anchor the newly formed Northwest Association of Youth Museums (NWAYM), a regional subset of the Association of Youth Museums (now ACM). At the time, due to considerable geographic distance, and with online communication its infant stages, there was a sense that the larger organization did not have as strong a connection to the Pacific Northwest museums as they did to members in other regions. Travel to national conferences, expensive and time-consuming, was limited to a handful of senior staff. There were also opportunities and challenges common to the museums of the Pacific Northwest, and it became clear that there was an advantage to sharing knowledge and resources locally.

NWAYM directors and senior staff held joint gatherings, rotating among member museums and sharing what they learned in their still-fledgling field. A larger number of museum staff gathered more easily and inexpensively at NWAYM regional meetings, catching up and comparing notes. They welcomed emerging museums and visited en masse when museums opened in Skagit County, Washington, or Medford, Oregon. Over time, more children’s museums sprouted in an ever-widening region. When children’s museums opened in Alaska and Idaho, they were invited to join.

Thirty-three years later, the group has grown and expanded its reach. It welcomes allied professionals as well—including designers, architects, and exhibit fabricators—and invites inspirational business and civic leaders to engage with the group. Today there are twenty children’s museums and science centers, of all shapes and sizes, established anywhere between one to seventy-five years ago, who work together in NWAYM to make each other—and the field—better.

Growing a Regional Association

In the last decade, NWAYM has become a more formal entity, providing several annual opportunities for cooperation among the region’s children’s museum and science center professionals. It holds an annual spring conference, generally trading off between Washington and Oregon locations. This allows large groups of staff and board members—sometimes 150-200 attendees—to gather for keynote presentations, themed discussions, and updates from each museum on programs, accomplishments, and initiatives. Each year, in the fall, ten to fifteen museum directors gather for transparent, honest, “cone of silence” conversations, acting as both colleagues and mentors to each other as their organizations face changes in growth, staffing, impact, advocacy, and community engagement.

The advantages of this regional cooperative are numerous. But perhaps the most intriguing, and least measurable, advantage is a region-wide contingent of children’s museum members who visit and support museums outside of their home towns. Each member museum has a unique, place-based personality, from Hands On Children’s Museum in Olympia, with 28,000 square feet and extensive outdoor exhibits, to the Victorian house and contemporary climbing structure at Gilbert House in Salem, to the museums in Skagit County and Boise whose staff have beautifully repurposed unused commercial space. The options for families and travelers are wide-ranging, and this cross-pollination is encouraged and appreciated by museum leaders. Members have increased attendance and awareness, and helped to open the region’s children’s museums to visitors from across the four states with a long-standing regional reciprocal visitation program. Members also increasingly utilize Museums for All, an access initiative for visitors presenting SNAP EBT cards, of the Institute of Museum and Library Services facilitated by the Association of Children’s Museums.

The museums that are part of NWAYM are quite different from each other. They each reflect their community: founders, board members, and staff have their own sense of what will resonate with the children and families they serve. Each museum has its own aesthetic sensibility, and each has developed a unique range of both on-site and outreach programs. The strength of the association is not that it encourages museums to converge or imitate each other. If anything, it has strengthened their individuality, as each museum team is encouraged to find and cultivate its own voice, and anchor itself in its surrounding community. Member museum staff are innovative and creative—sometimes borrowing ideas or techniques from each other, but usually putting their own twist on what initially inspired them. Museum staff and leadership are supportive and encouraging of their peers, and are deeply invested in each other’s success. Finally, as KidsQuest CEO Putter Bert said in a discussion for this article, “We all just really like each other!”

While this Pacific Northwest organization cultivates local/regional museums, NWAYM members have a national impact. Several children’s museum CEOs and executive directors have built and led multiple museums, served on the ACM board of directors, and brought decades of experience to not only regional but also national and global conversations. As many readers of this article will attest, these individuals are notoriously generous with their time and knowledge; they choose to share their hard-won expertise with each other and with their newer peers, growing the knowledge base and advancing the work of the field in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

NWAYM Loses One of Its Own: Portland Children’s Museum

NWAYM members supported staff and community members of the Portland Children’s Museum (PCM) when its board announced a sudden and permanent closure earlier this year. Front desk staff at children’s museums from Eugene, Oregon, to Burlington, Washington, got many questions from visitors. What happened, and would their own local children’s museum be in danger of closing, too? The group discussed ways in which it could welcome members from the now defunct museum, or at least communicate with PCM members to let them know that their reciprocal admission coupons would still be honored. Board members noticed as well, and worked with staff to understand and steer their museums clear of the dangers Portland had faced. Among NWAYM directors, a sense of grief and mourning ensued, as the doors closed on an important and influential museum that brought innovation and thought leadership to the field for seventy-five years.

2020 Hit Hard

Across the country and around the world, the last eighteen months have presented a whole new set of challenges for everyone, including NWAYM members. The health concerns of the pandemic, the turmoil of the election and its aftermath, the heightened understanding of anti-racism and social justice practices, and the various economic crises resulting from shutdowns created unprecedented conditions for children’s museums. Throughout the Pacific Northwest region, museums closed to visitors, re-opened, and in some cases re-closed and re-opened again. Sadly, the Portland Children’s Museum, established more than seventy-five years ago, closed permanently. Significant projects were put on hold, while some capital campaigns emerged at full strength. Fundraisers were canceled, restructured, or moved online.

Through all this, NWAYM museums’ staff have continued to serve their communities in myriad ways— through online programming, kits, videos, and remote lessons, as well as diaper banks, food drives, internet hot spots, outdoor play spaces, and activities for kids at vaccination sites. They also worked diligently to create safe, clean, un-crowded spaces in their museums once visitors were welcomed back.

In April of 2020, NWAYM directors canceled their annual fall in-person gathering and began meeting on bi-weekly video conferences. At first, these calls were a place to commiserate and compare notes, but they soon became a crucial lifeline for rebuilding, recovery, and reality checks. NWAYM directors also attended weekly ACM Leadership Calls, and applied the information they gathered to their states, counties, and cities. When funding options varied from state to state and county to county, bookkeepers and CFOs compared notes. And while COVID regulations varied widely with the region, staff members shared information about PPE, PPP, COVID testing, and operating protocols. They offered each other moral support and practical coaching, with directors hearing each other’s concerns and asking, again and again, “How can we help?” The spirit of collaboration that had been nurtured over thirty-two years became a reliable and steadfast source of true cooperation. In a very real way, this association, which was already a helpful resource, saw its own transition from nice to necessary.

A Rising Tide

Several NWAYM museum directors have noted that the individual success of each museum improves the outcomes for all the museums: if they focused on competing with each other—for audience share, funding, board members, media attention or political visibility—they may miss opportunities to grow together and become stronger as a group. To their minds, it is in everyone’s best interest for children’s museums throughout the region to thrive, and to be seen as essential, valuable, and important parts of families’ daily lives.

The NWAYM-associated museums have shared members and visitors, as well as staff. Several museums are close enough for families to easily visit and maintain multiple memberships, and as staff moves around the region, they have found positions at sibling organizations. In general, NWAYM museums take a pragmatic approach: it is challenging for families with young children to drive more than forty-five minutes to visit a museum, and there is sufficient audience in each travel catchment area to support each city or region’s children’s museum. While direct participation levels have varied over time, it has become more and more clear that the advantages of collaboration outweigh the temptation to compete. The region’s kids, families, educators, and communities are all better for it.

Alissa Rupp, FAIA, LEED, is Principal, FRAME / Integrative Design Strategies. She is currently serving as acting director of the Seattle Children’s Museum as they move to their next stage.

NWAYM: By the Numbers
Established:	1989
Current members:	21
Cost of membership:	$50, $75 or $100 per museum, depending on annual budget
Admission discount:	25% off admission for up to 4 people, with a peer museum membership
Size of the region:	Four states: OR, WA, ID, AK Bellingham, WA to Medford, OR: 530 miles Seattle, WA to Boise, ID: 490 miles
NWAYM-participating museums: Adventure! Children’s Museum (Eugene, OR) Children’s Museum of Eastern Oregon (Pendleton, OR) Children’s Museum of Idaho (Meridian (Boise), ID) Children’s Museum of the Magic Valley (Twin Falls, ID) (emerging) Children’s Museum of Tacoma (Tacoma, WA) Children’s Museum of Skagit County (Burlington, WA) Children’s Museum of Southern Oregon (formerly Kid Time, Medford, OR) Children’s Museum of Walla Walla (Walla Walla, WA) Eugene Science Center (Eugene, OR) Fairbanks Children’s Museum (Fairbanks, AK) Gilbert House Children’s Museum (Salem, OR) Hands On Children’s Museum (Olympia, WA) Imagine Children’s Museum (Everett, WA) Kids’ Discovery Museum (KiDiMu) (Bainbridge Island, WA) KidsQuest Children’s Museum (Bellevue, WA) Mobius Discovery Center (Spokane, WA) Seattle Children’s Museum (Seattle, WA) Umpqua Discovery Center (Reedsport, OR) Whatcom Museum Family Interaction Gallery (FIG) (Bellingham, WA) Wonder Works Children’s Museum of the Gorge (The Dalles, OR) Yakima Valley Museum (Yakima, WA)

Guerilla Networking: Connecticut Children’s Museums Organize to Pursue State Funding

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Jen Alexander, Kidcity Children’s Museum

Amid all the unknowns since March 2020, I held fast to one constant: a standing appointment on Wednesdays at 3:30 p.m. EST. The almost weekly ACM Leadership Call, with Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) staff and other children’s museum directors, became my North star, my therapy group, and—in the darkest days of the shut-down—my primary social outlet!

How do you run a children’s museum without visitors? How do you pay the bills without income? Where should we turn for help? Executive directors logged on from around from around the globe and took turns presenting whatever new tactics we were trying or commiserating about the layoffs we were implementing (sometimes our own). But mostly, my sibling museum directors and I would hang on every word during the Leadership Call’s weekly advocacy updates, shared by Jeannette Thomas, formerly ACM’s senior director of development and advocacy. She translated the mysterious world of Washington politics with the comforting assurances and sense of mischief of the best babysitter ever. She kept us in the loop, but more than that, she trained us how to help ourselves. “Reach out to your legislators,” she would say, over and over. “Tell them how you are doing, and then tell me how it went.”

As the first COVID spring crept into COVID summer, I listened every week, but it wasn’t until September 2020 that I finally picked up the phone. Thanks to Twitter, circa 2010, I remembered our U.S. Senator, Chris Murphy, had once played at our museum with his kids—and tweeted about it. I called his office and spoke to an aide. I told her how the crisis looked at our children’s museum and asked if the senator would keep us in mind when voting on funding that could help.

A Breakthrough Phone Call

I’ll be honest: it was a brutal call. I’m not sure how “professional” I sounded when I described what it was like to walk through the empty museum—I may have cried a bit. There wasn’t much she could offer, but she was nice, and that helped. As the pandemic went on, I kept calling. I called the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, and various state politicians. The outcome was sometimes, “I’ll look for any programs you might apply for,” or usually, “I’m so sorry.”

I told them all about how children’s museums are a hybrid of education, tourism, and the arts, and that it was going to take us a long time to recover. When the federal Shuttered Venue Operator Grants (SVOG) came out—tantalizing us with a possible award of 45 percent of our 2019 income, and then blocking us because we didn’t have a “fixed seating performance venue”—I added that to my spiel about how children’s museums were falling through the cracks and needed special help.

Then, in March 2021, I finally called my local state senator. “Wow, that sounds terrible,” he said. “We’ve got all this stimulus money coming in…let’s put a line in for your museum. How much do you need?”

You would think I’d be ready for that question! Um…$20,000? $40,000? $100,000?

He told me the state was developing a strategy on how to distribute much larger amounts. He said, “I could put in a line just for Kidcity, or maybe for all the children’s museums in the state together? How many are there? How many people do you all see, combined, in a year?”

Again, I was stumped. I explained that the Connecticut children’s museums were all very independent; we didn’t really know each other very well. I couldn’t even tell him how many there were. Even though I have children’s museum BFF’s around the country, staff from the local museums had only rarely been in touch with each other. That’s how it had been for the twenty-two years since Kidcity opened.

Then I thought of those Wednesday calls. I had seen a few Connecticut names on those screens. “Let me try,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “Get back to me by Friday with your ask.”

Over the next forty-eight hours, I was able to reach all the other children’s museum directors in the state. They told me how they were holding their organizations together, how they had made the decision to stay open or closed to visitors, and what it would mean if they had an infusion of funding. A couple of these conversations took place while directors were simultaneously running their museum’s front desk. One museum was on the verge of closing for good and jumped at the hope of using funds to build an outdoor experience to keep visitors coming safely. Others wrestled with the reality that having an in-museum preschool meant they couldn’t open their exhibits to the public at all, because of COVID restrictions. (The state’s office of early childhood wouldn’t even let the parents accompany their preschoolers into buildings, much less the visiting public into exhibits.) I heard about the deficits created by reduced attendance and higher operating costs, and capital projects delayed while raising everyday operating funds. And they listened to my particular woes: our museum needed funding to retain our exhibit artists, as we tried to make the best use of this shutdown time.

By the time I had finished all those calls and emails, I had the answer to my state senator’s question: there are nine children’s museums in Connecticut, and in 2019, we had 625,000 in-house visits at our museums. We were all eager to make this state funding request. We knew that without a direct, line-item ask, we would face the same old scrum of competing within the tourism/hospitality sector on one end, or against other education and arts organizations on the other. To date, we hadn’t fared well in those battles; a direct ask represented a breakthrough. But was it a pipe dream?

But What Should We Ask For?

The first challenge was to figure out a fair and defensible request. I collected bits of data, thinking maybe the answer was there. How much PPP did each of us get? Maybe we should ask for two or three times that amount? Or maybe we should follow the federal SVOG formula, which determined grant amounts based on earned income?

The problem was, it’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison between any two children’s museums, much less an accurate picture of the whole group. In terms of annual attendance, the Connecticut museums range from 5,000 to 277,000 visits (Kidcity clocks in at 112,000). Four of the nine museums have preschools, two take care of animals, and one is aligned with a university. Since COVID started—and as of this writing—five of the museums had opened to limited numbers of visitors and four were still closed to the public, without an opening day in sight. My museum, Kidcity, is perhaps the oddest of the oddballs. We usually fund our operations and our exhibits from earned income, and haven’t tried to raise money since our early years…until now.

Eventually, it was clear that there was at least one thing we all had in common: a building which was closed or at reduced capacity, limiting our ability to earn income to sustain our museums.

Ultimately, we based our request on a formula of $4 per in-house visit from 2019. For each of the nine museums, that would be a truly significant grant, and in our case, similar to the size of an unattainable SVOG award. Together, the Connecticut children’s museums’ request added up to a $2.5 million—a small number compared to the federal aid the state was receiving, yet more than we were likely to receive in competitive grants from state agencies.

The Seed is Planted, But You Have to Water It

The next hurdle was advocacy. My state senator, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, pushed to include our request in the spending bill for the American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds, but we didn’t stop there. In a stroke of luck, one of our Connecticut children’s museum directors is also an elected state representative for her town. She gave us all a crash course in how the legislative process works in our state. Directors from each of the nine museums contacted their own elected state officials—and anyone else they thought could help. A few have become real champions of our ask.

This episode ends with a cliffhanger. Months later, we still don’t know if our effort will succeed. Even if we make it through appropriations, there are negotiations yet to come with the governor’s spending priorities. Our request could wind up on the cutting room floor, not from callousness on the part of Connecticut leaders, but just because obtaining money from the state is a complicated, multi-tiered process. (Note to Self: In the next pandemic, hire a lobbyist!)

Regardless of the outcome, those two whirlwind days in March 2021 have forged an alliance among our state’s children’s museums that did not exist before. Since then, we’ve been texting each other about grant opportunities, exhibit problems, and cheering each other on as we stretched to tell our story and make our ask. We may not get the stimulus funds we asked for, but I’m convinced that we have made our case and that Connecticut’s children’s museums will be seen in a new light because of our outreach.

There are lots of things from these months of pandemic that I’ll be happy to leave behind, and it’s even possible that someday, I won’t need the weekly ACM Leadership Call just to stay afloat. But Connecticut is known as the “Land of Steady Habits,” and now that we’ve started, I’m hoping we’ll keep the relationships among all levels of staff in our museums, even after these strange, strange times are in the past.

Jen Alexander is the founder and has served as the executive & creative director of Kidcity Children’s Museums for that past twenty-six years.

Editor’s Note:

In mid-June, the Connecticut museums learned that their $2.5 million request was approved and doubled by the legislature, and they will receive the full grant for two consecutive years.

Supporting Leaders | Building Healthy Organizations

An Interview with Darren Macfee, Museum Roundtable Facilitator

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

Darren Macfee’s career began in fundraising as the director of development at a regional rehabilitation hospital. In 2006, he entered the museum field as the executive director of the Lincoln Children’s Museum (Nebraska). In 2012 he struck out on his own as an independent consultant, focusing on strategy, governance, and leadership. He assumed leadership of the Museum Director Roundtables from John and Anita Durel in 2018 when they retired.

The Museum Director Roundtables were started in 1999 by the Durels. Their format was based on that of groups of fitness club owners who, under the leadership of John Durel’s colleague and mentor Will Phillips, would get together and share best practices.

Each Roundtable is comprised of eight to ten executive directors or CEOs of geographically diverse museums of all types—children’s museums, history museums, science centers, and art museums. Pre-, and hopefully soon post-COVID, members convene three times a year in a chosen city where for three days they discuss topics central to effectively running a museum: leadership, management, governance, strategy and fundraising. Between meetings, groups meet virtually for updates on progress, friendly accountability check-ins, and problem-solving. Additionally, members commonly email their group with help for solving prickly issues.

For more than twenty years, this fee-based professional development group has been a model of supporting leaders as they navigate the ups and downs of the nonprofit world of children’s museums. In this past COVID year, Roundtable methods, resources, and open communications offered another lifeline to member museum directors as they wrestled with unprecedented challenges.

When I initially met John Durel, he told me he was considering recruiting a group of museum directors to form a Roundtable—really, a think tank. I immediately said, “Count me in.” I had benefitted from a similar situation when I was a school board president working with a “board presidency consultant” and other school board presidents across the U.S. I learned so very much from the guidance of that group. Peer support and networking is a real motivator for leaders. Being part of the Roundtable was transformational for me.

—Julia Bland, Louisiana Children’s Museum

Interviewed by Mary Maher, Editor

MAHER: The Durels began Museum Roundtable groups in 1999. You joined as a museum director in 2006, and became the facilitator in 2018. What perspective do you bring to today’s Roundtable groups?

MACFEE: The Durels are a tough act to follow, but I bring a slightly different perspective. John was far more knowledgeable than I in the technical side of museums such as collections management, curation, and programming; Anita was very focused on fundraising. I’m a big proponent of what writer Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, calls “team health.” He cites a difference between a “smart” organization and a “healthy” one. Smart organizations work on strategy, marketing, finance, technology. “Healthy” organizations do all of that and create an employee experience that minimizes politics and confusion and maximizes morale and productivity, leading to less staff turnover. Team health can and should be applied to boards as well.

MAHER: Were there differences in what museum leaders needed from a professional development group twenty years ago and what they need today?

MACFEE: I look at what’s the same as opposed to what’s different. But there are obvious external changes, like the growth of the internet. In the late 2000s at the children’s museum, we kept our wi-fi password a secret. We didn’t allow visitors network access because we wanted them to spend time with their kids with no distractions. That’s much less common these days.

There has been a lot of research in the past ten years on the “softer side” of organizational management. We know so much more about how brains work, how adults can reprogram their own neural networks and learn new things. Leaders can learn to change and modify the way they run their organizations creating a great environment in which staff can do great work.

MAHER: Tell us a little bit more about the softer side of organizational management.

MACFEE: Back in the ’90s, when I was in business school, business management was all about hard metrics, like the cost of materials and cash turnover. Employee engagement and job satisfaction, once viewed as “soft” measurements, are taken much more seriously now because we realize they actually matter a great deal.

For instance, to be successful, employees need to know their work has purpose, be able to measure whether or not they’re doing good work, and have autonomy over some part of the work. Purpose is easy. If you work in a children’s museum and you can’t get a sense of what the organization is trying to accomplish or how you’re contributing to a better world, then you’re probably in the wrong spot. Measurement is a little more difficult. For example, how do you know you’re doing a good job as a floor staff person? Is it keeping the museum exhibits clean? Interacting with guests? Facilitating play? Museum leaders have to define what constitutes a good job, and once an employee is clear on this, they should be given some autonomy to do it.

MAHER: When the Roundtables started, what needs were they fulfilling among members of the groups?

MACFEE: Museum leaders were looking for somebody who could appreciate the nuances of serving as a director of a nonprofit organization. They wanted a sounding board to talk about things like board issues or creating an environment where staff can be successful.

MAHER: What are today’s Roundtable groups like?

MACFEE: We purposely gather a broad cross-section of museums. Groups evolve. New people come in all the time, while some of the longest members have been in for over ten years. Some decide it isn’t for them and move on. The first Roundtable member was Julia Bland, executive director of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, and she remained a member for nineteen years.

MAHER: How do the Roundtable groups decide what to talk about? Is there a curriculum or a content plan?

MACFEE: We generally focus our discussions on the five critical competencies of a chief executive, which are: 1) good governance (everything about working with a board); 2) staff (organizational culture and engagement); 3) fundraising (a big focus for most museums); 4) community leadership (institutional visibility in the community); and recently, 5) DEAI (diversity, equity, access, inclusion). In addition, members suggest topics or things just come up at the meetings that members would like to talk or learn more about. So, between meetings I locate resources or prepare presentations to be on the agenda next time. Discussions are responsive to what the members say they need.

No topic is off limits. For example, one of the things people are talking about now is how to deal with burnout. People have been really stressed and challenged to keep things together, and now they need a respite in order to recover. But now, museums are reopening and trying to get back to normal, which requires fresh stores of energy. So, we’re talking about how to maintain energy and enthusiasm among an already burnt out staff.

MAHER: Do members bring nuts-and-bolts issues or thorny problems to hash out with the group?

MACFEE: Yes, the prepared topics mentioned above probably take up about two-thirds of the time at an in-person retreat. Then we reserve time for troubleshooting. You give people time in the hot seat where they say, “This is my challenge.” Then the group addresses it and gives them ideas for moving forward. The Roundtable meeting framework has been in place for more than twenty years, but once the pandemic hit, we devoted almost all of our time to rapid-response troubleshooting. Now, as we’re slowly re-emerging in 2021, there’s less attention on urgent problems and a return to thinking in bigger terms about ongoing professional development.

MAHER: Museum directors’ primary focus is usually on how to make their museums succeed. How much do museum leaders feel comfortable sharing and how much do they hold back? How do you deal with collaboration vs. competition among group members?

MACFEE: One difference between the Roundtable model and the other affinity groups discussed in this issue of Hand to Hand is how we bring new members into the group. When someone expresses an interest in joining, we look at the possibility of their museum being in competition with other group members. For example, including directors from two different art museums in the same city would not produce the optimal group mix. Competition for audience share or fundraising is not as big a concern as competition for board members, which can be fierce. The short list of people within a particular geographic region who make ideal board members often means that multiple organizations are competing for the same people. But once Roundtable groups are formed, trust takes over and there’s no holding back. We don’t aim to be matchmakers, but if collaborations emerge, that is frosting on the cake.

MAHER: How do people join a Roundtable?

MACFEE: They come through referrals from other members. This isn’t by design, we’re not trying to be exclusive, but broad-based, outbound marketing has not been effective at getting new members. It’s partly the nature of the business: people don’t usually reach out until something is wrong. Referrals come after somebody calls somebody they know for help. Maybe they remember a session presenter from InterActivity or recall a colleague’s story of how someone in the field helped them with a particular problem. So, they give them a call. And if this person has been a Roundtable member, during the course of the conversation, they might say, “Well, this is exactly the kind of thing I would take to my Roundtable.” And the caller’s response? “What’s a Roundtable?” That’s how new members come in. We want fresh thinking and new perspectives, but we haven’t had any luck inviting people who don’t have any connection to someone in the group who is known and trusted.

MAHER: Once someone has expressed interest in joining, what characteristics do you look for in assembling a compatible and productive group?

MACFEE: First, I get to know them through several in-depth phone calls. The first call is informational—what is the Roundtable and how does it work? After they’ve had a chance to think it over, the next call covers any questions and then confirms that we have a spot if they want to join. The third is an orientation call which focuses on the Roundtable’s core values, which are 1) listen to understand not to respond; 2) commit to growth, particularly uncomfortable growth; 3) engage in healthy conflict; and 4) full participation.

Listening is harder than it sounds. Directors are problem solvers, and sometimes jump in before they fully understand the issue. Growth is about stretching and challenging yourself. If you’re doing it right, you should feel uncomfortable. Healthy conflict takes place when somebody says something another member doesn’t agree with. Robust discussion and different points of view are encouraged, but we don’t want destructive conflict. Finally, if you come to a retreat and spend the whole time on your phone, that’s not helpful to anybody. Meetings are actively facilitated; everybody gets equal airtime. Nobody dominates the conversation, but nobody’s hiding in the corner either. This process helps establish trust.

MAHER: Successful affinity groups trust each other, and are not afraid to bring up any topic. What inhibits trust-building in a group?

MACFEE: People who would rather give all the advice and are not willing to hear or take any. Also people who aren’t willing to be open enough to share the real issues they face.

MAHER: Leaders are used to leading. People look to them for direction and answers. This role reversal must be hard for some people.

MACFEE: Yes, and some people never can get there. As an active facilitator, I try to balance answer-giving with answer-getting. Being unable to make this switch isn’t a bad thing—the Roundtable just might not be a good fit for them.

Every in-person retreat begins with what we call the Opening Ceremony where we revisit the core values of the group, and then participate in a sharing experience. It helps members shift out of “I have all the answers” mode into “I’d rather have people question my answers than answer my questions” Roundtable mode.

MAHER: In an earlier email, you described the health and vitality of a group in general as depending on a good balance of “advice givers and advice takers.”

MACFEE: People do things when they have an incentive. Somebody who wants advice or feels like they need help might have the incentive to start a group because they need a sounding board. Conversely, someone in the twilight of their career, who wants to give back, might be incentivized to keep a group together. Post-COVID will all these local/regional affinity groups stay together? Some will. As long as somebody has a strong incentive to keep a group together, they will do their best to make it happen. But if that incentive is weakened or lost, then groups kind of drift apart. People get busy with other things.

MAHER: Roundtable participation is fee-based; most local/regional groups are informally organized and free. There are some obvious differences between the two, but are there any commonalities?

MACFEE: When we’re in the nuts-and-bolts, problem-solving mode, the Roundtable group looks a lot like these other groups. Both models promote camaraderie and many result in the formation of deep friendships among members of the group.

But the fee and time commitment require me as a facilitator to elevate the Roundtable to another level. When I’m not actually engaged with my groups, I’m preparing for the next meeting, developing the curriculum and study guides so that when we all get together they will feel like it’s time and money well spent. With more informally organized affinity groups, attendance is less consistent. If nobody has any big questions or has prepared anything, it might not be the most productive session. Many people like that informality. Roundtable members do tell me they appreciate not having to plan anything. They don’t want one more thing to be in charge of.

The other big difference is that the Roundtables monitor accountability. Meetings are not episodic reports of issues, problems, solutions, and next time new problems, new solutions. We ask members to update us on progress made over the long term, because we’re interested in growth and solving the most challenging issues once and for all. We close each retreat by saying, “What are the two things that you absolutely want to make progress on before we gather together next time?” I write their responses down and email them to members afterwards. We start the next retreat with that list and the opening question is, “How did you do with ‘x’? Did you make progress?” If their answer is vague or evasive, I might say, “Okay, that was a nice bluff. Now tell us the real truth.” Sometimes it can be hard to get back into “Roundtable mode.” And sometimes there is hesitancy admitting they didn’t make progress. We want to tackle hard issues, so there isn’t any shame in it. But we can’t support a member if we don’t know what’s actually going on.

MAHER: In every local/regional group virtual meeting I attended, someone brought up a very specific problem. In about ten minutes, five or six directors just troubleshooted, came up with solutions the person was happy about, and they moved on to the next problem. I was amazed but also thought, “How did these directors solve problems quickly before COVID spawned regular group calls?”

MACFEE: How did people get advice like this in the past? Mentors. You invited an experienced director for coffee and picked their brain. Then if a cordial relationship emerged and later a crisis comes up, you could pick up the phone and ask them for specific advice. When I was the director of what was then considered a moderate-sized children’s museum (annual budget $1.5M), the people from smaller museums would ask me for advice. I, in turn, would seek advice from bigger museums. It’s like an ongoing food chain.

Also let’s not lose sight of the fact that before the pandemic, museum directors had fewer problems to solve. Life wasn’t perfect, of course, but compared to the past eighteen months, the wind was at their backs, the economy was good, donors were out there, and people were visiting and joining as members.

When the pandemic started, everybody suddenly had a lot of problems, some they had never even imagined before. So, they needed the active support of their peers to get through it. For our groups it was no different, but at the beginning of this year we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As museums reopened, directors’ interest shifted back toward longer-term thinking and organizational development.

MAHER: Do you think that what museum leaders have experienced in these stormy last eighteen months will fundamentally change the way they work together going forward?

MACFEE: My short-term prediction is we will return to the pre-pandemic way of doing things as much and as quickly as we can. However, the foundation has been laid for major changes over the coming decade. Now that we know that we can work from home, the link between where you live and where you work has been severed, probably forever. Museums will struggle with part of this because they are open to the public, so certain employees have to be there. But other employees might be able to work 90 percent remotely, coming in to the museum a couple of times a year. A marketing director, for example, could work for a museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, but live in Seattle, Washington. With enhanced communications, particularly now with Zoom, it is becoming increasingly accepted to conduct business from anywhere, so you’re no longer limited to the talent which lives close to you. Museum leaders already know the model of fractional work by hiring consultants for short duration specialized work. Where else can you deploy that model in your workforce?

MAHER: Among new people joining the Roundtables, do you see any changes in what they’re looking for in a support network now?

MACFEE: We actually brought on a couple new people during the pandemic. Judging by them, the focus for leaders remains the same: long-term organization development, good board relationships, good governance principles, strategic planning, working your plan, and building team health.

MAHER: Other affinity groups are wondering if their group should expand, what it would take to do that, and if there are trade-offs?

MACFEE: Expanding groups can be challenging. Even though the Roundtables grow by referral, I’m very structured and mindful of providing a proper orientation before the member attends their first meeting. This is as much to help them get the most out of it as it is to preserve the experience of the existing members. Everyone benefits from more brains at the table, but not if a new member is actively disrupting the culture we’ve established, even if inadvertently.

Even with all of this, I think the most effective groups should be capped at a dozen members. Google’s research about effective teams has shown that one key component is everyone has to have a chance to talk at each meeting. If you get too many people in the room, you run out of time pretty quickly for equal sharing.

MAHER: Before COVID—and perhaps again soon—many of these local/regional groups took field trips to each other’s museums. They supported each other professionally, but a real camaraderie developed through socializing. During the pandemic, maintaining virtual social contact with other people was a lifeline. What is the role of socializing in professional development networks?

MACFEE: Socializing is very important because that’s where you build trust. Pre-COVID, our groups work during the day and go to dinner together in the evening. Evening dinners are entirely social time—no work chatter—we talk about families and general interests. The more you know somebody, the more willing you are to share and bond as a group. During the pandemic Zoom calls, we were primarily business-focused and the group started to suffer a little bit. So, following an afternoon of professional development on Zoom, we adjourned and met up again at 7:00 p.m., uncorked some wine I had shipped to each of them ahead of time—and socialized. We were surprised at how much we needed that.

MAHER: What have you learned about people in your work with small groups?

MACFEE: People and organizations are much more alike than they are different. The same scenarios come up over and over, and everybody thinks that they’re the only one who has this challenge—particularly with governance. Having a board that understands what it is supposed to do, doesn’t micromanage or get “into the weeds,” and stays focused on the big picture is a common aspiration. Everybody feels like their board is the only one struggling with this, but I can tell you that most boards struggle with this.

Another learning is that inertia is strong. Someone once said that change only happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing. People will come to the Roundtable retreats with a problem. They want a plan for change. So, we give them suggestions to take back home but when they get there something else takes center stage and the plan gets tucked away. But it’s only a matter of time until the problem resurfaces, and when it does, it’s usually worse. At that point they really have to exert the effort and the resources to make the change.

Lastly, we all have pride. We don’t want to tell people what we struggle with the most. Museum directors sitting at their desks dealing with museum issues can get insular and myopic. But when they join a group, whether it’s a committed professional development, fee-based one or the many informal affinity groups that have sprung up all over the world, and build up trust, professional and personal breakthroughs can happen.

Hive Minds and Transient Networks

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Sam Dean, Scott Family Amazeum

As we enter into what we all hope are the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself looking back on the past fifteen months and thinking about lessons learned. Chief amongst those is my gratitude for the support we have given and received throughout the museum field —so many calls and so much information sharing! But also, as I think about how we’ve navigated the pandemic, I realize how much we’ve all needed to form new partnerships, ways of working, and transient networks to navigate all of the various pitfalls that have presented themselves over the year. Below are just a few networks that have been important to us here at the Scott Family Amazeum in Northwest Arkansas.

Deciding to Close

In the earliest days of the pandemic, so much of our work was driven by a lack of cohesive information or guidelines coming from the national public infrastructure. There was a lot we didn’t know about how to deal with COVID, and even more we didn’t know we didn’t know. In the absence of timely and consistent guidance from our civic sector, we found what we needed from our colleagues in the business community. With world-wide facilities, as business leaders prepared for what they needed to do for their businesses, they consulted world-class experts. Being able to tap into that expertise and foresight was crucial for the nonprofit community. On March 13, many Arkansas cultural institutions, in consultation with each other, decided to close to public visitation. A statewide mandate followed a couple of weeks later.

Thinking Together

During the pandemic, an existing, informal information- and expertise-sharing structure has been a key anchor for us in new ways. Every Monday morning, a cross-section group of community leaders in the Bentonville, Arkansas, area meets to share what is happening in their particular sectors. This group includes the mayor, the county judge, the school superintendent, representatives from the visitor and convention bureau, Chamber of Commerce, downtown association, the largest local philanthropic foundation, our largest local employer, and the three larger cultural attractions in the city. The goal of these loosely structured meetings is to make sure each of us understands what everyone else is doing at any given time with our agencies and organizations. During the pandemic, the meetings became a critical communication pathway and tool for collective problem-solving. I don’t know how we could have survived without the chance to do regular scans across the different community sectors to put together so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle when we didn’t even know what the final picture would look like.

As an example, the superintendent of the local school system needed to understand where the world of kids and families intersected with that of public health as the schools were placed under state emergency directives to offer an in-person schooling option by the fall of 2020. With much of the community still in lockdown, the school district was developing policies and making their meetings and minutes available via video conference. Being able to tap into their deliberations and assembled expertise provided the basis for many of our own decisions about our reopening plans. We were able to refine these plans in consultation with one of the school committee leaders, as well as three respected local physicians.

Interestingly enough, when looking for guidance on safety, the head of Bentonville’s Parks and Recreation Department became a key sounding board. In some ways, the Community Center they operate was one of the closest analogs to the interactive, hands-on environment of the museum in the region. Many other cultural institutions in the area are object- or performance-based, with different audiences and a very different style of interaction. As part of the city government, Parks & Rec had a close association with the Health Department. We learned what kinds of recommendations were being made, and what safety measures they determined were acceptable in a hands-on, activity-rich environment. I frequently spoke with the director as we navigated our decision-making, particularly in the first three months of the pandemic.

Pandemic Bartering and Support Systems

In the first months of the pandemic, procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE) and the materials needed to clean and sanitize our building was such a challenge that a strange new market for goods and supplies emerged. Some days the scene felt straight out of a back streets movie script. In one example, the head of the local Boys and Girls Club was able to procure a large quantity of disposable masks from a board member who was able to tap into his overseas factory chain to get a direct plane shipment. Fortunately, he was willing to share the masks with community organizations like ours. The larger regional chamber of commerce was able to secure a truckload of hand sanitizer, and hosted a pop-up sale to help distribute it to local businesses over a weekend. Distilleries, unable to entertain whiskey-loving visitors, used their equipment to create sanitizer to help make ends meet, while meeting the incredible demand for a scarce product. I can’t say how many conversations I had with people that started with, “So where are you on hand sanitizer?”

Existing cracks in local social services programs became even more pronounced, and new partnerships formed help fill widening gaps. With schools and other community children’s gathering centers closed, getting foods to families in critical need was a challenge. So a neighboring museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, put a team to work creating meal packs for thousands of families and organizations like ours created learning components to go into each box. Inspired by that work, Amazeum worked with a local food vendor and secured additional funding to continue providing food for a few thousand more families.

Finally, knowing the creative community was one of the hardest hit, the museum sponsored Lunch Tunes, hiring musicians to livestream over a series of lunch hours, providing paying gigs for musicians and opportunities for our team and the community to come together over lunch and listen to a little local music, even while remaining apart in their homes and offices.

Advocacy and Relief Systems

With so many different needs to attend to in the museum, and decisions happening so quickly in the state house with regard to relief efforts, it proved challenging to be present on the state level to help committees understand the situation of cultural institutions like ours. Visit Bentonville, our Visitor and Convention Bureau, became one of the most vocal advocates for Amazeum down in the capital. It was critically important for the museum to be seen not just as a place to visit, but as a small business and economic generator for the community. With strong voices from the tourism advocacy groups leading the way, private, nonprofit museums became incorporated into key relief opportunities that helped pave the way for our sustainability, along with that of many others.

Later Stages

As we shift into this later stage of the pandemic, I see us reactivating some of these early connections to understand how we open up more fully, transitioning from some of our current, self-imposed restrictions, such as capacity limits and masking policies. What are the right next steps? What is being done around vaccination policy? How can relatively vague guidance from public health be shaped into safe workplace policy? Working to create consistent responses for our team, our audience, our business colleagues, and our community is an important step to help bring our organizations and region along with us during the recovery—and we have a long way yet to go. Moving forward, we hope to retain some of these transient, cross-sector network connections to keep building on— both for our everyday work, and to lay a more robust foundation ready to respond to future unknowns.

Most importantly, I am so grateful for the collective mindshare that was offered over the last fifteen months. More so than any other time, certainly in my career, it took a hive mind to create the timely solutions and support to get to where we are now. Thank you all—we are so grateful you synapsed with us!

Sam Dean is the founding executive director of the Scott Family Amazeum in Bentonville, Arkansas, where he has served for almost nine years.

Collaborate to Advocate: The Power of Collective Voice

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Michael McHorney, Children’s Museum of Eau Claire; Deb Gilpin, Madison Children’s Museum; Anne Snow, Children’s Museum of LaCrosse; Andrea Welsch, Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac

When hearing the name of our state, Wisconsin, non-residents typically associate our culture with beer and cheese. Yes, Wisconsin leads the nation in cheese production and often ranks at or near the top in per capita rankings for beer consumption. Wisconsin also ranks first nationally in the production of horseradish, ginseng, and cranberries and is known for producing butter, bratwursts, and corn. Wisconsin also leads the nation in something else: it has the most children’s museums per capita in the United States. Basically, you could say folks from Wisconsin live in a state of PLAY.

Children’s museums in Wisconsin have long been engaged in collaborative efforts. An annual gathering, which began in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 2009, has traveled the state ever since, increasing in participation and frequency. At these events, children’s museum professionals discuss thought-provoking ideas and share each other’s best practices. This collaboration, known as Wisconsin Children’s Museums (WICM) has resulted in greater quality for exhibits and programs and nearly doubled children’s museum traffic from just over 500,000 (2009) to nearly 1 million (2019). To assist in navigating the pandemic, WICM held virtual meetings almost weekly. Discussions concentrated on uncovering critical and necessary funding sources and sharing best practices around reopening.

In November 2020, after working together to research state funding opportunities, more than a dozen children’s museums shared a combined total of $650,000 in COVID relief funding from the Wisconsin Department of Administration. This modest portion of statewide funding, available to all arts and cultural organizations, helped some children’s museums in the state, but more support is needed. Recently, members of the group again put their heads together to create messages for their county executives, mayors/city managers, etc. A powerful letter, signed by the group, details how children’s museums play an essential role in healthy, thriving communities and asks for their support in allocating American Rescue Plan funds to keep museums alive. It is hoped that these latest joint communication efforts will lead to additional opportunities for Wisconsin children’s museums to collectively advance goals of the Department of Children and Families and Department of Education, as well as provide critical support for our community’s children as they are healing from the effects of the pandemic.

What started as a group meeting periodically to share best practices has evolved into a collaborative that meets bi-weekly to coordinate and discuss museum issues and trends. Our first statewide project in 2018 implemented the national initiative Prescription for Play (RX4P) through a state media campaign in cooperation with medical institutions and pediatricians.

Wisconsin children’s museums demonstrated how effective the statewide partnership can be in this campaign, which highlighted information released by the American Academy of Pediatrics about the importance of play to a child’s health and development. A plan created collaboratively by the Fond du Lac and Madison Children’s Museums was endorsed and supported by all thirteen children’s museums in the state. On a single day, the campaign reached more than 100,000 people through social media posts alone. In addition, approximately two dozen healthcare entities and local radio and television outlets joined forces to shed light on a topic that directly impacts social, emotional, physical, and intellectual development of children.

Collaborating with colleagues from around the state allowed us to effectively and creatively develop a unique Wisconsin Prescription for Play logo and press release that each museum could customize, resulting in sweatshirts, stickers, signage, and opportunities to incorporate expertise from physicians in our own communities. Working smarter, not harder, we reached more people in a more impactful way. These efforts were acknowledged by the Association of Children’s Museums, who invited us to present the results of our awareness campaign in a national webinar.

—Andrea Welsch, Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac

Wisconsin Children’s Museums have moved from intermittent to consistent advocacy of play, starting through relationship building at our annual Children’s Museum Day at the Capitol. This became the foundation for realizing outcomes for positioning children’s museums as major partners of state government. In January 2019, Madison Children’s Museum hosted the Governor Evers’ Madison Kid’s Gala, and Michael McHorney was appointed by Governor Evers to the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board. In 2020, all children’s museums were successful in receiving COVID funding relief. These three examples were direct results of that initial relationship building.

Governor Evers leveraged our audience reach when he hosted three Inaugural Kid’s Galas across the state, in children’s sites, two of them children’s museums. In Madison, he funded a free Saturday at the museum, but he won us over when he held a press conference in the museum, but only took questions from kids. The press conference made it clear—the welfare of children would be front and center in his new administration.

—Deb Gilpin, Madison Children’s Museum

Momentum has been building, but more work is needed. Moving forward, efforts will involve telling the story of children’s museums and how they are an essential part of a thriving community. And thriving communities mean a flourishing state of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin children’s museum group’s latest project involves a push to educate the citizens of Wisconsin on the inequities surrounding pandemic relief funding.

Over the past twenty-five years in the field, I have witnessed children’s museums evolve from “a nice thing to have” to being an important resource, not only to families but also to communities. Some of our largest employers use the museum as a recruiting tool. They bring potential new hires to visit the museum when touring the city. Our statewide network of children’s museums makes the state a great place to work and live.

—Anne Snow, Children’s Museum of La Crosse

The value of a regional or state children’s museum network cannot be over-estimated. Many function as key sounding boards and support groups for museum practitioners scattered around a broad area. They can also harness the expertise and reach of member museums to develop a more powerful collective voice, one that can be harder to escape the notice of local government leaders. There is indeed strength in numbers. State networks like the Wisconsin Children’s Museums are showing the potential of strategic solidarity to support each other and advocate for the children and families in the communities they serve.

Michael McHorney is executive director of the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire; Deb Gilpin is president and CEO of Madison Children’s Museum; Anne Snow is founder and executive director of the Children’s Museum of La Crosse; and Andrea Welsch is the executive director of the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac. They are all located in Wisconsin.

Kindred Spirits: Q&A among Seven Regional Museum Networks

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

Africa Play Network • NorCal Small Museum Cohort • Louisiana Children’s Museums • North Carolina Science Network • Ohio Children’s Museums • Small Museums Collaborative • Virginia Children’s Museums

What’s the glue that holds you together?

AfricaPlayNetwork: We share 1) our love for all African children and the potential they represent; 2) our agreement that spaces—and in particular for Amowi, natural spaces—support and facilitate children’s development; 3) play-based, child-centered approaches to learning; 4) a deep and abiding mutual respect for how hard our work is, and 5) a commitment to deep laughter when we are at the point of tears!

The network has been a source of encouragement, support, and strength during tough times. There is a sense of solidarity because we really have nowhere else to look for a better understanding of the contexts we are working in.

NorCal: Camaraderie, shared experiences, these particular women, our need for mutual support through the pandemic, and Zoom technology making it possible.

Louisiana: We bond over the same goal: We want all children to have access to stimulating, hands-on and educational exhibits and programming that promote physical and mental development, curiosity, creativity, and exposes them to local culture.

NCScienceNetwork: A common purpose: to stimulate interest and excitement in STEM education, helping to promote science literacy throughout the state of North Carolina. Sharing best practices and addressing collective issues is beneficial to all.

Ohio: Mutual respect and having someone to talk to who understands exactly where you are coming from and the challenges you are facing. With only fourteen children’s museums in Ohio, the number of people who understand our plight during the past year is extremely small. Meeting regularly with colleagues has brought a sense of stability and calm to us all.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: Trusting in the friendship and collegiality we have built, we feel safe to be open and honest about our challenges and the issues. This diverse group always offers good suggestions, new tactics, or additional resources to pursue. The fact that we are all smaller museums in a specific region of the country leads to natural commonalities.

Virginia: Similar missions, wanting to learn, connect, and create best practices for post-COVID re-emerging.

What are you able to accomplish as a group that you might not be able to as individual museums?

AfricaPlayNetwork: Representing a range of African countries, we are working to evolve a continental vision of new frontiers in play and learning which would be much harder to do as individual organizations. We are building a collective and specific expertise to inform and invigorate global exchanges in the world of children’s experiential learning environments.

NorCal: We have shared many resources that no one of us could compile on their own. We have a Google Drive folder containing opening procedures, policy statements from other museums, etc.

To raise awareness of the impact of the pandemic closures on children’s museums, Gina Moreland drafted an op-ed piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about our plight. Group members reviewed and edited it, and became signatories. It was published in December 2020. Recently, we have joined forces with southern California children’s museums and arts groups to claim some of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) federal dollars. We are considering pooling resources to hire a lobbyist to advocate in our very large state for children’s museum resources.

Louisiana: When everything shut down in March 2020, and remained closed for months, we all canceled annual fundraisers, programs, camps, etc. When our state started a slow, phased reopening, we saw that children’s museums would probably be one of the last types of businesses to reopen. We collectively came up with policies and procedures to ensure visitor and staff safety and presented them to local and state agencies. By working together and agreeing to adhere to the guidelines we produced, we were allowed to reopen sooner than expected.

Currently, our group is working on a state travel promotion to highlight regional children’s museums as tourist destinations and show the impact each one has on its community’s children. This effort also celebrates the variety of locales and different learning experiences offered by each museums. We want to encourage exploration and travel across the state of Louisiana as well as bring in families from surrounding states.

NCScienceNetwork: We look for opportunities to share exhibit and program resources, which many smaller museums may not have the funding to support. For example, the network offered a small traveling exhibit about Nano science to member institutions at no cost (other than inbound shipping). We are replicating that model with a new exhibit about space science. We continue to seek state funding in one form or another. Our collective voice is much stronger than multiple entreaties by individual members.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: Formed a year before the pandemic, we were just beginning to explore ways to partner. In our first year, each executive director would lead a discussion during the monthly call on a chosen topic, such as “fundraising ideas and special events,” “evaluating programs,” or “audience engagement.” Participants knew about the topics in advance and took turns sharing perspectives or strategies and asking questions.

We originally intended to broaden the collaborative to include other museum departments—educators talking to educators, for example—with like departments managing and leading their own group meetings. However, in 2020, the group coalesced around COVID-19. We did not simply commiserate but shared strategies and plans about closing and reopening our museums and keeping our visitors safe. We kept each other up to date about federal relief packages and resources from various museum associations. We often talked about how to help our staff manage stress and visitor interaction.

Virginia: This grassroots effort in a time of crisis arose from a need for on-the-ground thinking and support. Similar demographics help us relate easily to each other.

Competition vs. collaboration among member museums?

AfricaPlayNetwork: Based in entirely different countries, with diverse languages and cultures, we are not in competition with one another for audiences or staff. We also tend to get funds from different sources, often with a focus on African development. Our network is characterized by a supportive culture that is not based on a scarcity mindset, but rather trusting that there is an abundance of resources in the world to support our work. We inform one another of funding opportunities and look out for sources that could help the network as a whole.

Every one of our organizations is highly responsive to its own local context. But all of us are creating original programs, projects, exhibits, advocacy campaigns, and media content to champion children and their right to play and learn.

NorCal: Competition is not a problem. Our museums are relatively distant from each other and draw from different audiences and funding sources. We have shared exhibits, and even offer reciprocal admission discounts to museums in the group.

Louisiana: We are geographically far enough apart that this is not really an issue. We actually want families to museum-hop and visit all of the museums in the state. We do occasionally compete for state-level grant dollars, but not too often.

NCScienceNetwork: Generally speaking, geographical distance minimizes direct competition. We often collaborate on grant programs that include multiple institutions as partners.

Ohio: The issue of competition has not come up. We focus primarily on how to help each other deal with state requirements and how to operate during the pandemic.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: It’s a non-issue. We share and borrow ideas back and forth with no hesitation. We cheer each other on, celebrate successes and achievements, and offer that pat on the back that we all need at times. We have talked about working together on grants, exhibit fabrication, and program development, but we haven’t been able to pursue those ideas yet.

Virginia: We don’t have a ton of competition since we are all far enough apart that we don’t have much audience overlap. We all come together to learn, discover, and share.

What have you learned—or what has surprised you—about this group?

AfricaPlayNetwork: While we advocate for increased access to play opportunities for children all over the continent, each organization and leader has a unique approach. A surprising benefit has been learning about work we have already been doing—networks created, lessons learned—increasing our respect for each other’s work and impact.

NorCal: I needed and have come to enjoy close contact with fellow executive directors, particularly ones nearby in similar circumstances! With most of us working from home, we had time to connect and set up a dedicated time to do so.

Louisiana: Nothing surprises us in Louisiana anymore, especially dealing with this past year’s pandemic and natural disasters. We really enjoy visiting with other on our Zoom calls.

NCScienceNetwork: I have been surprised (or at least heartened) that such a collaborative organization exists and has such a convivial and mutually supportive character. Having been a member of numerous museum-related organizations throughout my career, few seem to have such a high degree of collegiality and genuine recognition of the benefit of sharing rather than competing.

Ohio: Everyone thinks their museum is unique, but we have learned that we are much more alike. Our differences are very small in comparison to the overall needs of children’s museums during this pandemic.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: How quickly the group gelled once we started the monthly calls, which speaks to the need for more of these groups. Since we had been meeting for a year before COVID, we already had the support system in place when we needed it the most.

Virginia: We have all learned so much about the re-emerging processes going on in different communities and to hear how like-minded folks are solving similar challenges.

How do you handle inclusiveness?

AfricaPlayNetwork: Over the years, we have developed a deep sense of deep trust and mutual respect. The group provides a confidential, mutually-supportive space to share our successes and challenges. We want to expand but have kept the executive group small, because we are all so constrained for time/money—we simply don’t have the resources to allocate to expansion. However, we would love to share knowledge and practice with others in this field working in various contexts across Africa. We are currently looking for partners to help us expand the network to include others across the continent who share a commitment to amplifying Africa-led initiatives to promote play and playful learning.

NorCal: Although we have extended the invitation broadly, the group has established an equilibrium among the regular attendees. But it’s not exclusive, and we would welcome more members who have time to participate. In fact, with the intense lobbying for funding/ARP relief going on, we are reaching out to others to join.

Louisiana: Our group is open to all children’s museum directors in Louisiana.

NCScienceNetwork: We are open to anyone who meets the membership criteria.

Ohio: We ask each institution to send a representative to the monthly meeting, but we let that representative be determined by the institution.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: Keeping the group small fosters relationship building and makes the monthly conversations manageable so all participants can have a voice. We aren’t intentionally limiting membership, but we aren’t actively looking for more members either.

Virginia: We include anyone who asks to be invited.

Have any of the past year’s COVID-focused conversations sparked ideas for ways to work together in the future?

AfricaPlayNetwork: Working together more through digital media is one intriguing idea. COVID has exposed digital divides, but each of us has also seen how increasingly accessible technologies (e.g. smart phones with WhatsApp and other low-data apps), can be used to promote locally relevant content for children, parents, and educators.

Amowi: “I have been so deeply impressed with the way Play Africa Children’s Museum and Imagination Afrika used the virtual space to address the socio-emotional and physical wellbeing of children and parents through regular virtual African storytelling events, dance, and movement sessions and parenting guidance. The COVID period has simply amplified and validated existing practice—which has evolved organically—of attentive, active, and generous interaction online.”

NorCal: We haven’t gotten there yet, but we may share exhibits or other tangible resources, grant writers or other staff, and have discussed coordinating on a capacity-building grant that would benefit all of us.

NCScienceNetwork: The fact that we all faced some level of peril motivated us to seek support. We shared best practices regarding the health and safety of our visitors and staff, and sought funding to distribute among the member institutions. I hope that this sort of exchange and dialogue will continue into the future regarding non-COVID issues.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: Once all the museums in the group are operating sustainably, we intend to resume our plan to broaden the collaborative to other museum departments. This will build more working relationships among our organizations and provide professional development for staff, which is often unaffordable. We have discussed partnering on various projects, however, the group’s core purpose is to be an informal support system, which has been proven to be the most valuable part of the effort.

Virginia: Our conversations include all aspects of the museum field. We talk about how to solve problems in our own museums, as well as future collaborative grant efforts.

What makes this group function so well? Tips for other people looking to start their own groups?

AfricaPlayNetwork: We share a fundamental integrity of purpose, mutual respect and a clear Africa-centered focus. It helps to know who you are and what you stand for right from the beginning. This is an amazing group of women, leaders and pioneers in any circumstances, even outside of the field.

NorCal: As with any well-functioning volunteer group, every member needs to be committed and consistent. Our commitment has grown over time because our biweekly meetings have provided real benefits, including social and emotional ones. The women in our group support each other—we are all going through the same crisis. But even when one museum is facing a unique challenge, the group listens, commiserates, and offers helpful ideas.

As leaders of institutions, we all have executive functioning skills, but we bring our people skills to our Zoom meetings as well—making sure everyone has a voice and time to share. Interestingly, none of us claims a leadership role. Our conversations and group work have been much more mutual and collaborative. Members express appreciation for each other regularly. That certainly builds connection and sustainability.

In our most recent meeting (June 10, 2021), even though most of us are now re-opening, we unanimously agreed to keep the group calls going. Everyone concurred: it’s the most fun meeting we have, and there will always be needs in the future that we need to talk about.

Louisiana: We have learned so much about our work, our memberships and families, our donors, our staff, and most importantly ourselves, and we have helped each other think outside of the box so many times this past year. Our tip to future groups? Use your collective strengths and passion for what you do to your advantage.

NCScienceNetwork: Be prepared to work. In the past, the network had a full-time director whose principle responsibilities included fundraising and administrative responsibilities. Now, those responsibilities are shared among the volunteer board of directors and other members. Diligence and consistency are required by all. It may help a new group to source start-up funds to ensure that necessary tasks can be accomplished, e.g. financial records and reporting, meeting scheduling and arranging, program development, etc.

Ohio: The group functions well out of mutual respect, a willingness to ask questions, and the openness of our members to share unconditionally their best advice.

SmallMuseumCollaborative: There are no attendance requirements, financial commitments, by-laws, or minutes. People join the call as their schedules allow. We have no plans to develop any kind of formal structure or association. Keeping the number of participants low ensures equal and active participation.

Virginia: We all come together openly, share a deep respect for each other, and appreciate the support.

Museum Network stats

1) AFRICA PLAY NETWORK

ImagiNation Afrika | Dakar, Senegal
Mmofra Foundation | Accra, Ghana
Play Africa | Johannesburg, South Africa
The PlayHub | Kigali, Rwanda

The Africa Play Network is an informal group of executive leaders of four pioneering organizations that promote children’s play and playful learning in their own contexts on the continent: two children’s museums (Play Africa and ImagiNation Afrika), a children’s park (Mmofra Park) and a creator of playgrounds and public spaces (The PlayHub).

They have been meeting since 2013, when Karima and Gretchen, founders of different children’s museums—6,000 miles apart—found each other and organized a Skype call to swap notes and share ideas. Due to the extreme distances (Amowi spends much of the year in Spokane, Washington) the group has met almost exclusively virtually—on Zoom and Skype. They communicate between calls with short messages on WhatsApp and actively support each other on social media such as Twitter.

—Gretchen Wilson-Prangley, Play Africa; Karima Grant, ImagiNation Afrika; Amowi Phillips, Mmofra Foundation; Julian Ingabire Kayibanda, The PlayHub

2) Nor Cal Small Museum Cohort

Children’s museums located in Northern California with budgets under $2 million

Children’s Creativity Museum | San Francisco
Children’s Museum of Sonoma County | Santa Rosa
Habitot Children’s Museum | Berkeley
Kidzone Museum | Truckee
MY Museum | Monterey
Sacramento Children’s Museum
Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery

The cohort was organized in April 2020 by Collette Michaud (Children’s Museum of Sonoma County) who reached out to four other museum directors. Meeting primarily on Zoom, it soon evolved through word-of-mouth and mentions on the weekly ACM Leadership Calls.

—Gina Moreland, Habitot Children’s Museum

3) Louisiana Children’s Museums

Membership open

Bayou Country Children’s Museum | Thibodaux
Children’s Museum of Acadiana | Lafayette
Children’s Museum of St. Tammany | Mandeville
Knock Knock Children’s Museum | Baton Rouge
Louisiana Children’s Discovery Center | Hammond
Louisiana Children’s Museum | New Orleans
Northeast Louisiana Children’s Museum | Monroe
The Children’s Museum of Southwest Louisiana | Lake Charles
T.R.E.E. House | Alexandria

The group was organized in April 2020 by Julia Bland (Louisiana Children’s Museum) and is currently managed by Arianna Mace (Bayou Country Children’s Museum). All members contribute and actively participate through emails and monthly Zoom calls.

—Arianna Mace, Bayou Country Children’s Museum

4) NORTH CAROLINA SCIENCE NETWORK

Membership criteria:

Designated 501(c)(3) or a governmental agency
Located in North Carolina with a regional audience and a significant focus on science
Open to the public for at least two years and operating at least 120 days per year
Have at least one full-time professional staff

This large group has forty-four members, including:

Catawba Science Center | Hickory
Discovery Place Charlotte
Fascinate–U Children’s Museum | Fayetteville
Greensboro Children’s Museum
Hands On! Children’s Museum | Hendersonville
Imagination Station Science and History Museum | Wilson
KidSenses Children’s Interactive Museum | Rutherfordton
Kidzu Children’s Museum | Chapel Hill
Marbles Kids Museum | Raleigh
North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences | Raleigh
Port Discover | Elizabeth City
The Children’s Museum of Wilmington
Western North Carolina Nature Center | Asheville

In the mid-1980s, eight North Carolina science center directors gathered to discuss issues including the possibilitiy for state funding. In 2000, the group formed the NC Grassroots Science Museums Collaborative, an independent 501(c)(3) organization with advocacy for state funding as a key purpose.

That same year, the collaborative received a $1 million grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to create an endowment, which continues to support it. By the late 2000s, membership had grown to thirty-four institutions. In 2016, the state funding model changed from direct grants to museums to a competitive program based partly on regional economic need. Working in collaboration with the membership to determine the future of the organization, in 2018 it was rechristened as the NC Science Network. The network connects, unifies, strengthens, and champions museums and allied organizations throughout the state to enrich the lives of its citizens by engaging with science.

—J. Willard Whitson, KidSenses Children’s INTERACTIVE Museum

5) Ohio Children’s Museum Directors Meeting

Membership open to any children’s museum in Ohio

AHA! A Hands-On Adventure, A Children’s Museum | Lancaster
Akron Children’s Museum
Boonshoft Museum of Discovery | Dayton
Children’s Museum of Findlay
COSI | Columbus
Duke Energy Children’s Museum (Cincinnati Museum Center)
Explore-It-Torium Children’s Museum of Marion
Imagination Station | Toledo
Little Buckeye Children’s Museum | Mansfield
Ohio Valley Museum of Discovery | Athens
The Children’s Museum of Cleveland
Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones
Children’s Center for Science & Technology | Youngstown
SPI: Where Science and Play Intersect | Mt. Vernon
The Works | Newark

The first meeting came out of a conversation between Fred Boll, executive director at Little Buckeye Children’s Museum, and Johnna McEntee, executive director of the Ohio Museum Association. Johnna is the current group organizer. In June 2020, the group began monthly Zoom meetings.

—Fred Boll, Little Buckeye Children’s Museum

6) Small Museum Collaborative

Membership currently stable

Children’s Museum of Brownsville | Brownsville, TX
Don Harrington Discovery Center | Amarillo, TX
Discovery Center at Murfree Spring | Murfreesboro, TN
Hands On! Regional Museum | Johnson City, TN
Mayborn Museum | Waco, TX
Mayer Museum at Angelo State University | San Angelo, TX
Mid-America Science Museum |Hot Springs, AR
Museum of Texas Tech University | Lubbock, TX
The Discovery Science Place | Tyler, TX

Diane LaFollette, executive director of Mid-America Science Museum, wanted to create an informal collaborative group to share and address issues unique to smaller museums. The group started with seven museums in 2019; two more joined in 2020. Participating museums are located in states bordering Arkansas, in or near a population area of less than 200,000, with operating budgets of less than $3 million.

The group began meeting in-person or on group phone calls and later through monthly one-hour Zoom meetings. Initially planned and organized by LaFollette, meetings are now led by mutual agreement.

—Diane LaFollette, Mid-America Science Museum

7) Virginia Children’s Museums

Membership open

Amazement Square | Lynchburg
Children’s Science Center | Fairfax
Children’s Museum of Richmond
Discovery Station | Hagerstown, MD
Explore More Discovery Museum | Harrisonburg
For the Kids: By George Children’s Museum | Martinsburg, WV
Kids Square | Roanoke,
Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum | Winchester
Virginia Discovery Museum | Charlottesville
Wonder Universe, A Children’s Museum | Christiansburg

Organized in the spring of 2020 by Dawn Devine (Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum). Meetings held primarily on Zoom.

—Dawn Devine, Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum

Community Education Network Supports Children and Institutions during the Pandemic

This article is part of the “The Power of We: Local/Regional Support Networks Flourish” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Rachel Carpenter, Children’s Discovery Museum; Hannah Johnson & Candace Summers, McLean County Museum of History; Shannon Reedy, Miller Park Zoo; and Dr. Diane Wolf, Bloomington Public Schools District 87

No one group or organization can do it all. The many organizations within the Bloomington/Normal, Illinois, community that serve the educational needs of children have created multiple and sometimes overlapping support groups. In addition to educators, members include psychologists, food workers, and marketing personnel, but we all work for organizations that are tied to formal or informal education in some way. Sharing a commitment to care for families, these professionals from different nonprofit organizations work together to identify needs and coordinate responses.

During the pandemic, different groups quickly realized that we all needed to maintain consistent and regular communication to meet three distinct levels of need: 1) the needs of children and families, 2) the needs of each organization serving them, and 3) the needs of individual professionals who participated in the meetings. The Central Illinois Community Educators (CICE) stepped up to become a support group and a virtual space where professionals could share ideas and issues among people doing similar work. United Way of McLean County facilitated the formation of even more new groups including one to connect schools, childcare, and youth programming centers. The Children’s Discovery Museum participated in both pools regularly; they were very important for the success of the museum during the pandemic.

History of CICE

In 2006, Dr. Diane Wolf of the Regional Office of Education (ROE) 17 wanted to help promote the variety of community resources available to public and private school students in the ROE 17 region. With this goal in mind, Dr. Wolf connected with informal educators and representatives from local institutions including the McLean County Museum of History, Children’s Discovery Museum, Livingston County War Museum, David Davis Mansion, Miller Park Zoo, Sugar Grove Nature Center, and others. Over time membership in this coalition of community educators expanded to the Bloomington and Normal public libraries, the Girl Scouts, institutions of higher education, including Illinois State University and Heartland Community College, and arts organizations including the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts and the McLean County Arts Center. The group primarily included organizations that directly served schools through onsite visits and outreach through off-site programs, loan kits, and other resources.

The group has evolved as more members have joined, but the mission largely remains the same—to inspire and support collaboration among community partners to leverage resources and better serve Central Illinois learners and educators. In the fall of 2017, an effort began to revitalize and, in some ways, reimagine the group’s form and function. Continuing to connect with like organizations within Bloomington/Normal, as well as throughout the Central Illinois region, the group was rebranded as the Central Illinois Community Educators (CICE) and effectively relaunched with a meeting of interested organizations in November of that year.

The November 2017 meeting expanded the variety of organizational members to include representatives from all forms of community education from museums, zoos/nature centers, art galleries, and cultural sites, to public libraries, afterschool programs, human service organizations, and more. Today, almost eighty individual educators representing more than fifty local educational institutions are invited to attend quarterly meetings. In addition, they receive regular information about the needs and services of participating organizations and their audiences.

Since 2017, CICE has utilized its quarterly meetings to collectively explore relevant themes including DEAI, marketing, youth development, behavioral health, census data and the human services sector, community collaboration/partnerships, and pandemic response. Participating organizations rotate host responsibilities. Themes and topics are determined based on the expertise of the host site, as well as the expressed needs and interests of the group. Hannah Johnson, director of youth & family education at the McLean County Museum of History, has facilitated CICE communication and collaboration among group members and host sites since 2017. She continues to aid in the coordination of monthly meetings among core members as an extension of the group’s initial COVID response.

Supporting the Community

When the pandemic began, CICE’s core membership of ten to twelve organizations focused on learning about each member’s capacity and identifying needs present in both our regular audiences and the larger community. Each organization is structured differently and has different sources of funding. Some were protected from many of the effects of public closures while others were not. Some organizations, like the Children’s Discovery Museum, had grant funds that needed to be reallocated appropriately. The museum was also partially supported by the town of Normal.

At each group meeting, held via Zoom beginning in April 2020, discussions focused on the current but quickly changing status of the pandemic, and the ever-evolving information released from the Illinois governor’s office and health department. We discussed the ethics of re-opening to the public and how and when to offer in-person or virtual programs. We talked about how to take programs off-site into both private and public spaces to meet community needs without being too swayed by community “wants” that were not safe for everyone. Balancing the critical need for organizational revenue against the possibility of being a site that could spread the virus was excruciating for all of us. Not everyone on the calls was a decision-maker for their organization, but we could all share information with those who held those roles.

Shannon Reedy, education specialist from Miller Park Zoo, found our discussions very useful. Even though the zoo wasn’t doing many programs during those first few months of the shut-down, she was inspired by hearing what other organizations were doing. She was eventually charged by zoo management with rolling out virtual programs, along with in-person programs that met COVID mandate standards. This was quite a challenge and required a different way of thinking about their program offerings. She was able to think through new methods, themes, and collaborations based on the stories her colleagues shared.

In our area, schools continued remote learning, but many businesses began to open. The United Way of McLean County recognized a need for childcare and youth programming and brought together organizations that were serving families in this way. Regular meetings of what became the Childcare and Youth Programming Coalition included discussions about issues the schools were seeing. For example, school counselors were particularly helpful in sharing observations on students’ mental health during the shutdown. The coalition also discussed current openings in traditional childcare programs in our area, and relevant program offerings from other informal education institutions. Rachel Carpenter, education manager from the Children’s Discovery Museum, acted as the liaison between the CICE and this new coalition, sharing the availability of all CICE partner organizations’ programming, but also their concerns about new and ongoing community needs and the funding required so that all institutions could continue to operate. As a result of many offshoot meetings, the local YMCA launched all-day programming in closed schools for students whose parents were working. The local school district also created a unique summer program in partnership with other area youth programming organizations.

The release of Cares Act funding to our local school districts enabled the creation of new summer programming. Dr. Diane Wolf, who now works for School District 87, recognized CICE as a resource to help the students in her district, which will host three weeks of summer programming for children in 2021. Diane connected with CICE members and found organizations that could adopt a grade level or group for each afternoon during the program. The Children’s Discovery Museum and the McLean County Museum of History, in conjunction with three other community partner organizations, will bring fun and playful learning experiences to the students.

This arrangement supports the museums as well. For example, as part of the Town of Normal, the Children’s Discovery Museum could not directly access federal funds targeted at learning loss. But the school districts that do are eager to partner with other learning organizations skilled at mitigating primary learning loss. The museum will replace its usual month of summer programs with this new one, guaranteeing the museum’s program income for this period.

All organizations are excited to bring their curriculum to students who may not typically be able to access their programming. These enriching learning experiences help build solid educational foundations for children as they return to school this fall.

Supporting the Organizations

The organizations that have chosen to work together here in Bloomington/Normal could all be considered competitors within a limited market. But we realized that by working together, we can amplify our shared goal of meeting the needs of our community to the best of our ability. By providing the best programming we can in our areas of expertise, and sharing our successes and failures, we can maximize impact and focus our time in ways we could not as siloed operations. All of our programming overlaps in different ways. Rather than viewing this as a problem, we see it as opportunity to share and better serve children by offering slots in one program when others get full or referring someone to a different program where their needs or interests may be better served. There are never enough resources available to do all the work that needs to be done, but together, we can do more with what we have.

Rachel Carpenter is the Education Manager at the Children’s Discovery Museum (Normal, IL); Hannah Johnson is the Director of Youth and Family Education and Candace Summers is the Director of Community Education at the McLean County Museum of History (Bloomington, IL); Shannon Reedy is the Education Specialist at the Miller Park Zoo (Bloomington, IL); and Dr. Diane Wolf is the Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction at Bloomington (IL) Public Schools District 87.

Why Do We Need All This Office Space Now?

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Collette Michaud, Children’s Museum of Sonoma County

The Children’s Museum of Sonoma County (CMOSC) closed to the public on March 13, 2020, and has remained closed since then. We have plans to reopen our outside exhibit area by April 2021, and the interior by the summer. First opened in 2014, CMOSC occupies a repurposed, sixty year-old building. While we are located on more than four acres of land, the museum has only 7,000 square feet of indoor space split between exhibits and administration.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, CMOSC’s 1,200-square-foot office space was maxed out, with more than twelve team members sitting shoulder to shoulder. Because we simply did not have the space for more desks, we were constrained in hiring additional team members. At least half of the desks were claimed by part-time team members who only worked two or three days a week. My office did triple duty as the only conference room—when I wasn’t working in it—and storage space. Prior to the pandemic, the idea of team members working from home was not considered viable for many reasons, such as accountability and regular and meaningful communication. To address our conflicting needs for growth coupled the lack of office space, we spent time and money on an expansion master plan that would double our office space at a cost of millions and take years to successfully complete. There seemed to be no other choice.

We discovered Zoom within days of closing the museum. Although we had previously used Zoom to attend webinars, we never considered it as a tool for operations. Overnight, as team members were was forced to work from home, it became our main tool of communication. We found that it was now possible to effectively and productively communicate with each other regardless of location. This was revelatory.

If there is a silver lining to downsizing our staff due to our COVID-based closure, we no longer have the problem of too many employees in one office space. Now there is room for a shared worktable, desktop laser printer, vinyl cutter, and meeting space. When we reopen and grow staff again, we plan to have “plop” spaces that can be shared among team members on different days—thus eliminating the need for so many desks in one space. Zoom has provided us the flexibility to reorganize and more effectively make use of our small office space.

During our temporary shutdown, another unintended use of our space emerged. The local symphony contacted us looking for a large space to safely hold practice sessions with their youth musicians. We made a portion of our outdoor area available to them once a week at no cost, working together to cross-promote our organizations through social media to area donors. After promoting this partnership in our e-newsletter, there was some confusion about the equitable use of our outdoor space from some of our members. If an outside group could use it, why couldn’t they? So, while the orchestra has continued to practice here, opening the museum’s outdoor area for special events or other reservation-only uses is under review.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused us to seriously rethink the expansion plan for our building, as we’ve realized creating more indoor office space is no longer the priority we once thought it was. It has also opened our eyes to other ways we can use our outdoor space moving forward, and the underlying equity issues involved in those decisions.

Collette Michaud is the CEO and founder of the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa, California.

Museum Guild 2021

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Tara MacDougall, Discovery Center at Murfree Spring

During pandemic pause and reset, four weeks into our closure to the public in April of 2020, we scanned our community for signals: what were the immediate needs and what was the long-term view? How could we strengthen our partnerships?

For years, Discovery Center (DC) had tossed around the idea of an “ambassadorial” group—young parents and caregivers who may not have the immediate financial capacity to be donors, but embrace play, accessibility, and inclusivity. This group would be in the tradition of supportive museum guilds of the past, but with a different mission and makeup. Our participation in the Cultural Competence Learning Institute (CCLI) was transformational in terms focusing our vision on creating change through incremental actions. However, until the pandemic pause, the ambassadorial group never materialized.

DC started exploring this model by surveying and having conservations with our members and guests. Following this outreach we were approached by Julie King, a dedicated member and passionate advocate for the Discovery Center. Like many of us saddened by the disparity and inequities revealed through the pandemic, Julie was determined to do something to make her community more welcoming to newcomers and create a space where families from diverse backgrounds could find a hub. While DC had long considered starting an ambassadorial group, her contributions sparked the transformation into what would become our Discovery Guild.

Within weeks, we held our first interest meeting and established the Discovery Guild with its own board of directors, consisting of seventeen community leaders, and a chair, who also serves a one-year term on the center’s board of directors. Naturally, that dedicated member and passionate advocate, who was the guild’s catalyst, is its inaugural president. Given the museum’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion and today’s ongoing national reckoning with racism, we wanted the guild board to reflect the diverse families we serve each day. It was also critical that the guild board hold the needs of the most under-resourced families at the heart of their outreach and fundraising efforts.

Discovery Guild leadership created the following mission statement: “The Discovery Guild is a network for families, caregivers and community leaders to connect and engage within the mission of Discovery Center. They embrace the vision of our local children’s museum to ‘value meaningful exchange on societal issues where understanding of science is essential’—and always in the spirit of tolerance, peace, and respect for cultural identities and diversity.” Through social networking and fundraising, the guild strengthens ties among the many communities who gather and learn at Discovery Center and bridges the gap to those communities we struggle to serve.

Guild co-creator and community volunteer Regina Ward had the following to say about her work with Discovery Guild:

“Being a part of forming the guild is one of the most exciting advocacy opportunities I have ever had. The hope and desire that this organization can not only help to fund the outstanding work of the Discovery Center, but also to open the minds and hearts of our community is outstanding. We have the ability to stretch the possibilities of play, education and wonder, in the lives of our youngest members of society, via equitable and shared experiences. All of which support the mission of DC, by engaging curious minds to fuel the future.”

At the Discovery Guild board’s second meeting, each member completed a survey to determine what area of the museum’s mission they would like to support and how their fundraising dollars would be allocated. The board decided almost unanimously to focus on DC’s diversity and inclusion efforts (free days, special needs nights, etc.). They also decided they would prefer dollars raised by guild fundraisers to be directed toward free memberships for underserved families and ensure that the center remains a hub for STEAM learning for every child regardless of any physical, cognitive, cultural, or economic circumstance. A community solicitation, launched in late February, will expand the guild beyond its founding board members. We plan to recruit from our whole community, as well as reach out to multicultural partners. With a guild that reflects the diversity of our community, we’ll share clear messaging about Discovery Center’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Discovery Guild is a key ingredient in Discovery Center’s development strategic plan to increase donor cultivation. The annual membership fee to join the guild is $25. Guild members are also charged with hosting an annual membership wine-and-cheese solicitation event and a major fundraiser each fall. However, this group will expand the role of the traditional museum guilds of the past. Meetings are filled with fresh, creative, and thought-provoking ideas. More important than the fundraising, the guild will have significant potential for creating more inclusive experiences, engaging more diverse visitors, and creating a brighter future for our regional children’s museum.

Prior to assuming the role of president and CEO of the Discovery Center at Murfree Spring in 2012, Tara MacDougall was a wealth management advisor with Northwestern Mutual.

The Future of Work: Putting Pivots into Practice and Examining How We Support Staff

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Kyrstin Hill, Creative Discovery Museum

For working parents of young children, finding quality, affordable, flexible childcare was already difficult before the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 2019 poll done by New York Times Parenting and YouGov, an international polling and marketing company, 28 percent of U.S. respondents reported childcare as being a “very significant financial strain,” with average costs consuming 37 percent of a family’s average household income. Now, almost a year into the pandemic, with limited capacities, unexpected closures, and tighter budgets, this challenge has not diminished.

Children’s museums across the country have a variety of different missions but most center on supporting children and families in their communities. But does that translate to supporting the children and families of those on staff? Is it possible? Can it be done equitably?

Those are some of the questions Creative Discovery Museum’s Babies at Work Task Force brought to the table in the fall of 2019. Historically, Creative Discovery Museum (CDM) has bolstered a family-first environment through its Children of Staff policy, which allowed staff members to bring their children, grandchildren, or siblings to work as long as productivity wasn’t disrupted.

“I always was very appreciative of the option to bring the kids with me when I needed to,” said Brianna Daignault, CDM’s membership coordinator and mother to Charlie (10) and Autumn (8). “The family-first mentality at CDM is amazing, especially in my department. As long as I was able to complete my work and be available, I could still be a mom.”

However, for obvious reasons, this accommodation typically applied to older children, not babies. I became pregnant in October 2018. I was eager to find a way to maximize time with my infant after my maternity leave ended. I was also eager to get back to a job I loved.

Research has shown that allowing parents to bring their babies to work has a wide variety of benefits for the health and well-being of the parent and the infant. Based on that research, coupled with the complete support from museum leadership, a policy was in development to allow parents and infants to clock in together. Near the end of 2019, two staff members in different departments, both parents of babies, were bringing their young ones to work with them on a regular basis. I was lucky enough to be one of them.

The task force began tackling the challenge of making the policy as equitable as possible across departments and among staff who did not have children. Based on a template from the Parenting in the Workplace Institute, the task force created a policy addressing topics such as crying babies and unhappy staff members. I was used as a test case to see if our policy could work. It did, but I had an office mostly to myself with a door—a luxury many staff members did not have. Equity remained our biggest challenge.

Then COVID hit. CDM closed to the public on March 14. Supporting working parents and their families was no longer an option: it had to happen. And for the majority of staff, it had to happen remotely.

Over time, the fears and logistical hurdles of remote work were alleviated. Staff continued to be productive, and in some cases, were even more productive. Weekly full staff meetings via Zoom created stronger internal communications. IT capabilities were assessed and modified to meet remote work needs of all staff. Paid sick leave was extended in the event that a staff member needed to care for themselves or a sick family member. In June 2020, CDM was lucky to be able to reopen to the public.

But for some staff members, returning to work at the museum created even more challenges. Many families opted to keep their kids at home to do remote schooling. Some schools and childcare centers were operating on flex schedules. In the first phase of re-opening, children of staff weren’t allowed to come to the museum for safety reasons.

“Since we were encouraged to work from home and my kids were already home, it worked out,” said Daignault. “But when I was needed on the floor more when we first re-opened, it was challenging. My kids were still out of school. I was relying heavily on my family for daycare.”

Daignault wasn’t alone. In keeping with the museum’s commitment to support children and families in our community, the museum launched Destination Discovery @ CDM (DD @ CDM), an academic support program from children in kindergarten through fifth grade. Certified teachers helped no more than ten students per museum “classroom” stay on top of their virtual schoolwork Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Parents could go back to work knowing that their children were in a learning-rich, safe environment where informal and formal learning worked together to help students succeed in an unfathomable school year. And DD@CDM family enrollees included CDM staff.

“Jay is currently in DD @ CDM three to four days per week,” said Amanda Ward, mother of Jay (8) and Sarah (2), and CDM’s museum educator and volunteer manager. “We are fortunate to have a place for Jay that is affordable and enables us to keep working full-time. Without DD @ CDM, I would probably only be able to work part-time.”

Staff members have been allowed flexible schedules to balance schooling and childcare at home with their responsibilities at the museum. Some job descriptions were renegotiated to allow staff to work fewer hours. For some staff, especially those with young children and infants, flexible scheduling provided significant peace of mind and completely removed the need for external childcare.

DD @ CDM has had more than 600 total registrations since launching in the fall of 2020. But with the vaccine and hopes of returning to a normal visitorship, the museum will lack the physical space to continue this program. And more staff will be needed back onsite to resume full operations.

So, does all of the work we’ve done to create a more flexible, supportive work environment go out the window? Or has COVID taught us that when there’s a will there actually is a way?

CDM’s future looks bright. In the spring of 2021, the museum’s $10M capital campaign, Ignite Discovery, will come to an end. We will begin comprehensive renovations of the entire facility in the summer. As a part of that overhaul, in February, administrative offices will move permanently to a building across the street from the museum. An entire office will be available for parents to utilize when they bring their young children or babies to work. Children of staff are once again allowed in the museum whether they are enrolled in a program or not.

CDM’s baby and child at work policies currently work only for administrative staff; making this equitable for all staff is difficult. In a perfect world, CDM would house onsite, free childcare for its employees. But the museum lacks the physical space and finances to bring this to fruition in the foreseeable future.

Flexible work works. With sufficient infrastructure, CDM continues to offer this option to its employees. A fully-remote administrative staff is not feasible today. However, learning from the flexible work models required by the pandemic, we can take steps toward a better balance.

Kyrstin Hill is the marketing and communications manager at the Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

An Ongoing Journey of Healing

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Julia Bland, Louisiana Children’s Museum

Our venture into the world of mental health support began September 12, 2001 when I called Andy Ackerman, then director of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (CMOM). It was the day after 911, and he was already arranging to bring grief counselors into the museum, a perceived “safe place,” to help parents process the international disaster. CMOM’s response was an example of compassion, relevance, and child-centeredness—a lesson I was glad to have learned when, four years later, our museum was struggling with another type of disaster, the Category 5 hurricane Katrina.

With CMOM’s help, we began a ten-year healing journey that included big doses of mental health support, even sharing our resources with three other hurricane-ravaged and flooded cities in need. In the process, we learned that children—even very young children—pick up on the anxiety and worry of their caregivers. Whether it stems from widely publicized events, like a terrorist attack or a natural disaster or a pandemic, or arises quietly from pernicious sources, such as family violence or poverty. No matter the cause, the anxiety is real. Children’s museums can help families understand the needs of young children and the roles of caring adults as we go through many challenges including those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The morning after the museum closed to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, I reached out to our partner at the Tulane Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health. We began mapping prioritized ways to reach local families in this time of great need. Ultimately, three projects emerged from this collaborative effort. First, our weekly Zoom series called In Dialogue, presented by various Tulane mental health experts, offered information on topics such as maintaining kids’ friendships while social distancing; the ABCs of trauma; self-compassion and mindfulness; promoting healthy sleep; and parental self-care. Second, we developed a set of resources called “Building Resilience,” a tip sheet with links to nearly forty additional resources for guidance. Finally, we created a new initiative called The First 1,000 Days, designed to help parents grow into their important role as their child’s most important caregiver.

Additionally, when the museum closed its doors to the public, we opened them to a nearby charter school, welcoming 120 Pre K and K students to use our facility and grounds as their school for seven months of the school year, ensuring in-person education and the joy that comes with going to school in a children’s museum.

Having weathered a variety of disasters since that call to CMOM in 2001, we’ve been rethinking our role as a children’s museum. We have learned a lot about caring for our families—both in our community and on our staff. How do we take heart and comfort our weary souls while telling our children that “it’s going to be ok” even when we don’t always believe our own words? What can we do as a welcoming community institution, even a temporarily closed one? Each museum follows a different path, but for Louisiana Children’s Museum, which in 2019 completed a thirteen-year project to build a new museum, only to close it six months later due to the pandemic, the focus remains true: finding meaningful ways to help families replace fear, loss and uncertainty with information and straight talk a parent can use to navigate everyday life in good times and bad.

Julia Bland has served as the executive director of the Louisiana Children’s Museum in New Orleans for the past twenty-four years.

Cross-Institutional Study of Virtual Programming: What Do Parents Want Now?

By Scott Burg & Claire Quimby, Rockman et al

Children’s museums need actionable data from audiences to plan virtual programs during this pandemic. However, few large-scale surveys gathering such data have been administered to date. At Rockman et al, a research and evaluation company based in Oakland, California, we wanted to address this issue. In the fall of 2020, we approached Carol Tang, CEO at the Children’s Creativity Museum, to conduct a pro bono survey on behalf of Bay Area children’s museums to learn more about how their guests view virtual museum programming for children. Survey questions, developed in collaboration with museum CEOs, covered program content and formats as well as children’s age and school or care situation.

We soon expanded the opportunity to include any interested museums in the member network of the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). Ultimately, thirteen museums participated by distributing the online survey to their audiences. We prepared real-time web reports to provide participating museums with immediate access to the survey results. Over 950 responses were collected between November 2020 and January 2021. The majority came from the Minnesota Children’s Museum, Chicago Children’s Museum, Bay Area Discovery Museum, and Explora (Albuquerque). Additionally, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis incorporated a subset of the questions in their own survey and shared those results with us.

While our deeper analysis of the data has just begun, results clearly show that parents are quite divided in their interest in virtual programming from children’s museums.

Percentages indicating no/slight interest in virtual programs for their child were even with those indicating moderate/high interest. Sixty-two percent of those with moderate/high interest indicated they would be willing to pay for programs. We also found that a child’s age was not a driving factor in determining interest: parents of two- and three-year-olds were just as likely to be interested in virtual programming as parents of seven and eight-year-olds—a surprise given the different attention spans of children these ages.

Interest does appear to be linked to the child’s school or care situation, however. Parents of children attending in-person school or daycare expressed less interest in virtual programs than those who attend school online, which begs the question: Will families continue to seek virtual programming after the pandemic ends? We invited open-ended feedback for participants to explain their current interest levels. Those with greater interest in virtual programs said they wanted to provide their child with a diversity of meaningful educational experiences. They also seek programming that is developmentally appropriate and provides for safe socialization opportunities with other children. Those who were less inclined towards virtual museum programming were most concerned about excessive screen time, lack of attention span, or the age of their children.

Parent’s screen time concerns are warranted. The majority of parents with children ages seven and up said their child was getting more than three hours of screen time per day. If they are going to take part in virtual programs, parents indicated a strong preference for programs that require active participation rather than a passive experience. This was especially true of parents whose children are attending school virtually. It was also interesting to note that most participants didn’t care if programs were designed to align with in-school learning (excepting the small number of responses from parents of children ages thirteen+).

These are just a few of our findings, and there is much to learn from this dataset. You can find further analysis through our website (https://bit.ly/3o3KC4I).

Scott Burg is senior research principle and Claire Quimby is research associate at Rockman et al, a research and evaluation company based in Oakland, California.

The Future of Membership Programs

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

Q&A with Jane Greenthal, Project Coordinator,
Harvard Business School Association of Northern California Community Partners

Convened by the Lawrence Hall of Science, the Bay Area Science and Children’s Museum Consortium (SCMC) is as a loose coalition that formed following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent “stay-at-home” order in California. SCMC currently includes eleven institutions, ranging widely in terms of budgets (from $2 to $70 million), earned revenues (from $1.5 to $20 million), and annual visitors (from 100,000 to 800,000).

Initially made up of institutions focused on high-touch experiences, consortium conversations ranged from advocacy to day-to-day operations. Of particular interest were membership models and how each institution was handling the change in demand for traditional membership services, e.g. free admission. Several institutions had already been looking into alternative models.

This sparked questions that led the group to seek advice from the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California Community Partners (HBSCP), soon leading to a partnership to explore membership models in a post-Covid world.

HBSCP serves about fifty different nonprofits each year, providing pro bono consulting and advisory services through about 200 HBS alumni volunteers in the Bay Area. Over the past thirty-five years, clients have included social-service nonprofits focused on families and children, housing, food security, healthcare, homelessness, and education, as well as cultural organizations such as museums and performing arts organizations.

What follows is a Q&A with HBSCP Project Coordinator Jane Greenthal and some of the project team members. They share what they discovered about how museums are adapting traditional membership models to meet today’s needs.

What new museum membership models have you examined?

We looked at several other museums nationwide. The monthly subscription model is new but seems to be gaining notice. The Dallas Museum of Art added a Kids Club at a $50 annual fee atop their regular membership for digital access to children’s online programming and events. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has several add-ons, including digital access, for additional fees. The Brooklyn Museum has offered shorter term options, such as six-month memberships. We looked at time-based pricing for admission, and joint museum memberships as well.

Are there membership models from other types of organizations that bear relevance to museum models?

Subscription models have been sweeping the business world. So many more people are now not only digitally connected but also digitally accessing many of the services once delivered on a single transaction basis, e.g., movies, car services, or toothpaste. Subscription models appear to increase the connection the consumer feels to the provider and also the amount of information the producer/company/museum has about what the customer wants and enjoys, allowing the provider to better tailor services.

What have you learned from regional membership managers about the current state of memberships? What do people want from a membership now?

For the most part, memberships have been relatively transactional, especially for children’s museums. New memberships are traditionally gained onsite, when a visitor realizes that a membership is a better “deal” than paying a single-entry fee. Memberships, for the most part, have been priced this way as well.

With the pandemic, museum visits obviously fell dramatically, throwing into question their value. Most museums reacted by extending the memberships for the period of their closures to the public, or longer. However, these extensions didn’t address the fundamental assumption that membership value was tied to onsite visits. Many institutions shifted to creating a digital presence, but found charging for online content challenging given the availability (and expectation) of similar content free elsewhere. Moreover, demand began to weaken as parents didn’t want more screen time for their kids. While families still want place-based experiences, decoupling memberships from museum visits provides new opportunities to add value in terms of content and outreach not limited by geography.

How do museums determine and communicate the value of their memberships? How should they?

There’s great interest in a membership model that is more subscription-based than the traditional annual renewal model; however, this ups the ante on what value you provide beyond a discount on museum visits. This is where children’s and science museums could learn from fine arts museums that have cultivated members with intangible benefits such as shared mission and status, as well as access to exclusive content, events, and experiences. Creating more emotional value can also enhance loyalty and philanthropy.

Museums in the project range widely in terms of budget, size, attendance, key audiences as well as content. Traditionally, people join different types of museums for different reasons. Art museum memberships may be associated with use but also status and tend to have a longer renewal life, while children’s museum memberships are highly transactional and have a short life (children age out quickly). In what ways are all membership programs in this project’s scope similar? How will you identify and account for differences?

Membership strategies for family-focused museums are moving away from patronage models towards monthly subscription models—the latter being more relevant to children’s museums, where the visiting population stays for only a few years. In contrast, art museums may have non-resident and life-long members.

A number of subscription initiatives are already taking place: A group of eleven children’smuseums in Northern California has developed new monthly membership models, at $25 permonth per person and $60 per family.

In another post-Covid development, regional subscription-based membership programs often include online reciprocity components. These appear successful because online costs are much lower and leave room for discount incentives on shared virtual tours and children camps.

Our study revealed that all SCMC members are interested in monthly subscription models in some form. We identified three main reasons:

1) Subscription models allow much better targeting of new populations. For example, a large SCMC member experimented with the data they gathered to increase participation of lower economic demographics—with demonstrable success.

2) In this digital age, monthly subscription models give their promoters a much-increased ability to understand their members’ priorities.

3) Families are key to all SCMC members. They all have a strong education orientation and need membership programs oriented towards families—even though they may also have corporate programs catering to employees of Bay Area companies. Not all SCMC members have such corporate membership programs. Monthly subscription programs, on the other hand, are likely to be developed by all SCMC members.

Were you surprised to learn anything about how museums operate, particularly related to memberships?

How small membership revenues were as a percentage of total revenues for some. There’s also an obvious overlap between membership and development, but they were distinct functions in many institutions with some missed opportunities to share data and collaborate.

Will new membership models specifically help museums through the pandemic and recovery? Or will they have application for a longer future?

We’re predicting that many institutions will begin to experiment with new membership models, more likely as adding to, rather than replacing, current annual models. This could include less expensive monthly subscriptions for lower income and otherwise underrepresented audiences. Compared to full-price annual memberships, these may be limited by number of visits, number of family members admitted, or limits on visits on the most crowded days. We may also see digital-only subscriptions or lower-priced memberships for non-resident members.

The additive upside we see for the subscription model is that it is less transactional, i.e., “I join because I get something tangible such as visits, in-person lectures and tours, or merchandise discounts, etc.” Non-traditional membership models have the opportunity to be based more on identification with the museum’s mission, values, or cause.

Project team members included: Jane Greenthal, Rita Koselka, SB Master, Qingxi Wang, Etienne Deffarges, Arthur Hindman, Helena Geng, and Jim Mills.

Welcoming the Neighbors

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Carol Tang, PhD, Children’s Creativity Museum

Over the past few years, the Children’s Creativity Museum (CCM) has grown dramatically; both attendance and overall budget have increased by more than 50 percent since 2015. We diversified our earned income streams to benefit from the tourists and convention travelers that visit our San Francisco neighborhood. That financial foundation allowed us to offer 60 percent of our field trips for free to Title 1 schools and free admissions to thousands of families through Museums for All, library passes, and free memberships to community organizations and families.

Since our closure on March 12, 2020, those carefully built financial foundations have disappeared—and perhaps will not return until 2025 when tourism and business travel are projected to fully rebound. However, the other foundations we built around our values, equity, and inclusion during the same time period are even more valuable than the financial ones and provide us with a clear path for rebuilding: focus on the neighborhood.

A June 2020 member survey indicated that 28 percent of respondents usually walked to the museum. Many of them visited many times a month—one member came more than 200 times in a single year! This high proportion of very local visitation will provide a base as CCM explores reopening to the public. Meanwhile, the 37 percent of members who reported coming by public transportation may now be uncomfortable with that mode of travel, as well as further impacted by the elimination of weekend service for some time to come.

CCM is located in a dense, urban neighborhood in downtown San Francisco with few open spaces or opportunities for play or social gathering. The museum sits in a green oasis, Yerba Buena Gardens, which has a playground, free live-music venues, and planted landscapes. With the recent construction of high-rise luxury residences, this rapidly-changing neighborhood has evolved from being one of the poorest districts in San Francisco to one of the highest-income ones in just five years. Yet, on average, 84 percent of the children in the four public schools within a mile of CCM are socio-economically disadvantaged. Among the low-income families who have remained in the neighborhood are hundreds of school children who face housing insecurity. In fact, when CCM was founded more than twenty years ago (as Zeum), it was in response to an earlier community redevelopment project that displaced many low-income, blue collar, and immigrant residents. This change left many children and families with few out-of-school learning activities, particularly technology-based ones at a time when most low-income families had no access to computers. Today, our neighborhood has been designated a Filipino Cultural Heritage District, named SOMA Pilipinas, to preserve some of its rich history.

By returning our focus to serving our local community, we can not only think more deeply about engaging all families within walking distance, but also apply and track our own theory of change based on developmental research. This research posits that the more time children spend doing creative activities with caring adults, the more likely the museum is to achieve our desired outcome of building “creative confidence and creative collaboration.” In a neighborhood where families come from an extremely wide income spectrum, CCM may become a hub where children grow up together and help each other to thrive.

Finding the silver lining in a pandemic, we are adapting. We are replacing our focus on boosting visitation numbers and earned income from (now absent) tourists and one-time visitors with pursuing equity strategies for neighborhood families. How can we engage families in the museum, at home, and in the surrounding Yerba Buena Gardens setting? By finding more open-ended activities that serve multiple generations and multiple ages, bringing families back again and again. By re-examining our membership, pricing structures, and fundraising strategies to equitably serve both high- and low-income families. By providing a place for people to re-learn how to create things together and thrive in the local communal spaces now available to them.

In January, we were honored with an award for Excellence in Community Engagement by our local business improvement district. While we know that we need to re-consider our entire business model, we are building on the formerly sustainable pre-pandemic foundations and finding new solutions to put our neighborhood visitors at the center of our work. We expect this new focus to give us renewed energy as a museum for years to come.

Carol Tang, PhD, has been the executive director of the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, California, for six years.

Building a Bigger Purpose

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Kerry Falwell, Explorations V Children’s Museum

When the pandemic hit and local businesses here in Lakeland, Florida, began to close, Explorations V Children’s Museum leadership staff and the board looked for something to serve as our institutional lighthouse. Our organization was in the midst of a capital campaign to build a new museum, and needed a broadly informed document to guide hard decisions about what programs and offerings to cut, change, or move to virtual in the present while continuing to plan for the future. When George Floyd was murdered, leadership once again found ourselves without a clear way to express to the community the museum’s stance that all children deserve equitable access and that Explorations V is committed to anti-racist practice.

The work that followed became a board, community, and staff directive to re-define the mission and guiding principles of the institution. The first decision was to develop a new mission statement to serve as an anchor and guide for the work of the museum. In October 2020, the board adopted the following new mission:

Curating the world for all children to explore.

The next step was to develop a set of standards to inform all decisions and justify resource allocation. These guiding principles serve as a contract between the museum and the community we serve. If these principles are lived daily, the museum will enact its mission.

The seven guiding principles:

• We educate through exploration – Children learn when they engage their senses. We provide a nurturing environment where children can engage in experimental risks. Our offerings encourage creativity, exploration, problem solving, flexibility, and thoughtfulness.
• We welcome all children – Our commitment to inclusion means all offerings of the Museum reflect the community we serve. Children deserve a safe place in which to explore in a developmentally appropriate environment.
• Our people are our secret sauce – We are a diverse team. The Board of Directors provides guidance and insight, while our expertly trained Staff operate a world-class facility, supported by a team of Volunteers committed to helping children grow. We support our people to ensure they are safe, engaged in the Mission, and set up for success.
• We are here to stay – We will continue to be a centerpiece in Central Florida. We are committed to sound operational management, perpetual and sustainable renewal of our exhibits and grounds, and a continual improvement model for our educational offerings.
• We serve our community – We will adapt to the needs of those we serve to engage all members of our evolving community. Communication of programs, improvements, and opportunities to engage with our work will be consistent, clear, and timely.
• Our children are safe and secure – We offer a safe place – an island – where children and parents can be confident that the facilities, staff, programs, and exhibits are held to the highest standards when it comes to the safety of our guests.
• We serve the whole family – Educating children means serving and supporting their ecosystem of caregivers. Our facilities, exhibits, and programs will be welcoming for all members of the family. Family focused programs will be provided to support parents and caregivers in areas of their lives that impact their ability to support the child.

For example, looking at our existing literacy initiative through the lens of the new guiding principles, it became clear the museum was honoring content and not creators. We saw that titles long been considered staples in teaching diversity to young children were all written by white authors. Directly informed by guiding principle #5 (We serve our community), we reimagined this initiative to feature diverse authors, people who reflected our community and spoke in the many voices of those around us.

Learning to work within the guiding principles is an ongoing challenge. It is hard to examine things that appear to be working, based on traditional measures, and see that, in a new light, changes are needed. For example, when nominating new members to our board of directors, the board built a demographics dashboard to visualize the gaps in their own representation. They then sought to include leaders who share a passion for the museum and who also identify with a non-represented group. This insures guiding principle #4, “We are here to stay.”

These changes may or may not have happened without the impacts of the pandemic. Maybe, after years of meetings and focus groups, we would have re-defined our purpose or tweaked things here or there. But the pandemic forced our hand; the stakes have never been higher. We were forced to be clear on what the museum stood for in order to determine what was most important to protect with whatever resources we had left. We did not have that clarity before, but we do now. And this clarity was motivated by the need to respond efficiently and purposely to a pandemic and social unrest.

Explorations V closed to the public on March 13, 2020. We were asked by Department of Children and Families to provide emergency care for children of essential workers, which we began on March 17th and continued through mid-August. Scrambling to operate this much-needed program was supported by all of our guiding principles.

The museum reopened to the public on September 1, 2020, under our new, COVID-response-based SAFETY + KINDNESS Reopen Play Plan. The brandmark appears throughout the building and on our website/social any time we have augmented the program or space for COVID safety concerns. (#6 safe and secure). The work continues. A clean, vibrant, and compelling mission, along with clearly articulated guiding principles, have created the lighthouse needed to navigate in this storm, and the ones to come. But, in fact, these changes, tough as they may be to implement, have energized the board and fundamentally changed how they act. In our ongoing capital campaign, we now state that Explorations V is not just building a bigger place, we’re building a bigger purpose.

Kerry Falwell has been the CEO of Explorations V in Lakeland, Florida, for three years. Prior to this, she was the director of education at the Glazer Children’s Museum in Tampa.

Programs Multiply As Reach Expands

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Joe Cox, Museum of Discovery and Science

Friday the 13th of March 2020 should have been the 25th Annual Bank of America Wine, Spirits & Culinary Celebration here at the Museum of Discovery and Science (MODS) in Fort Lauderdale. During this wonderful evening, almost 2,000 guests come together to celebrate the work of the museum and raise funds to support our accessibility programs. Instead, the fundraiser was cancelled, marking the beginning of one of the most challenging periods in our forty-three-year history.

Faced with the prospect of being closed for months, our team rose to the challenge of continuing our mission of “connecting people to inspiring science”—only now, through innovative virtual programming. Two days after we closed, we transformed our exhibit floors into a video production studio. In that first week, we produced forty-five STEM learning videos focused on our four strategic pillars of Environmental Sustainability, Physical Science, Health & Wellness and Early Childhood Education.

Using those initial videos and supporting activity guides, we worked with our local school district to create eight weeks of PreK–12 curriculum to support their virtual learning programs. The “MODS Challenge” allows students, teachers and to solve real-world problems through STEAM content and project-based learning. During a time when distance learning is at the forefront, this partnership-developed curriculum bolsters 21st century skills, including creativity, critical thinking, design, teamwork, leadership, risk-taking, and perseverance. Additionally, each week’s challenge offers selected readings for every grade level and access to some of the IMAX® films in MODS’ library of documentaries.

Our partnership with Broward County Public Schools, a district serving over 250,000 students, was key to our success. Superintendent Robert W. Runcie stated, “Our District values the strategic relationship we have with the Museum of Discovery and Science. The MODS Challenge is just one example of how we are working to transform virtual education with real-world activities that engage students while supporting their ongoing learning.”

The success of the “MODS Challenge” encouraged us to reimagine physical events into virtual experiences and to launch INSPIRE (INnovative STEAM Programs in Remote Education) as a new way of providing ongoing engagement with students and professional development for teachers not just locally, but around the world.

Held each May at MODS, Eye of the Storm is traditionally a hurricane awareness and preparedness day that welcomes 3,500 visitors. Recognizing the importance of this programming in South Florida, we worked with our partners at Florida International University’s International Hurricane Research Center and the Florida Division of Emergency Management to produce a twelve-episode, “Eye of the Storm” video series that has now been viewed over 300,000 times. The production brought together dozens of our community partners as well as other museums in hurricane prone regions, the Science Museum of Virginia, and the Louisiana Children’s Museum.

“Wise Bodies” has been a successful assembly program over the past two years that addresses the critical issue of HIV/AIDS awareness in Broward County Public Schools. As a result of the pandemic, our partners at Aids Healthcare Foundation worked with us to create a virtual version including a supporting educational curriculum that is hosted on the School District’s learning platform.

Each of these programs was generously supported by our board members, private foundations, and corporate donors. Our approach overall was to secure funding to present the programs at no cost to our viewers or program recipients. We are continuing this approach with the launch of our new STEMobile, a new mobile museum makerspace

designed for the many schools and families not able to get to the museum as a result of the pandemic. Our goal is to raise funds to deliver free programs to 50,000 children over the coming year.

Whether at the museum (we reopened December 1 and are seeing about 40 percent of our 2019 attendance), virtually (900,000 views of our content and counting) or through our community outreach programs, our mission has never seemed more critical, and our role in helping to reverse the “COVID slide” more timely. Our role at the Museum of Discovery and Science is to connect people to inspiring science and encourage young people to pursue STEM careers, building a workforce that is ready to solve future challenges.

Joe Cox is president & CEO of the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Expanding the Earned Income Menu: Camps, Seasonal Fun, Family Play

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Beth Fitzgerald, The Magic House

The Magic House, St. Louis Children’s Museum, opened in 1979. Our founders created an earned income driven organization with a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and for the first fifteen years, we did virtually no fundraising. Admission fees were kept low to encourage attendance. This strategy worked well until the early ’90s, when St. Louis experienced two consecutive years of flooding during peak tourism season. At that time, a very wise board of directors felt it was time to focus on fundraising. Since then, about 20 percent of our income is contributed, and 80 percent comes from a wide variety of earned income sources.

Then 2020 happened. We quickly realized the importance of our long-term relationships with regional donors as well as with a local bank that helped us navigate and secure a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. That said, it became immediately apparent that we needed to focus on sustainability. In character, we took an entrepreneurial approach to survival and began looking for new ways to fill community needs, remain relevant, and generate revenue.

Museums in St. Louis were only closed to the public for three months. In mid-June, all the major museums in our region reopened with strict protocol documents in place approved by city or county health departments, to ensure safe operations during COVID-19. These protocols included greatly reduced capacity numbers—basically 25 percent. We never reached that number. And because we had extended memberships by three months (like most museums), we had no renewal membership income.

So, we began looking for earned income outside of admission and membership fees. First, we made the controversial decision to offer summer camp programs at both our main location and our downtown satellite. In both places, parents were more than eager for their children to have play, creativity, and social interaction back in their lives after being isolated at home. We abided by all the new CDC protocols for schools; divided each class in half, with a maximum of eight to ten children per room; added plexi-barriers to tables; and converted lower interest exhibit galleries into classrooms. We filled all our camps and had no positive COVID cases among educators or campers.

In early August, regional school districts announced that children would continue to learn virtually from home or be in a hybrid model through at least the first quarter of the new school year. We quickly converted our summer camp to an in-person camp to support virtual learning. Approximately 120 K-5 students enrolled in our Fall Learning Camp, in which museum staff assisted children with their online school classes and provided support for asynchronous learning. Our museum café provided “school lunches” and museum educators provided daily hands-on enrichment experiences. Outdoor play spaces were used for “recess” and campers played in indoor exhibits every day. It was a big learning curve, but everyone pulled together and the parents and children were very grateful. The Learning Camp generated about $150,000 in new revenue, while at the same time filling an important community need.

Families, desperately seeking a sense of normalcy while still wanting to ensure the their children’s health, were behind the launch of private playtimes outside of normal visiting hours. From 9 to 10 a.m. each weekend day, a family of up to six could rent one eighth of the museum for $100. (Due to contact tracing responsibilities, a family was defined as a group of people who lived together.) In addition, we offered Picnic and Play times on Friday evenings. Limited to ten families at a time, families had the museum to themselves for two hours—with a picnic dinner provided to eat outside—again for $100 per family.

To drive attendance and meet families where they were comfortable, we expanded our outdoor experiences. Sandcastle Beach remained open the entire summer instead of the usual six weeks. Our September Safety Town exhibit became Trick or Treat Town in October and then Gingerbread Village for the holidays. While we typically do not offer special holiday programs, this year we offered a Visit with Santa in an outdoor sleigh with social distancing built in. Close to 1,000 families made reservations at $15 per visit, allowing more than 3,000 children to experience this holiday tradition. With no corporate after-hours holiday rentals this December, we created other evening events complete with twinkling lights, an outdoor Snowball Carnival, story time with cookies and milk, plus an added S’mores experience. Attendance was set at a maximum of 150 and we sold out most of the twelve nights, raising more than $30,000.

With a staff-wide entrepreneurial spirit and a deep-seated commitment to save The Magic House for future generations, we survived 2020 with no new debt and with new earned income sources in place that would never have been considered under other circumstances. We plan to offer more holiday programming and private playtime events in the future and we will continue to offer more outdoor-themed experiences year-round.

Would any of us want to live through 2020 again? No! But there were certainly “diamonds” that emerged from the pressure of the situation that will continue to benefit our earned income base in years to come.

Beth Fitzgerald has been the president of The Magic House, St. Louis Children’s Museum for over forty years.

Look and Listen: Taking a Chance on New Partnerships

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand.
Click here to read other articles in the issue.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest—unless an external force acts upon the object.

—The Law of Inertia

Back in March 2020, COVID-19 swept through the country unlike any force in recent times, essentially breaking the children’s museum industry, and our inertia, overnight. Exhibit floors fell silent. Too many beloved museum personnel lost their jobs. Our future became uncertain, bewildering, scary.

How does a children’s museum, a place-based institution where people congregate, achieve its mission during a pandemic? Every museum has confronted this same question with its own unique set of circumstances. For the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the answer has been to embrace our newfound state of “rest”—to slow down, even stop, and give ourselves the time and space to innovate so that we can one day go fast again. As a result, we decided almost immediately not to focus our energy and resources on reopening to limited attendance, burdensome COVID restrictions, and an untenable expense profile. Instead, we would seek long-term, transformative change through synergistic partnerships with people and organizations whose skills and reach far exceed ours.

The past ten months of public closure have been both devastating and liberating, providing an unprecedented opportunity for renewal, experimentation, and risk-taking. We’ve enjoyed the freedom to be open to new possibilities, especially by mining our extended network for opportunities. And sometimes it all starts with a simple exploratory conversation. In one example, through staff connections we were able to forge a new partnership with a local artist and performer, Wes Tank, whose videos rapping Dr. Seuss books to Dr. Dre beats went viral early in the pandemic. Tank now produces “Story Raps” content for streaming service Kidoodle.TV entirely at our museum—using our exhibits, props and playful environment as inspiration for his work. We are also planning joint content and events for virtual and (eventually) in-person audiences.

The museum and Tank share the same values and target audience. His reach and popularity as an emerging streaming media star are very attractive to the museum—just as our facility and constant stream of visitors are very attractive to him. Together, we are stronger, more relevant, and have more opportunities than we would have individually… and that’s the magic of synergistic partnerships. Would we have even identified, much less explored, this possibility if we had been open to the public or working feverishly towards reopening? I doubt it.

Slowing down also provided much more freedom to think, listen, and read. While COVID hasn’t stopped the relentless barrage of emails, voicemails, messages, and social media, we can pay attention to that data differently now, with an eye towards discovering new opportunities. And we’ve found some gems.

In late spring, for example, I received an email from someone at an exhibit company I didn’t know. The first sentences were a bit salesy in tone, but I read it carefully even though I thought it would be a waste of time. It wasn’t. That email seeded a licensing agreement in which the exhibit company is now marketing, selling, and fabricating two of our flagship exhibits in every market worldwide except for North America. While it’s early, I am optimistic that the long-term passive income possibilities will transform the museum’s finances—all because I slowed down and read my email carefully.

In addition to slowing down and widening our gaze, the museum has also been careful to know our limitations and seek partnerships to fill our deficits. Like most children’s museums, our superpower is that we understand kids and the importance of play; we are experts at translating that knowledge into fun, educational experiences on our exhibit floors. When the pandemic shuttered museums and exiled families to an extended quarantine, our natural inclination was to “go virtual,” to somehow repackage an intensely three-dimensional experience into small, two-dimensional rectangles on a screen. But as creative as the staff at Betty Brinn are, I knew immediately that we lacked the expertise to make a high-quality pivot to virtual. So, we searched for a partner with an overlapping mission but very different skill set. That’s how we found GLOMADO (GLObal MAkers and DOers), the educational technology company that became our partner in bringing live, interactive, virtual workshops to children anywhere in the world.

Our new virtual learning platform, Play in the Cloud, offers a rich array of hands-on workshops led in real time by instructors around the world. Teachers are increasingly using it to enrich their curricula and as field trip alternatives. Right now, almost all of the usage is schools—many in underserved communities—and it’s 100 percent free for them thanks to funding. This program has established a new avenue for fundraising not only for schools, but eventually for families. The platform’s real value will grow over time, especially in a post-COVID world when virtual engagement becomes a valuable option instead of the only choice. If that reality comes to be—and I’m optimistic that it will—this strategic partnership will transform the museum into a global institution with no boundaries. And that, ironically, would be thanks to COVID.

These are just a few examples of how the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum is innovating our way through crisis. With the pandemic raging on, our industry’s “new normal” probably won’t be clear until 2022. That means for better AND for worse, we all have more time to explore the possible. Opportunities are out there. We just have to slow down, widen our gaze, and look for them.

Brian King has served as the executive director of the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, since 2019.

Supporting Children’s Learning When and How They Need it

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Patti Reiss, Mississippi Children’s Museum

Mississippi Children’s Museum’s (MCM) Launch into Learning (LIL) program provides tutoring, afterschool, and day camp services. LIL developed organically out of our successful summer camp, in response to our community’s critical fall need for childcare and educational resources.

With COVID-19 recommendations in place, MCM started its traditional summer camp program at the beginning of June 2020. It was the first time that children had been on the grounds of the museum since Sunday, March 1, when we closed to the public. MCM hosted a full eight weeks of camp while operating regular museum hours with a capacity limited to 250 visitors at a time. By August, schools began announcing their plans for fall—some opting to start in-person, others postponing start dates, and still others adopting hybrid or virtual models.

During the last week of camp, a group of campers’ parents approached the museum about hosting afterschool programming in the fall. They had recently been notified that their previous aftercare option was no longer available, highlighting the sudden urgency for childcare that many parents faced. MCM staff knew if they could successfully run day camps during a pandemic, they could certainly host many of the same children for just a few hours every afternoon.

Discussions began about implementing an afterschool program. Less than a week later, the Jackson Public School District (JPS), Mississippi’s largest public school system and MCM’s home district, announced that their classes would be virtual for the first four weeks of the semester—a timeline that quickly evolved into the entire fall. Many JPS children already faced increased academic challenges after losing nearly a semester in the classroom in early 2020. Underserved students who lacked access to technological resources, faced even more critical challenges.

One of MCM’s longstanding community partners, Stewpot Community Services, a local nonprofit organization that helps families in need, was already providing childcare services to a group of JPS families. However, Stewpot’s facility was not equipped to handle COVID-19 distancing measures, or provide the technological support to fifty virtually-learning elementary students. The museum had the space, the tools, and a staff trained to work with children on educational, social, and emotional learning. In previous years, the museum had talked with schools about starting afterschool care but had never worked directly with the school districts until COVID demanded new solutions for ongoing challenges. Now, together, we realized we could give children a remarkable experience.

Launch into Learning began in August with a dozen students, allowing MCM to continue regular but still limited daily museum visitation. By the first week of October, the program had grown to serve more than eighty students daily. MCM pivoted operations, delivering Launch into Learning during the week and opening the museum to members and visitors on the weekends.

LIL students are grouped by grade level in learning pods of eight children each. Their teachers provide curriculum content for them in the mornings. The museum then delivers additional STEM, art, and physical education activities in the afternoons. Sixty percent of the students have a diagnosed learning disability; 75 percent come from underserved families. For many of them, museum school has changed their outlook on learning. It is amazing to see students from fifteen different schools in the same district build connections among a broader network of children through shared topics that they would not have been exposed to previously.

The fall 2020 program was supported by the Mississippi Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER funds), supplemented by donations and a few tuition-paying families. The majority of participating students paid no fees.

MCM built relationships with individual teachers and parents, creating a circle of care for these students from school to museum to home. The parents entrusted MCM with their children, and the teachers put their faith and grace into our interactions. The program continued through Friday, January 15, 2021, having served more than 100 students from twelve JPS schools. With JPS students scheduled to return to in-person learning after ten months away from their schools, LIL is transitioning into an afternoon-only program.

Will Launch into Learning continue indefinitely? Public schools reopened for in-person learning on January 18, and everyone was thrilled to be back. Like many other COVID-based responses, the museum is taking it one nine-week program at a time right now. But we know that we are capable of using our expertise to provide all kinds of need-based learning programs as they arise—an opinion shared by many parents and now school district leaders, too.

Patti Reiss is director of museum experiences at Mississippi Children’s Museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

Taking Science Learning to New Places and People

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Neil H. Gordon, The Discovery Museum

From a professional point of view, responding to COVID-19 has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Every day brings decisions that involve the safety of staff and visitors, the livelihoods of employees, and both the short- and long-term viability of the museum. However, the pandemic has also forced us to be creative and devise ways of reaching children and families we never would have considered before. Some of these new approaches will help us address a challenge many museums face—getting playful learning experiences into the hands of more kids, especially those without access to them.

As a hands-on children’s museum, the mission of The Discovery Museum has always been carried out face-to-face, through child-directed exploration of our exhibits and grounds. Another important part of our work is what we do away from our campus, in schools. For twenty-eight years, the museum’s Traveling Science Workshops (TSW) program has brought hands-on science experiences to elementary and middle school students in their classrooms. Before schools closed due to the pandemic, we were projected to reach 46,000 children last year, up 20 percent from the previous year. We provide TSW free of charge to thousands of students in underperforming districts, where serving kids right in their classrooms is critical to reaching children of different backgrounds and experiences.

Like all of the museum’s programs, through hands-on exploration and experimentation, TSW’s goals are to improve students’ attitudes toward science, build their confidence as STEM learners, and help them recognize their own potential as scientists. At first it was hard to imagine how this could work in a socially-distanced world.

But when the museum closed to the public in March 2020, our educators immediately began working to adapt TSW to a digital format, in a way that preserves our inquiry-based approach to teaching science. In June, we piloted Virtual Traveling Science Workshops (VTSW), via Zoom webinar with eight classes of elementary students, all learning remotely from home. Our staff also worked with teachers and administrators in ten school districts, including many where we have a history of subsidizing programs, to refine the workshop delivery model and ensure they can be easily adapted to each district’s unique learning plan.

Our educators have been delivering virtual programs widely since October. Rather than present pre-recorded demonstrations, they actively engage students in real time, encouraging them to experiment with materials, ask questions, and make observations. As with our in-person programs, we still supply all the materials, only now we ship them to schools in advance, safely packaged for individual use.

As of the end of 2020, we had delivered ninety-five workshops to almost 1,500 students. Twenty-four percent of these workshops were fully subsidized—a fraction of our usual level, but a very clear proof of concept. In gathering feedback from teachers, we expected to hear some disappointment compared to the in-person programs. Happily, teachers have said things like this: “While this is a favorite program in person, given the times, I was impressed with how well it went over Zoom. The materials bags were perfect, and I was really impressed with how kids were engaged and really enjoyed the program. Thank you!” The surveyed teachers who experienced VTSW, unanimously endorsed VTSW, saying they would recommend it to a colleague.

We probably never would have developed VTSW if not for the pandemic. While we are not likely to replace TSW with VTSW, the virtual workshops have solved one of the museum’s long-standing challenges: TSW expansion constrained by the distance our teachers are able to travel from the museum. While we have grown within those limits, many districts, such as those within the Boston urban ring, were just too far away. VTSW has, in some ways, removed this barrier. In fact, we currently are not only able to reach those students “just out of reach,” but we have booked workshops in Georgia, suburban New York, and within New York City.

Over the years, as we have talked about how to reach more districts, we have considered satellite sites or “franchises,” but never virtual approaches. VTSW is the result of the museum staff’s willingness to try something new while staying very true to our guiding philosophy for all programs. Thanks to their creativity and dedication, we have significantly grown our potential audience for an important part of the Discovery Museum’s mission.

Neil Gordon has been CEO of the Discovery Museum in Acton, Massachusetts, since 2009. Prior to that he served as COO at Boston Children’s Museum for fourteen years.

Learning through and about Social Media

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By PAPALOTE Staff

On March 16, 2020, after PAPALOTE closed our venues in Chapultepec in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and Monterrey to visitors to help stop the spread of COVID-19, we made quick decisions to remain present and in contact with our audiences: children, families, and teachers. Like everyone else, we thought this extraordinary situation would last only a few weeks.

Within ten days, we created a microsite called PAPALOTE en Casa (PAPALOTE@Home), with articles, activities, videos, and health department updates for a predominantly urban audience equipped with digital devices and internet connections. We disseminated this free content through different social networks (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). Initially, our priority was to quickly generate useful content for families heading into confinement.

It soon became clear that our buildings would not reopen soon and that our primary audience contact would remain virtual indefinitely. We realized we needed to evaluate everything about the website, combining both quantitative and qualitative data to inform future directions.

A sampling of twenty weeks (March 26–September 15) of quantitative results revealed the following data about PAPALOTE@Home:

2.2 million visits
More than 610,000 users
30 percent of users were recurring
Average browsing per visit: two minutes.

Social networks participation broke down as follows:

17 million users reached
More than 724 total clicks and interactions
More than 5.7 million views on Facebook.
Facebook: Increase of 40,000 followers compared to 2019 (+6.6%).
Instagram: Increase of 7,000 followers compared to 2019 (+22%).

The numbers tell a powerful story, but we wanted to know more than the quantity of clicks or views. We wanted feedback on content, but also to know what people were feeling. Conducting opinion polls with a rigorous methodology was not feasible due to limited time and resources, especially with closed venues. Instead, we decided to carefully review the comments left by our digital community on social networks.

As of November, we had surveyed 12,000 opinions expressed by our social media followers. More than 70 percent (8,390 responses) of the comments were positive. Most of them congratulated the museum for helping families during confinement with activities specifically developed to carry out at home. Teachers appreciated the information about health and wellness.

What Have We Learned?

Successfully engaging with virtual audiences involves a lot more than simply presenting a museum’s content online. Our digital visitors are different from our physical visitors. Among physical visitors, 50 percent were families with preschoolers. But visitor ages have broadened for our new online programs. Further, parents expressed interest in activities that children can do on their own, without parents’ help, because they are working from home. As a result, we now offer activities for kids ages zero to five that require parents’ help, as well as programs for kids six to ten and ten to twelve that they can do on their own.

With our virtual programming, PAPALOTE entered the privacy of our users’ homes, becoming present in their daily lives. Users prefer content that is related to what they are experiencing day-to-day. Social media has the power to reach people who cannot physically visit our museums, but digital content goes beyond a virtual visit to the facilities. For example, we have learned that characters work better on social media than straight museum content. The PAPALOTE’s Facebook Live stream features characters, like Santiago, who has thirty-five stories to tell. Our recipe: keep it simple and homely, not fancy.

Based on all that we have learned, we are designing the new version of PAPALOTE at Home 2.0. We are doing more with less. In some ways, PAPALOTE was a victim of the “sparkling effect”—everything at the museum was beautiful and shiny. Now, sizing down our programs without sacrificing quality, our team is looking at what we have done well, and what we have not. What topics should we address next?

Best case scenario, PAPALOTE’s Chapultepec museum will open in late 2021. Reopening dates for our facilities in Monterrey and Cuernavaca have not been determined yet. Even after we are fully reopened, the digital community we created is here to stay.

WEB: papaloteencasa.org
FB: @PapaloteMuseo
IG: @Papalote_museo
Tw: @Papalote_museo

Doubling Down on DEI

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Dianne Krizan, Minnesota Children’s Museum

In May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed under the knee of a police officer eleven miles from Minnesota Children’s Museum (MCM). Despite being under a shelter-in-place order due to the pandemic, thousands of local protestors sparked a worldwide reckoning with the plague of systemic racism.

MCM staff and board were outraged by the inhumane treatment of Floyd, which was the latest (and sadly not last) killing of a Black man by police. As a predominantly white organization, many of us at MCM have the privilege of only seeing the ugly face of racism when a phone video broadcasts a blatant and tragic event. Our Black colleagues and community experience racism every day.

The events following George Floyd’s murder showed how far we need to go to reckon with racism—and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated inequities in our communities. While MCM has been focused on diversity and inclusion for years, with particular emphasis on racial equity, in 2020 we committed to deepening our DEI efforts in the long run.

Commitment to DEI

MCM’s strategic plan incorporates our DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) commitments, stating specific goals around diversity of staff, board, and audience, as well as a commitment to equitable access to the museum and to higher-touch programs for families with less access to resources.

Since 2014, the museum has participated in a collaboration among ten of the state’s largest arts and cultural organizations with a shared purpose to grow our individual and collective capacities as inclusive organizations. One of the outcomes has been co-investing our resources to jointly grow the intercultural competence of staff.

MCM staff take the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a cross-culturally valid, reliable, and generalizable measure of intercultural competence along the validated Intercultural Development Continuum. The continuum describes a set of orientations toward cultural difference and commonality that are arrayed from the more monocultural mindsets of Denial and Polarization through the transitional orientation of Minimization to the intercultural mindsets of Acceptance and Adaptation.

Staff then participate in different training opportunities, such as deepSEE Filter Shift. This program effectively supports staff in moving a full stage on the continuum towards a more intercultural mindset. Through a three-step process, we learn how to:

See self: conscious awareness of own filters
See others: nonjudgmental awareness of others’ filters
See approach: shift filters to be more effective

We have also incorporated the understanding of intercultural differences into our customer service training. Discussion and role-play scenarios reveal how race and bias can play out in service situations, including recognizing the cultural differences in communication styles from restrained to expressive and direct to indirect.

Our board of directors has recently taken the IDI to understand where they are developmentally as individuals and as a group, and are now determining next steps for growth.

More Action Needed for Racial Equity

In 2019, our board adopted a new DEI value statement that included stronger language around our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In part, it says:

“Given the reality that a history of exclusion and unfair treatment exists broadly in our community, our values compel us to be intentionally inclusive and welcoming of indigenous people and people of color. We are allies to marginalized groups.”

While we are proud of the attention given to DEI across the organization, the tragedy of Floyd’s killing caused us to ask, what does it mean to be an ally? Do we need to push further to tie activities to equity outcomes? Would alignment on outcomes help ensure our efforts are having an impact?

In learning more about allyship, the key insight was recognizing that ally is a verb, not a noun. Ally means taking action. How should MCM authentically support individuals and communities who have been marginalized?

Being an ally to marginalized communities includes being an equitable workplace. After evaluating staffing data from the past few years, in our pandemic down time, our newly focused internal equity lens has identified three outcomes:

Improve retention of BIPOC staff
Achieve 30 percent BIPOC representation on senior leadership (directors and up)
Adopt inclusion accountability standards for people leaders as part of performance evaluation

In addition to making internal progress on these three outcomes, we plan to share them publicly including the work we are committed to doing. As we recover from the pandemic, MCM is increasing our efforts to address equity and increase inclusivity. With new publicly-accountable DEI metrics in place, we are changing how we evaluate our success as an organization.

Dianne Krizan has served as the president of the Minnesota Children’s Museum in St. Paul since 2010.

Food Pantry Fulfills a Need and Opens a World of Possibilities

This article is part of the “Forged in Fire: New Models” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Steve Long, Children’s Museum of the East End

In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.” This adage aptly describes the Children’s Museum of the East End’s (CMEE) response to the pandemic’s unprecedented challenges. Located on the East End of Long Island in New York, the museum closed this spring to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. To ensure CMEE’s survival, we adapted, taking inspiration from the settlement house movement.

According to writer Jeffrey Scheuer, settlement houses are historically known for “institutionalized experimentation,” where decision-making is informed by an empirical assessment of their local community’s needs. Rather than superimpose a new element on their community, they function as glue bringing it together. Isn’t this a terrific description of a children’s museum?

While Long Island’s East End is widely known as “the Hamptons”—a summer retreat for the well-to-do—the museum’s community shares much in common with people served by today’s settlement houses. The year-round population has higher rates of poverty and substandard housing than the rest of Long Island, as well as a high immigrant population. Latinx students comprise over 50 percent of the population in East End school districts and a third of visitors to the children’s museum.

During the week following the museum’s March 2020 shutdown, staff and board focused on two primary questions: 1) How could the museum replace income lost due to the closure, which would total $750,000 by the time we reopened? 2) How could a “hands-on” museum continue to fulfill its mission “remotely”?

Faced with enormous economic volatility, we modeled a variety of budget contingencies to respond to the first question. But to answer the second question, we couldn’t determine what our stakeholders needed without asking them directly. So we developed an online survey in English and Spanish, which was emailed and texted to our outreach programming participants. Survey results revealed that the vast majority of respondents—more than 80 percent—had lost their jobs and were struggling to cope. Their overriding concerns were rent and food. CMEE launched several emergency initiatives to help families cope, including online support groups and programs. However, the museum’s most significant response has been a food pantry.

Almost every hamlet and village on the East End has its own food pantry. We initially anticipated guiding families to one in their specific area. However, we learned that in order to receive food, clients must prove residency in that hamlet or village; this requirement proved impossible for immigrant families already taking part in the museum’s outreach programming. Concerned about their naturalization applications, they did not want to provide contact information because they were afraid they would violate the “public charge” rule. Long an element of immigration law, tightening restrictions implemented in February 2020 widened the definition of what could be considered “public assistance,” which could be grounds for refusing citizenship. Despite the museum staff’s many attempts to allay these fears, the families made it clear they would go hungry before risking their immigration status.

If families were reluctant go to a food pantry, we needed to figure out how to bring the food pantry to them. With the help of a former museum trustee, the Bridgehampton Community Food Pantry agreed to offer curbside pickup of food for thirty families at the museum on March 31. Unfortunately, with skyrocketing demand and limited resources, that arrangement was short-lived. After failing to strike partnerships with any of the other food pantries, the museum decided to start its own “pop-up” food pantry in April. While a food pantry may seem to be outside the museum’s mission, if children are hungry, how can they play and learn?

Museum staff learned how to run a “socially-distant” food distribution center on the fly. Initially assuming we could rely on in-kind food donations, we quickly discovered that food pantries purchase the vast majority of food they distribute. We also underestimated the amount of staffing required to run it. Adding “food pantry manager” to our job descriptions, restaurants and other food pantries connected us with food service companies that began making weekly deliveries to the museum.

The biggest challenge was financial. Weekly food costs averaged $65 per family. Running a food pantry cost thousands of dollars each week out of a museum that was already losing $25,000 a week. The museum launched a “Food 2 Play” fundraising initiative. Major donors that had expressed little interest in simply subsidizing the museum’s lost revenue were far more eager to help with “Food 2 Play.” Asking donors to help the museum simply survive the pandemic was ineffective. We needed to be positioned as “first responders” helping vulnerable families through the crisis. Numerous corporations, philanthropists, and foundations began funding food banks and pantries. Leveraging a substantial portion of this support, CMEE raised more than $300,000 specifically for Food 2 Play and other COVID response initiatives in 2020.

Ordering and paying for the food was the first step; figuring out how to get it to families presented another set of hurdles. In addition to three paid staff committing a quarter of their time, almost two dozen volunteers unloaded, packaged, and arranged curbside food pickup every week.

While last spring’s school closures created havoc for families, it was a silver lining for the museum’s food pantry. Parents, eager for safe and meaningful activities to do with their children outside of the home, contacted the museum looking for ways to volunteer their time. In a few weeks—mainly through word of mouth— the museum had more prospective volunteers than it could safely accommodate.

The volunteer recruitment effort also reconnected the museum with more than a hundred former members. Like most children’s museums, families tend to “age out” of CMEE when their eldest child gets to be seven or eight years old. Over the years, the museum has developed an array of strategies, including community service projects, to keep these families engaged, with limited success. The pandemic changed that. According to one mom whose children volunteered, “The museum is giving older kids a greater sense of purpose.”

It’s not just teenagers who now see themselves differently in relation to the museum. Young children, like my six-year-old son, have been affected by their volunteer experience. When the museum was still closed to visitors, he pointed out that he used to play at the museum but now he helps families. During videoconference check-ins with his teacher or calls with grandparents, he would proudly describe his work at the food pantry.

In addition to teaching the value of giving back, the food pantry provides numerous learning opportunities for young children. Children as young as three or four help their parents count potatoes to go in a box or sort and separate pantry items such as rice, lentils, beans, and pasta. They also learned how to work collaboratively to make sure no family was skipped and every box had the right number of items.

Even though CMEE has reopened—at 20 percent capacity—we are still running our weekly food pantry for nearly eighty families each week. In total, the museum has provided food to 187 different families and a total of 804 people. In addition to reducing food insecurity, it’s promoted a sense of dignity and community. In contrast with many other food pantries, families feel no stigma. Prior to the pandemic, they came to play at the museum; now they also come for food.

In addition to food, CMEE has distributed art materials, offered free flu vaccines with Stony Brook Hospital, and provided bilingual information from Peconic Bay Medical Center about how to protect against COVID-19. Via the messaging service WhatsApp, families communicate with museum staff and each other, sharing recipes, artwork, and photographs. Food pantry recipients also volunteered their time at the food pantry.

While the museum started its food pantry to support its most vulnerable families, in fact, the museum itself was supported. Although we did cut expenses, support for our COVID response efforts meant we never had to lay off any staff. 2020 was one of the most successful fundraising years in the museum’s history. Grants and contributions more than made up for earned revenue we lost. For years, we have operated much like a settlement house, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that donors became fully aware of the range of educational, recreational, and social programs we provide for underserved children.

Will our food pantry operate after the pandemic? My sincerest hope is that it will no longer be needed. What we will continue is our “institutionalized experimentation” where we remain responsive to the needs of local families. By acting more like a settlement house than a traditional museum, we altered the East End’s perception of CMEE, moving it from a peripheral “nice to have” to the heart of the community.

Works Cited

Scheuer, Jeffrey. Legacy of Light: University Settlement’s First Century. University Settlement, 1985.

Steve Long has served as president of the Children’s Museum of the East End in Bridgehampton, New York, since 2008. Prior that, he was vice president of collections and education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City.

New Issue of Hand to Hand: Forged in Fire – New Models

The latest issue of Hand to Hand, “Forged in Fire: New Models” is now available! Read each article here on the ACM blog. ACM members can find the full issue PDF in the Online Member Resources Library.

This issue of Hand to Hand shares stories from sixteen museums that have transformed their “temporary” pandemic responses into permanent changes, innovating new ways to deliver their missions and serve their communities.

Many of these stories build upon ACM’s Museums Mobilize initiative to highlight the ways children’s museums are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some changes involve totally new ideas. Others emerged as museums modified and accelerated existing programs or processes, or arose from ideas “on the shelf.” Read the issue to explore new models for museum finances, partnerships, workplace environments, and more.

Read the issue!

Food Pantry Fulfills a Need and Opens a World of Possibilities
Steve Long, Children’s Museum of the East End
New model: Transforming the role and identity of the children’s museum in the community by operating a food pantry.

Doubling Down on DEI
Dianne Krizan, Minnesota Children’s Museum
New model: Building upon existing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts to deepen DEI in the long run.

Learning through and about Social Media
PAPALOTE Staff
New model: Optimizing social media to become present in visitors’ daily lives.

Taking Science Learning to New Places and People
Neil H. Gordon, The Discovery Museum
New model: Launching Virtual Traveling Science Workshops to significantly grow potential audiences.

Supporting Children’s Learning When and How They Need it
Patti Reiss, Mississippi Children’s Museum
New model: Increasing flexibility in supporting families, from camps to virtual learning to childcare.

Look and Listen: Taking a Chance on New Partnerships
Brian King, Betty Brinn Children’s Museum
New model: Pursuing innovation with an entrepreneurial approach to new partnerships.

Expanding the Earned Income Menu: Camps, Seasonal Fun, Family Play
Beth Fitzgerald, The Magic House, St. Louis Children’s Museum
New model: Strengthening earned income base by expanding indoor/outdoor programming and offering private playtimes.

Programs Multiply As Reach Expands
Joe Cox, Museum of Discovery and Science
New model: Innovating virtual programming to achieve their mission of connecting people to inspiring science.

Building a Bigger Purpose
Kerry Falwell, Explorations V Children’s Museum
New model: Forming new guiding principles and a new mission statement to serve as new institutional lighthouse.

Welcoming the Neighbors
Carol Tang, PhD, Children’s Creativity Museum
New model: Rebuilding strong foundations by returning the museum’s focus to local neighborhood audiences.

The Future of Membership Programs
Q&A with Jane Greenthal, Harvard Business School Association of Northern California Community Partners
New model: Exploring opportunities provided by non-traditional membership models in the years to come.

Cross-Institutional Study of Virtual Programming: What Do Parents Want Now?
Scott Burg & Claire Quimby, Rockman et al
New model: Supporting effective virtual programming with actionable audience data.

An Ongoing Journey of Healing
Julia Bland, Louisiana Children’s Museum
New model: Increasing focus on providing mental health support to children and families.

The Future of Work: Putting Pivots into Practice and Examining How We Support Staff
Kyrstin Hill, Creative Discovery Museum
New model: Offering equitable and flexible work options for staff with young children.

Museum Guild 2021
Tara MacDougall, Discovery Center at Murfree Spring
New model: Creating a Museum Guild 2021 to increase participation and diversity among visitors and donors.

Why Do We Need All This Office Space Now?
Collette Michaud, Children’s Museum of Sonoma County
New model: Reorganizing office space based on flexible new work patterns.

Hand to Hand is the quarterly publication of the Associations of Children’s Museums (ACM). ACM champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

What’s Different about This Picture: Laying the (New) Groundwork for Design

This article is part of the “Exhibit Planning in 2020” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Alissa Rupp, FAIA, Frame | Integrative Design Strategies

When helping museum leaders lay the groundwork for good design, we talk about how to get a project off to a good start: finding the right team; preparing your internal team for the path ahead; understanding design as an iterative process; and acknowledging that the building and site will be the setting for reaching your strategic goals and realizing your vision. Project teams work together to address questions about what to design, how much to build, and how to move a project forward in a prudent way given the huge number of variables.

Prior to March 2020, these questions simply represented a typical design challenge: designers using their “crystal ball” to determine what will best serve the organization, at least in terms of the physical space. But in this incomprehensible and ever-changing year, the crystal ball is foggy. We’ve found our immediate way forward through a lot of observing, re-thinking, and learning by doing in the short-term. Long-term, big picture thinking has been harder. As national and international crises play out, project teams are asking: What now? And what’s next?

Some days, the pandemic pause seems long and drawn out, but really, it’s been five minutes in “design time.” Capital projects can only shift so quickly. In the meantime, museums are working hard to respond in real time. The first design responses have shown up in logistics, circulation patterns, new equipment, revised operations, and modified service models. A lot of great work has happened, but the bigger thinking has just begun: examining what makes museums essential in our uncertain future.

In planning new museums and expansions, we are learning from existing ones.What is happening inside their facilities, and what is happening virtually? What is key to their survival? What have they changed?

DISCOVERY Children’s Museum in Las Vegas opened their empty temporary exhibit gallery as socially distanced remote schoolwork space for kids with limited internet access at home.

KidsQuest Children’s Museum in Bellevue, Washington, doubled down on outreach, kits, toy libraries, and online resources for parents of preschool kids.

Both museums acted quickly, finding funding for the programs only after they were underway. These museums are taking cues from their community, their elected and appointed officials, their members, and their boards. They are agile. They are reconfiguring and shifting strategies, learning as they go. Their responses go beyond stanchions, hand sanitizer, or thermometers at the doors, but include big moves that support their true work.

The medical aspect of this pandemic will be managed, eventually. But while COVID-19 has been called a “once in a lifetime” event, subsequent pandemics are possible, because as a society we are not yet doing what it will take to prevent them. To think intelligently about the future of hands-on, immersive, interactive museum experiences, designers and museum staff must key in on fulfilling the museum mission. Is the organization prepared to be nimble, in its offerings and messages?

Being resilient must be more that a catch phrase. In designing for the future, resilience should be a core value, link directly to other core values, to sustainably guide everything the organization does. Whether you are open, emerging, or just beginning, your values likely include:

• Social justice: There is much work to do around diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging in museums.
• Sustainability: Climate change continues to impact the communities that sustain museums and undermine their stability.
• Ethical practice: Museums must be good workplaces and good corporate citizens.

These key values cannot be addressed successfully by organizations that do not have a solid grip on their own financial, operational, and environmental sustainability. They require resilience.

The growing interest in outdoor space now holds even greater appeal.

Outdoor space is often the least expensive way to build usable program, exhibit, and visitor service spaces. Providing distance between people and groups may be easier outdoors. But even these spaces require organizational flexibility. Inclement weather of all types—now including air quality concerns that affected so much of the Western United States this summer—significantly affect the utility of the space. Design for resilience: instead of designing around rain or extreme heat or cold temperatures, these weather variables can become part of an outdoor exhibit when they occur.

The country—and specifically the experience economy—is experiencing a crisis within a crisis within a crisis involving social, political, economic, health, and environmental issues. What does this mean for museums in the future? No one knows for sure, but it could mean that, as communities emerge and recover from these crises, people will need what museums offer more than ever. Before launching—or even continuing—a new design project, ask:

• Which of our short-term responses might have long-term application, or be held in reserve for future crises?
• How can the museum best use each space, and can those spaces be designed to be more flexible in the future?
• Can communities who are currently underrepresented in the museum audience be invited to participate more fully in its offerings?
• Can our income stream be further diversified to include operating income, sponsorships, corporate giving, major gifts, individual contributions, and an endowment?

Designing for resilience does not mean building “generic” spaces, or galleries that are so flexible they blur your identity. On the contrary, each museum’s solution must enhance its connection to its community and strengthen its relationship to its place. Design for spaces that allow you to highlight unique offerings and support essential services. Create a museum that belongs firmly in its geographical, historical, and cultural setting, so that it is easy for your audience to feel a sense of belonging there.

Design with a hard look at future audiences, both the near future and beyond. Will you serve tourists anytime soon, given the drastic reductions in family travel this year? Once things calm down, which visitors will return first, and who will come consistently? Has your core audience recovered financially, or are they still reeling from the shrinking service economy?

As we imagine the ways in which children’s museums will be needed going forward, we can respond by designing spaces that will add value in the future, and we can look at how to monetize them, either through operations income or targeted giving. The design task right now is to focus on what carries the field forward, instead of “waiting it out” until we can go back to where we were before. That return may not happen, and in many ways, we may not want it to.

As design professionals, it is hard to say “we don’t know yet” when asked about future of museums and what it means for our projects. Especially when we are laying the groundwork right now for a new or expanded museum. But we are learning, and we are hopeful that museums will fill an essential space in our communities going forward. Capital projects are intense and exhausting in the best of times. Optimism is an important tool in the toolbox for anyone thinking about a new exhibit, a new museum, or an expansion. But the work is important. Determine what makes you essential and design like your museum depends on it.

Alissa Rupp, FAIA, is the founder of FRAME | Integrative Design Strategies, which focuses on the design of places for community building, informal education, and lifelong learning.

Exhibit Fabrication and Installation Challenges during COVID

This article is part of the “Exhibit Planning in 2020” issue of Hand to Hand. Click here to read other articles in the issue.

By Cathlin Bradley, Kubik Maltbie, Inc.

These days, it seems like every conversation begins with, “during these uncertain times,” and for good reason. While many aspects of daily life are beginning to return to a pre-COVID state, things also continue to change every day. Museums, museum staff, and the firms that serve them are adapting to the “new normal”—another phrase we hear all too often. The reach of the COVID-19 pandemic extends beyond our personal lives, into the way our industry creates and maintains exhibits.

Starting at the Beginning: Exhibit Planning

Historically, the exhibit planning process has involved a variety of stakeholders (museum staff, designers, fabricators, media producers) coming together, often in the same space, to brainstorm and collaborate. The social distancing protocols, travel restrictions, and concerns associated with COVID-19 have turned this on its head. Many museums are closed, with staff furloughed or working from home. Consultants are no longer traveling to job sites, even if they’re just down the street. Human contact has shifted from in-person to virtual interactions. In spite of these challenges, we’re enjoying some benefits of quarantine culture, such as reduced travel costs, increased flexibility, and acceptance of sweatpants as work attire. The importance of proximity of team members has also diminished, allowing museum teams to select the absolute best partners rather than those who happen to be closest. But, where there are pros, there are often cons, and some important aspects of the planning process have to be rethought.

Over the past six plus months, our industry has had to shift the way we plan, fabricate, and install museum exhibits… In many ways, exhibit planners like my organization have taken lemons and made lemonade. Instead of giving up, we’re become flexible and agile.

In the world of design and fabrication, accurate site dimensions create the foundation for an exhibit. The floor plan defines traffic flow through the space and anchors different experiences to the gallery’s key story or big idea. Design drawings that rely on architectural plans that have not been site-verified simply aren’t as accurate. Without access to museum galleries due to closures or travel restrictions, we have to get creative! Over the past few years, some very cool large format scanning technology has become available. These scanners are relatively easy to use and can capture entire rooms and even artifacts with a high degree of accuracy. And the added bonus? The data collected builds a 3D model that can be exported to CAD (computer-aided design software). So not only are dimensions more accurate, but teams can use this technology to save the step of creating the digital model, on which the design is based, ultimately saving time and money while providing a great result.

Prototyping and Testing

Once the planning is complete, we move on to fabrication. As we know, a key component of children’s museums is hands-on interactivity. When fabricating interactives in our shop, we conduct prototyping and testing to ensure exhibits are safe, durable, and function in the way they were designed. For our firm, these two critical steps have always been collaborative activities. The project team, including the museum staff, designer, and fabricators, come together in the shop (often with kids and families) to play. Prototypes are put through the ringer and tested to failure, while the project team takes notes and documents the experience with photos and videos. Based on these collective experiences, we specify modifications or make approvals.

With current travel restrictions and social distancing protocols, this hasn’t been possible, so we’ve shifted our process. Instead of hosting project teams in person, we’ve moved prototype testing and reviews into the virtual space. This allows us to collaborate in real-time while also recording the testing sessions for team members not able to join. We were concerned at first, but we’ve found that we often have more participants than we previously had in person. Museum staff who might not have traveled to our shop due to budget constraints or museum responsibilities are now able to join and contribute their insights. Participants can go back and review the video afterwards to collect their thoughts to provide better and more detailed feedback. The results have been fantastic. This has been so successful that we intend to add a virtual component to every shop review in the future.

Materials: What Works Now and What’s Available

Let’s dig into materials and their supply chains. Most fabricators and museums who build exhibits in-house rely on standard fabrication materials such as plywood, medium-density fiberboard (MDF), Sintra PVC board, and acrylic sheet goods. Before March, these materials were readily available. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were material shortages and longer lead times for many items, but our firm was very fortunate as we already had a stock of standard materials. Unfortunately, smaller organizations and in-house teams may have been (and continue to be) impacted. In order to overcome shortages, many organizations have begun considering alternative materials or making trade-offs.

If your organization is considering an alternative material, be sure to test it out. Any time a new material comes into our shop, we treat it as we would a prototype. We consider different use (and abuse) scenarios, constraints, and limitations. There are several key factors to keep in mind. Safety and durability are always first on the list. With hands-on or interactive exhibits, we have to ensure that materials will hold up to the inevitable wear and tear of little learners, always keeping in mind potential hazards such as pinch points and sharp corners. While it has always been important to clean exhibits, COVID-19 has made sanitizing a top priority. Materials must now withstand little hands and the chemicals used for disinfecting. Some material choices we would have made a year ago simply won’t hold up to disinfectants or scrubbing. A painted MDF surface may need to become solid surface, laminate, or boat board. Exhibits with soft surfaces and foam objects that are more difficult to clean may need to be redesigned or modified.

Scheduling—and Protecting—Installation Labor

In addition to material shortages and delays, COVID-19 has created challenges with installation labor. When the pandemic began in March, our firm had installation crews onsite at several museums across the U.S. Some sites, such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, closed immediately and sent crews home. Others delayed installation starts by days or weeks, depending on local protocols. Eventually all job sites shut down for several months. This has created an opportunity to put our logistics skills to the test. Our project managers and site supervisors stay apprised of the different safety protocols for each state, some of which still include a fourteen-day quarantine before entering the job site. To overcome these and other challenges, every site installation is carefully planned with each task, including travel and quarantine, accounted for on a master schedule. This way, we are able to tackle uncertainties as they emerge. While the installation process may look different than it did before COVID-19, just like with planning and fabrication, flexibility is the name of the game.

In order to ensure that our team is always safe, we’ve instituted a corporate safety protocol, outlining our safety procedures that must be followed regardless of local regulations. This involves CDC-recommended social distancing as well as use of personal protective equipment (PPE) at all times. In addition to our internal protocols, each museum has different requirements, ranging from limitations on the number of people allowed to work in each room to additional PPE like “spoggles” (safety glasses that are goggles), face shields, and hand sanitizer stations.

An Industry Evolves

Over the past six-plus months, our industry has had to shift the way we plan, fabricate, and install museum exhibits. The current landscape remains uncertain, and will continue to be so until either effective treatments or a vaccine are developed. Children’s museums and the organizations that support them continue to move forward and develop new and better ways to serve children and families through informal learning experiences. To do so, we must be creative, proactively seeking new and different ways of doing things. In many ways, exhibit planners like my organization have taken lemons and made lemonade. Instead of giving up, we’re become flexible and agile. We’re digging into technology to meet our communication needs and even enhance the ways in which we collaborate. We’re finding new material solutions and optimizing site logistics. We’re still working together and doing our best to serve our clients. Someday, we will return to the world of in-person meetings and travel, but we’ll continue using this new toolkit of virtual skills to enhance our collaborations and produce optimal visitor experiences. It definitely hasn’t been easy, and we will continue to face challenges, but if we focus on what we’re learned and maintain our focus, the future will be bright.

Cathlin Bradley is director of business development at Kubik Maltbie, Inc., an exhibit fabrication firm that works with museums, visitor centers, and specialty environments.

Support Our Mission, Donate Crypto

New Hand to Hand: Inside the Curve: Business as (Not Quite) Usual

Centering DEAI in Staff Recruitment and Hiring

The Summer that Changed Everything

Recruitment/Sourcing

Screening Applicants for Diversity and Staff for Bias

Responses to Unprecedented Challenges Create Lasting Change

New Hand to Hand: The Power of We

Northwest Association of Youth Museums: Regional Network Powerhouse

Growing a Regional Association

NWAYM Loses One of Its Own: Portland Children’s Museum

2020 Hit Hard

A Rising Tide

Guerilla Networking: Connecticut Children’s Museums Organize to Pursue State Funding

A Breakthrough Phone Call

But What Should We Ask For?

The Seed is Planted, But You Have to Water It

Supporting Leaders | Building Healthy Organizations

An Interview with Darren Macfee, Museum Roundtable Facilitator

Hive Minds and Transient Networks

Deciding to Close

Thinking Together

Pandemic Bartering and Support Systems

Advocacy and Relief Systems

Later Stages

Collaborate to Advocate: The Power of Collective Voice

Kindred Spirits: Q&A among Seven Regional Museum Networks

Museum Network stats

Community Education Network Supports Children and Institutions during the Pandemic

History of CICE

Supporting the Community

Supporting the Organizations

Why Do We Need All This Office Space Now?

Museum Guild 2021

The Future of Work: Putting Pivots into Practice and Examining How We Support Staff

An Ongoing Journey of Healing

Cross-Institutional Study of Virtual Programming: What Do Parents Want Now?

The Future of Membership Programs

Q&A with Jane Greenthal, Project Coordinator, Harvard Business School Association of Northern California Community Partners

Welcoming the Neighbors

Building a Bigger Purpose

Programs Multiply As Reach Expands

Expanding the Earned Income Menu: Camps, Seasonal Fun, Family Play

Look and Listen: Taking a Chance on New Partnerships

Supporting Children’s Learning When and How They Need it

Taking Science Learning to New Places and People

Learning through and about Social Media

What Have We Learned?

Doubling Down on DEI

Commitment to DEI

More Action Needed for Racial Equity

Food Pantry Fulfills a Need and Opens a World of Possibilities

Works Cited

New Issue of Hand to Hand: Forged in Fire – New Models

What’s Different about This Picture: Laying the (New) Groundwork for Design

Exhibit Fabrication and Installation Challenges during COVID

Starting at the Beginning: Exhibit Planning

Prototyping and Testing

Materials: What Works Now and What’s Available

Scheduling—and Protecting—Installation Labor

Q&A with Jane Greenthal, Project Coordinator,
Harvard Business School Association of Northern California Community Partners