Butterfly Pavilion
Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and opening ourselves up to feedback from Latinx community members, business leaders, and organizations has helped us facilitate meaningful connections and amplify our reach.
Butterfly Pavilion
Annual operating budget: $5 million–$9.9 million
Total number of employees: 77
Annual visitorship: 383,162 visitors in 2024
Our plan: Abandon assumptions, embody equity
Creating accessible pathways into science was the heart of what we hoped to accomplish through our participation in Cambio. As a first step towards understanding and identifying the needs of our unique Latinx community, we needed to listen deeply without making assumptions. This process helped us understand we were not experts in this work. To prioritize and meaningfully connect with the communities we hoped to serve—to be a genuine community space and resource—we needed to start by listening. Community listening led to so much more: developing protocols for crafting effective, culturally sensitive translations; addressing barriers to visiting us; devising ways to bring material directly to our target communities; and more.
Our projects: Honor our most precious resource—community feedback
Our listening sessions with Latinx community members resulted in a fundamental shift in how we design events and programs. In the past, we began with internal brainstorming, collecting community feedback only after an event’s conclusion. Now, we’ve realized the value of community listening as an essential element of the planning process.
We combined our first listening session with the launch of Monarch Magic, a beloved event. Understanding our community’s values and priorities pushed us to move beyond the event’s previous scientific focus by incorporating cultural content: a Día de los Muertos altar and an interactive migration map that reflected our visitor’s journeys.
A session with local social justice and environmental activists shed light on what our Latinx community expects of an organization of our size and scope. A family-centric evening session held in Spanish (with dinner and childcare) provided a trove of information about accessibility and barriers to visiting related to price point, programming, and transportation.
Our takeaways: Be brave, do better
Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and opening ourselves up to feedback from Latinx community members, business leaders, and organizations has helped us facilitate meaningful connections and amplify our reach. We have learned:
- listening has to come first—we act based on what we hear from our community
- Latinx community members are the ones who know best what they need
- local activists can help us be better stewards of environmental justice
This transformative journey empowered us to explore new horizons and prioritize efforts that authentically engage and serve the Latinx community—enriching all our work going forward.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
