External partnerships
How to find partners in your community
Much like you might approach finding partners on any topic, the key to just start to understand who is doing what in the sustainability world in your community? What kinds of “forums” for discussion are there? Who is hosting convenings? Are there discussion groups, committees, or events on the topic? What publications are being produced? Ho about speaker events? Does your local government have a staff person working on sustainability?
Making an inventory would be a good start. Looking for audience overlap would be a useful criterion. Are there natural allies?
And then, just like any partnership, take the first step. Conversation and discussion. Get to know each other. Explore areas of common concern and understand each other’s goals. This is not hard – we do it in many areas of our work. Just get started!
Stakeholders + Partnerships
Many children and families in the region of The Children’s Museum of Southern Oregon do not have access to healthy, quality foods, and particularly locally sourced foods. To respond to this need, we have created a Fun with Food program in our culinary studio. It emphasizes fresh fruits and vegetables that are locally grown and recipes that are family friendly.
This program makes fresh food choices a fun and enjoyable option for kids, and it makes fresh food as appealing as the processed options kids are used to. Families now have free opportunities to learn about sustainable nutrition, local food vendors, and healthy food choices. And families that join our Fun with Food programs also get the opportunity to see how cooking with the whole family can be fun and engaging and can even encourage the pickiest eater to try something new. While this is a new and growing program, it’s popular and it has support from our local funders.
Teacher Taylor preparing for The Children’s Museum of Southern Oregon’s Fun with Food program.
Attribution: Sunny Spicer, The Children’s Museum of Southern Oregon
Where we were/what started this process
Many children and families in the region of The Children’s Museum of Southern Oregon do not have access to healthy, quality foods, and particularly locally sourced foods. For example, the food choices that our member families brought in were sourced from outside the area and rarely nutritionally valuable. Our preschool class frequently had free farm boxes delivered to them, but often families would leave them behind, unsure of how to use the fresh fruits and vegetables, or afraid their children would not enjoy them. Many educators that we collaborate with reported that students had difficulty understanding where their food came from—that the food they ate had a journey.
Our board and staff decided to focus efforts on creating a culinary studio and educational programs that would introduce families to healthy and sustainable foods. The effort includes partnering with local farms and food vendors. With a wealth of agricultural partners close to the museum, there was ample opportunity to encourage healthy and sustainable practices while building a wide variety of life skills.
What we are doing
We have created a fully stocked, fully functional, and welcoming culinary studio for nutritional education. This complements our Farm to Table exhibit that also highlights farms, gardens, local orchards, a farmers’ market, and a cafe for families to engage with through interactive play. In the culinary studio, we take things one step further by using real food and supplies to create meals and snacks that are child friendly. Now families can touch, chop, mix, and taste real food.
We have partnered with the local food co-op for funding, and the local food bank and regional farms for food supplies. For example, Harry & David supplies locally grown apples and pears for tasting and cooking activities: children and their parents can see how the different varieties taste, how each change when baked, and how to use each variety in different applications. Through this, families can learn which varieties and preparations they enjoy the most. We also teach about the local orchard industry, and where local fruits are grown and available.
We measure success based on participation and feedback from families. While this is a new and growing program, it’s popular and it has support from local funders. Initially we offered 1 hour per week of direct service programs. Now we offer, at minimum, 6 hours per week of direct service programs, with a goal of providing 20 hours in the near future. We have already seen success in our interactions with families who have attended the program. They have expressed how grateful they are for this learning opportunity and how we have helped remove some of the stigma and trepidation involved with cooking with children—the museum has been able to teach caregivers techniques to safely and enjoyably introduce their little ones to cooking.
The biggest challenge is the amount of prep time and clean up involved (about 3 hours for every hour of direct service) and the wide age range of participants (children can range from infants to teenagers in one class). We are looking forward to diversifying the museum’s offerings to make sure we have opportunities available for all who are interested.
Where we want to go
Our primary goals are to build enthusiasm for healthy and sustainable food choices while connecting families to the plentiful local resources available in our region. Agriculture is a cornerstone of the museum’s community and an important part of the area's history and development over time. We are excited to build a love of food and produce within our visitors. Over the year (2024), we expect to increase attendance at our programs and increase the number of community partners. This will begin to build more sustainable practices for the families that participate.
This fits into the museum’s long-range plans to utilize local products and vendors and teach sustainable practices to our members and visitors. This effort also opens many opportunities to work with a variety of partners that are also working in sustainable practices, from farmers to pollinator projects to water conservation and so much more. The way that humans think about food and the choices they make, can impact the global carbon footprint—this program is a platform for a wide variety of educational efforts.
Attachment list and links
More about TCMSO’s Culinary Studio: https://www.tcmso.org/exhibits
How to advocate for children, your organization, and climate action in your community
1.
Advocacy is defined as any action that speaks in favor of, recommends, argues for a cause, supports or defends, or pleads on behalf of others.
Thus in thinking about advocacy, we should be thinking about a possible range of actions. It is easy to think about advocacy in the limited “political” sense, but it is broader than that and potentially less visible than you might think.
2.
How do you already convey a point of view? Many museums already convey a point of view about the value of play in children’s lives. That point of view is conveyed by the way we approach learning and the way we organize the museum experience. It is conveyed by the way our work is described and the outcomes we highlight. It permeates our institutions.
3.
While climate change may feel more “touchy” than play, that does not mean we do not have a point of view to convey. Just like you might think about how you would convey you message about play, so too should you think about the message on climate. This might be a good moment to review the other section on Leadership and development of a mission statement. That is a good way to understand your point of view and what you hope to convey.
5.
Communicating your advocacy is discussed in the section on Marketing. You will need to understand your community and how you fit. Are you seen as a thought leader? Are you expected to have a point of view? Are you expressing points of view on other topics and thus having a climate advocacy opinion is part of your image, or would it be unique and unexpected?
6.
Lastly, do you have Board leadership that is clearly on the same page about your point of view? Will advocacy actions be welcome and embraced or come as a surprise? If you answer is surprise, then let’s go back to building a mission statement and leadership sections.
4.
Once you have a point of view, what are the ways that you will express it? Perhaps the place to start is recall that the adage about being judged by what you do not just what you say. Your advocacy starts with what you do. Yes, you may also need to communicate about what you do, but much of the message is in the action.
Working with local government to further green goals
Madison Children’s Museum is a mid-sized museum with big ambitions to address children’s needs in a warming climate and to support their futures. We partner with others who have knowledge, resources, and expertise that we do not possess ourselves.
Our museum’s expertise in creating equitable, inclusive accessible, joyful hands-on learning experiences that are rooted in a strong sustainability ethic are our biggest assets and make partnering with local government agencies and departments who share similar goals a natural extension of our work.
Our long history of working closely with diverse community groups, creating sustainable exhibits, and fostering healthy habits that support resiliency, have helped cement partnerships with a broad array of departments within the city and county government including Dane County’s Department of Waste and Renewables, Dane County’s Henry Vilas Zoo, Dane Arts, the City of Madison Fire Department, as well as the joint Dane County/Madison Department of Public Health. Each of these relationships was fostered to increase the health of our community, to instill healthy habits and feelings of empathy toward others and the Earth among children and families, and to leverage our individual strengths, create unlikely synergies, and foster greater understanding.
Madison Children’s Museum’s partnership with Dane County Department of Waste and Renewables resulted in this 27-foot-long mobile Trash Lab exhibit that explores waste and overconsumption and encourages visitors to reconsider what they buy and throw away.
Attribution: Madison Children’s Museum
Where we were/what started this process
The Madison Children’s Museum (MCM) began working with Public Health Madison & Dane County in 2016 as part of a Children & Nature grant to foster more outdoor experiences and connections to nature for children in our community. This partnership helped us reframe our work around health and resiliency and understand that the experiences we provide getting children moving and connected to nature are precursor experiences that set the stage for children becoming future climate activists who care about the Earth. Since that partnership, we have done a better job of including health outcomes data about children in our community to support our work, and we are seen as a credible source for taking serious content and making it fun.
Our partnership with the Dane County Department of Waste and Renewables (DCDWR), resulted in a 27-foot-long mobile Trash Lab exhibit on wheels that explores waste, overconsumption, and what really happens to the things we throw away. The project focuses on rethinking our relationship with waste, protecting our air, water, and soil, and rethinking the way we consume. The exhibit’s main theme is Waste is not Waste until you Waste it! Housed at the Dane County Landfill and toured by the DCDWR, The Trash lab travels throughout the community visiting community centers, schools, preschools, churches, and historically neglected communities, extending our work and expertise in new ways. The goal is to educate our community about the negative health and climate impacts of overconsumption and to encourage people to use and waste less.
Our partnership with the Dane County Henry Vilas Zoo was an extension of our work with Public Health Madison and the DCDWR. In this context, we partnered with the zoo to help them build relationships with the Hmong, Latino, Black, and Indigenous communities, and to help create new signage focusing on empathy, understanding of animals, and conservation of threatened species, all of which align well with our work. We know as we move forward with climate education for very young children, that the most important message is one about our interconnection with other species, and the need to build our empathy skills in caring about and considering other species. This partnership helped the museum design and build its first climate change exhibit for young children, focused on fostering empathy for all living things. The new exhibit, The Nice Age Trail, is our climate change exhibit for young children, and never once talks about climate change. Instead, it offers precursor climate activities for the very young to build empathy, gratitude, resiliency skills, and feelings of connection, along with concrete tips for adults on ways to build agency and hope rather than fear.
What we are doing
Our partnerships with each of these local government agencies and departments continue to be nurtured and bear fruit across every aspect of our organization. Working with the Henry Vilas Zoo, for example, led us to deeper conversations with the Dane County Department of Equity and Inclusion, which helped us re-evaluate our hiring practices with a goal of creating even greater equity. Our partnership with Dane County Department of Waste and Renewables helped us secure additional funding for our new pay what you can cafe, Little John’s Lunchbox, which offers healthy, nutritious food that has been gleaned, and lovingly prepared for visitors at whatever price point is reasonable for guests. In 2023 alone, MCM served over 16,000 meals in our pay what you can cafe and saved 8,600 pounds of food from the landfill. Additionally, 1,200 more pounds of leftover food and containers were converted to compost, thus diverting that excess food waste from the landfill. We recognize implicitly that equity and sustainability are intertwined, and our cafe model addresses both sustainability and equity issues, ultimately helping build a more just, inclusive, and sustainable world.
Our partnership with the Madison Fire Department was an unlikely one but continues. We initially reached out for help understanding the fire code when we were considering redesigning and beautifying two fire staircases at our museum. This led to deeper understanding of the health crisis in our community, and the fact that 95% of the fire department’s calls are for health issues, many related to obesity, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise, not for fires. This encouraged us to double down on making sure the museum prioritized healthy living, by encouraging biking, walking, carpooling, or bussing, and to updating our alternative transportation policy to include more staff incentives. These positive health outcomes are also positive climate health outcomes, if we can encourage less fossil fuel consumption. And lastly, our understanding of the fire department’s challenges also led us to redesign five more staircases in our community in partnership with Dane Arts, the county arts commission. One of them is housed in the City County Building, placed there to encourage less use of the energy hogging elevators, and more use of the stairs. A double win for health and climate.
Where we want to go
While we have been working department by department within the city and county government, we would like to work toward being the go-to entity when the city is thinking about future planning and the needs of young children and families. We know that children will be the most negatively impacted by climate change, and we need our city governments to understand that by thinking of children first in every decision, we are indeed creating a more equitable, sustainable community. Our museum wants to be top of mind when government officials are trying to think creatively about how to plan for the future.
In order to make this a reality, we need to foster deeper and stronger relationships with the city and county sustainable development departments first and foremost and find ways to help the city and county see that we can be a big part of their success going forward.
Attachment list and links
DCDWR and MCM’s collaborative effort, Dane County Trash Lab: https://landfill.countyofdane.com/projects/WastandRenewableProjects/Trash-Lab
MCM’s Stair Trek: https://madisonchildrensmuseum.org/exhibits/coretocosmos/
