KID Museum
We continue to deepen our understanding of bilingual best practices, listen to community needs to better serve those needs, and take a big-picture approach to conveying our mission and vision to our community.
KID Museum
Annual operating budget: $5 million–$9.9 million
Total number of employees: 39
Annual visitorship: 30,000
**Numbers as of 2023
Our plan: Build relationships across generations
We believe in a future where every Latinx community member feels truly seen and valued at KID Museum. We wanted to know how to better support this community—not just in words, but in action. Our plan focused on listening to cultivate greater connection and understanding of our potential visitors’ needs. In addition to learning about structural barriers and systemic oppression, we aimed to discover what kind of STEM engagement and career awareness parents wished for their children and families. We also hoped to foster intergenerational cohesion and mutual appreciation amongst family members growing up in different cultural contexts due to immigration, societal change, and technology. This required us to reframe how we think about, learn from, listen to, build relationships with, and serve our Latinx communities.
Our projects: Building bridges and bilingual resources
Attuning to our Latinx community and its needs meant deep listening and focus from our team. We were initially inspired by many ideas—too many to do in one year of Cambio—and those ideas pulled us in different directions. Within our organization, we cultivated our capacity to pause, reflect, and reach across different sides to come together. We hosted cafecitos to provide opportunities for staff to share and spark collaboration. And we engaged Spanish- speaking volunteers to provide a pathway for hiring additional bilingual staff.
We recruited and led two community listening sessions with local families that produced invaluable insights into how we could enhance our bilingual approach, in part through having more bilingual resources both on-site and in the community (for example, by developing a culturally relevant, bilingual version of our Mind of a Maker educational framework). We also set about implementing more cultural programs and tailoring our communication and recruitment efforts based on what we heard in the listening sessions, including feedback on individual email communications, social media reminders, and repeated engagement. This effort required providing KID Museum staff with the necessary tools to build lasting, respectful relationships with members of our Latinx community. It also contributed to our efforts to share our work in progress with our staff, ensuring that our insights and learnings benefitted the whole organization, and gave them enough insight into our work as it evolved for them to feel invested in its success.
Our takeaways: Meet community members where they are
KID Museum, through both individual and organizational growth, is now better equipped to continue to advance our social justice goals, keeping in mind all that we’ve learned:
- relationships take time and effort—being easy to reach and sharing a language and cultural values is critical
- actions, not just words, are what builds trust
- we must adapt to the platforms and technologies community members are using rather than the other way around
We continue to deepen our understanding of bilingual best practices, listen to community needs to better serve those needs, and take a big-picture approach to conveying our mission and vision to our community. We’re celebrating the small victories along the way!
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
