The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
As The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis celebrates its Centennial, we reaffirm our vision to inspire and empower all children to realize their full potential through inclusive learning experiences that strengthen community connections.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
Annual operating budget: $20+ million
Total number of employees: 314
Annual visitorship: 1.2 million
**Numbers reported in 2023
Our plan: Trust and transformation
As The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis celebrates its Centennial, we reaffirm our vision to inspire and empower all children to realize their full potential through inclusive learning experiences that strengthen community connections.
Central to this commitment is a bold reimagining of our operations and programming—ensuring that every visitor feels truly welcome, seen, and represented.
Our projects: Translation and co-creation
In alignment with our strategic plan, we launched the Latino Community Initiative to deepen engagement with Latino communities and build lasting relationships.
Through close collaboration with our Latino community advisors, this initiative focuses on enhancing accessibility via multilingual resources, co-creating culturally relevant STEM experiences, and expanding our team with more Spanish-speaking staff. Developing an institutional translation process with that staffing, who understood our brand and audience, strengthened our work, but has also come with implications for workload and compensation, which we are navigating.
Participation in Cambio has enhanced cross-departmental collaboration and given us tools and resources to share with staff so they can increase their cultural competence. A $5,000 “mini-grant” provided us with an equitable way to use funds for translation of materials for off-site Family Outreach Nights, opening the door to greater participation by Spanish-speaking parents both as program participants and as volunteers. We hosted a Spanish-language focus group at a local school—with childcare and dinner provided, and incorporated feedback from our advisory council to ensure inclusive Spanish dialects in translations. Cambio has also been the impetus for collaborating with our advisors on improvements to Fiesta de la Familia, our free cultural celebration.
This ongoing work reflects our commitment to transformational change.
Our takeaways: Continue listening and learning
Offering relevant STEM experiences requires reexamining our own cultural norms and truly valuing people’s lived STEM experiences. To that end, we have embraced these learnings:
- transformational change must happen at both the individual and systemic level
- relationships build trust and understanding of the needs, interests, and values of the local Latino community
- co-creation means being vulnerable and letting go of control
Our Latino communities are complex and nuanced, and the work will take time. We look forward to taking the next steps forward, with patience, passion, and commitment.
To read other museums’ stories of change, visit our Cambio Stories page.
