Children’s Museum of Tucson | Oro Valley
Celebrating local, nontraditional STEM activities and careers at CMT builds upon itself, and opens doors for further collaboration and engagement with new communities.
Children’s Museum of Tucson | Oro Valley
Annual operating budget: $1 million–$4.9 million
Total number of employees: 43
Annual visitorship: 206,000
**Numbers reported in 2025
Our plan: Reflect our diverse community
The community surrounding Children’s Museum Tucson is rich and diverse, and we aimed to reflect this commitment in our programs and exhibits. Our goal was to work with community leaders, educators, and families to examine who was being left out of CMT programming and why, and to address the historical barriers to accessing our programs (cost of admission, transportation, language, cultural relevance, and programmatic representation).
Our projects: Help kids see themselves in STEM
We introduced new bilingual programs, translated existing materials and programs, and raised funds for outreach, tours, and events. We committed to hiring diverse, bilingual staff that reflect our local community, and added differential pay for bilingual staff. All of these efforts comprise a sustainable infrastructure for authentic, accessible bilingual engagement to ensure we are reaching those we have historically struggled to reach.
We leaned into accessibility by greatly expanding our affordable engagement opportunities, broadening our outreach efforts throughout Southern Arizona. We committed to portraying science and scientists in a more inclusive, expansive light. We created new STEM-related signage that shifted the focus from mostly white, male scientists to showcase local scientists, both female and male, who represent the ethnic and cultural diversity of our region. Programs like Science in Your Backyard and I AM a Scientist, exemplify and embrace nontraditional contributions and the wide variety of people’s cultural influences and lived experience. We introduced hands-on science activities that draw from Latinx culinary traditions, such as salsa and tortilla making. We hope that by seeing people who look like them reflected in our offerings, children and families will feel that STEM careers are accessible, impactful, and achievable.
We also established what we hope will be long-lasting collaborative connections with schools and peer resource providers to help us reach our historically marginalized neighbors and continue to be a trusted, valuable, inclusive community resource for all children.
Our takeaways: Start somewhere and keep building
Celebrating local, nontraditional STEM activities and careers at CMT builds upon itself, and opens doors for further collaboration and engagement with new communities. We’ve learned:
- you have to dive in and start somewhere, even if you don’t know where to begin
- embed inclusion in every conversation and decision—tangible impacts will follow
- push beyond the traditional, Western representation of what science is
Change can be overwhelming, and isn’t always something you can see right away. It’s an investment that picks up speed as it starts rolling along.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
