Museum of Science
Our mission is to inspire a lifelong love of science in everyone. Cambio brought our mission to life and supported our efforts by providing meaningful organizational tools.
Museum of Science
Annual operating budget: $20 million +
Total number of employees: 300+
Annual visitorship: 5,000,000
**Numbers reported in 2022
Our plan: Meaningful learning experiences through trust
Better understanding and meeting the needs of our local Hispanic community was the driver behind our Cambio strategic initiative. Our commitment to developing culturally responsive learning experiences for Spanish-speaking visitors depended on deep, authentic relationship-building with external partners who are already serving this community.
Ultimately, we hoped to build trust within a community that has historically been excluded from the museum, thus bolstering our mission and making the Museum of Science more welcoming for all.
Our projects: Leaning into listening
We strengthened connections with two local organizations that work with Hispanic youth to organize and host the first two of what we hope will be a series of community listening sessions focused on building relationships and growing trust. Together with community partners, we co-created an event at our Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. We also developed a bilingual storytime presentation that connects STEM themes and topics with cultural stories, and translated monthly astronomy videos to make more Spanish-language content accessible and engaging.
These projects developed and evolved alongside institutional changes. Our MOS en Español team became more structured and well-established. Our interdepartmental strategy for digital Spanish-language content creation, as well as our process for producing bilingual exhibits, grew to be more robust. And our community engagement efforts transformed from widely scattered partnerships to a more thoughtful and reciprocal process supported by the major institutional investment of hiring a Senior Director of Community Engagement and Outreach.
Our takeaways: An ongoing commitment to inclusion
Our mission is to inspire a lifelong love of science in everyone. Cambio brought our mission to life and supported our efforts by providing meaningful organizational tools:
- dedicated time for meaningful conversation
- a shared language among colleagues, partners, and each other
- a focus on concrete projects that united teams across our institution
Cambio showed us that cultivating connection with our local Hispanic community does not end, and solidified our ongoing commitment to this work. Cambiamos mientras caminamos—we change as we walk, moving forward one step at a time.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
