The Children’s Museum of Rochester: Arts, Culture and Access Programs
Arts and Cultural Heritage funding will allow us to pursue three major initiatives between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021:
- Health and Safety of our visitors and the community
- Dynamic Experiences and programming at Children's Museum of Rochester
- Initiative to engage communities in playful learning through access programs
$150,000 the second year is for the Children’s Museum of Rochester for interactive exhibits and outreach programs on arts and cultural heritage
- Engage visitors in Southeastern Minnesota to build creative and critical thinking skills through play
- 25,000 total visitors
- 500 free memberships distributed
Our goal without knowing a pandemic was about to hit was 43,000 the first year in our space. So the fact we almost reached that goal with several months shut down due to COVID-19 is amazing!
We have been able to target more specific programming that aligns more with our three focus areas, health and well-being, STEM, and cultural connectedness. We have been able to build a lot of new partnership within our community help support the communities’ underserved population. Through these partnerships, we have found new groups to deliver more free memberships with our voucher program. We have been able to communicate and work with the Center for Autism, and Families First.
We also had a goal to deliver 500 free memberships to families and we exceeded this goal. Because of the pandemic a lot of families had financial struggles and were unable to afford a membership but still needed their children to be involved in hands-on educational learning. So we continued to give free memberships on our budget because we knew that these families needed this so badly.