Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
Thanks to our experience with Cambio, we reinforced the importance of ‘small pilots,’ which has enabled us to say yes to opportunities that we may not have agreed to six years ago.
Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose
Annual operating budget: $5 million to $9.9 million
Total number of employees: 63
Annual visitorship: 320,000
**Numbers reported in 2019
About Cambio’s first cohort
Cambio’s first cohort included Children’s Discovery Museum (CDM), Exploratorium, and Explora, each of which had a longstanding commitment to community engagement, as well as strong ties and experience co-creating with their local Latinx communities. These organizations were asked to pilot and help co-develop the first version of the Cambio curriculum and a modified version of the program model. Developing a new cohort experience in partnership with these three museums reflected two important aspects of the Cambio model—that of experiential learning and co-creation.
2020: Cambio’s Pilot Year
Cambio’s first cohort year unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Museums were closed to the public while juggling local health mandates (and, eventually, operational requirements for reopening), remote work, lay-offs, and financial strain. The nation also grappled with George Floyd’s murder, as individuals and institutions navigated their commitment to and communication about diversity, inclusion, and equity.
CDM’s 20 years of experience engaging with San Jose’s Latinx and Vietnamese communities spurred the creation of CCLI, the professional development model focused on organizational change that Cambio is also built upon.
The Cambio impact: Listening to lived experiences
It was a new experience for us at CDM to come together with a common focus to work on a strategic initiative that evolved over the course of a year. Working together as a team surfaced so much around our museum’s identity, approach, and events. It was incredibly enlightening to hear our staff’s experience of these things, and then take action. Our Cambio year gave us access to our museum peers and a different kind of learning that is available when you engage with colleagues’ lived experiences and their responses to them. It also gave us the chance to share what we were working on, and to connect with others who were engaged in similar work, with similar values. The feedback that our Cambio cohort provided over the course of our year together was invaluable.
Our projects: Build an internal knowledge hub and keep learning
We started out with a focus on community engagement, and the desire to approach it differently than we had traditionally. As our project evolved, we realized that we had a lot of work to do within our institution before we would be ready to dive deeper into community engagement. So we ended up in a very different place, with a much stronger internal focus. We created an internal knowledge center—an online repository for philosophy and techniques we feel are unique to our museum that apply to working with different audiences, such as our Latinx communities. We continue to develop that and encourage our staff to use it. We’ve also taken our learnings from Cambio and applied them year after year. We had translated our public offerings [into Spanish] for years, but over time our approach has shifted based on our current audience, who speak English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. We’ve reexamined our translation process and its products, asking ourselves if our tone has been too formal and questioned how welcoming we are to families.
Our takeaways: An ongoing commitment to learning—and our communities
Thanks to our experience with Cambio, we reinforced the importance of ‘small pilots,’ which has enabled us to say yes to opportunities that we may not have agreed to six years ago. Now, we actively try things out as ‘experiments’–like agreeing to park San Jose’s low-rider cars inside of the Museum to launch Hispanic Heritage Month. We’ve also learned:
- a spirit of ongoing learning keeps us flexible and open to change when we encounter new information
- to invite and appreciate underrepresented voices at the table, to broaden our perspectives
- the external environment may shift, but our commitment to our visitors is constant
We care deeply about our local communities. That means that we’re sticking with what matters most to them, and not changing our course. We’ll continue to be the Museum we are for as long as it is relevant to the families of San Jose.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
