About Us | Our Case for Support

Building on a 60-year record of success, the Museum is growing indoors and outdoors to provide engaging experiences with science and the natural world. The Museum’s fundraising priorities for 2007 are annual fund support to fuel our mission and the Dinosaur Trail Campaign.

History and Mission

The Museum began in 1946 as a small trailside nature center. Generations of families have participated in joyful, enlightening experiences that spark wonder, touch the heart and expand the mind. Today, the Museum is a 80-acre site with 90,000 square feet of indoor space.

To meet a growing demand for learning and quality family experiences, the Museum is expanding with a larger campus and more learning experiences. Under the leadership of Barry Van Deman, President and CEO, the Museum is focused on a new mission: to create a place of lifelong learning where people, from young child to senior citizen, embrace science as a way of knowing about themselves, their community and their world. The Museum’s Board of Directors is committed to a new strategic plan that will secure the resources to deliver this vision.

Improved Service as a Community Resource

With our unique indoor/outdoor environment, the Museum serves over 300,000 annual visitors and helps define us as a community committed to learning and innovation. We are expanding our traditional educational role with children and families to a platform for lifelong learning serving visitors of all ages. To help our community learn about contemporary science, the Museum has recently won a major grant to educate the public on nanotechnology.

In May 2006, we opened Explore the Wild, a six-acre woodland and wetland site with habitats for black bears, red wolves and lemurs, featuring interactive exhibits and multi-media kiosks. Visitor response to our new Explore the Wild outdoor experience has been particularly positive.

The Museum consistently improves or re-invents the experiences that we offer to our visitors and members. Perennial favorites like Carolina Wildlife or Magic Wings Butterfly House gain new appreciation when visitors interact with our staff and volunteer docents or sign up for a behind-the-scenes tour. The Museum offers fresh features including forums for adult learners, visiting exhibits and special events. We also launched a partnership with a local restaurateur for a significantly upgraded café and on-site catering service to support increased Museum visitation and rental activity. Thanks to a planned gift from the Teer family, the Museum has purchased a new train locomotive to replace our thirty-year-old model. The new locomotive was officially christened and began operation is January 2007.

How does the Museum make a difference to our children’s education? Our hands-on, inquiry-based learning opportunities reinforce and supplement classroom experience. With over 50,000 students visiting on field trips annually, we provide environment-based learning with all-new focused field trips that provide engaging outdoor experiences. Leading corporations, including GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer CropScience, have made significant investments in the Museum to fund these important new educational programs. The Museum also provides direct support to Durham Public Schools (DPS) through educational programming and kit programs. In the last year, nearly 25,000 DPS students (75% of total enrollment) visited the Museum or participated in Museum educational programming. Nearly 800 DPS classrooms used Science in a Suitcase kits maintained by the Museum on over 50 topics to strengthen hands-on science learning.

According to researcher Jon Miller, students participating in hands-on science programs show "increases in creativity, positive attitudes toward science, perception, logic development, communication skills, and reading readiness." In an age when most children have uninterrupted access to sedentary, indoor activities, such as television, video games and computers, the Museum offers them an enhanced outdoor experience, filled with exploration possibilities and opportunities to appreciate our natural world and science in a safe and innovative environment.

For lifelong learners of all ages, the Museum’s brand of experiential and social learning is a key building block of scientific literacy. As an environment where we can grow, play, and appreciate natural beauty, the Museum enhances our quality of life and helps to attract highly skilled workers and investment to our community.

Master Plan Growth

We are at an important point in the Museum’s history with the phased opening of 12 acres of outdoor exhibits. This BioQuest project is large and rich enough to be considered a new museum in itself. This expansion offers both incredible new opportunities and challenges requiring continued and enhanced support.

In 2007, the Museum has opened Catch the Wind, a new four-acre outdoor experience with a 5,000- square-foot radio-controlled sailboat pond, a flight experience and wind-related interactive exhibits. We will also debut Investigate Health!, an indoor exhibit that will improve our understanding of the science behind health and wellness. The Museum’s strategic plan calls for additional focus on building the experience for members, our loyal repeat visitor base; forging new partnerships and grant opportunities to enhance science access and understanding in our community; and launching a campaign to complete the funding package for a new Dinosaur Trail.

From FY2005 to FY2008, our annual operating budget is growing by $1.5 million to meet needs that include additional staff, animal care, and maintenance of a larger campus with more interactive exhibits. Durham County and the State provide just under one third of our operating budget; therefore, the Museum must earn over 70% of our funding through admissions, memberships, fees, contributions and other revenue.

Current Investment Priorities

This year, our priorities for investment are annual support of $450,000 to fuel our mission and raising the remaining $695,000 in needed capital funding to build the Dinosaur Trail.

The Museum’s Annual Fund is critical to create memorable educational experiences, including:

  • Magic Wings Butterfly House provides a source of wonder and an engaging educational experience for our visitors. Annual operating costs include about $60,000 in power and utilities, and about $80,000 in butterfly chrysalises and supplies. The chrysalises come from Central and South America, Asia and Africa and are a means of sustainable agriculture in the developing world whereby farmers can make a living from the forest’s natural resources.
  • Our annual educational supplies budget is about $70,000 annually for materials from paper and glue to Petri dishes and microscopes. These materials provide hands-on learning excitement in the nearly 100,000 children who are served in our programs.
  • The Museum’s 130 species of live animals connect people with the natural world, and encourage us to consider better stewardship of our shared environment. It takes nearly $85,000 a year to feed and care for our animals – bears, the donkey, muskrats and tarantulas – just to name a few. Our grocery list that includes 40,000 crickets, 3,000 apples, 2,500 pounds of bear chow and 365 bunches of kale.
  • Special exhibits help keep the Museum fresh and provide unique family experiences. Bringing a visiting exhibit to the Museum costs from $30,000 to $75,000 per exhibit.

Learn more about making a contribution.

The Dinosaur Trail Campaign is a $1.49 million public-private partnership to create a state-of-the-art Cretaceous experience. The Dinosaur Trail is supported by a Durham County bond investment of $675,000, and the Museum is raising the remaining $815,000 needed.

Learn more about the Dinosaur Trail Campaign.

In addition to being a fun and healthy outdoor activity, the new Dinosaur Trail is an excellent way to learn. While some children may be intimidated by science and math, they amaze us with their accomplishment in learning how to pronounce dinosaur names, research the latest findings, or understand complex biological relationships. Students will tackle chemistry, physics, or math in order to understand what made dinosaurs tick, rumble or roar. Visitors will learn basic science concepts and are more likely to make connections with other knowledge, building science literacy skills. Many parents find themselves learning from their children about dinosaurs, and this intergenerational conversation will make the Dinosaur Trail a popular family activity.

Leveraged by Durham County’s investment, donors to Dinosaur Trail will enjoy a long-lasting legacy of recognition in association with the dinosaur models that will populate the trail.

Summary

We envision a one-of-a-kind place, a science park, offering extraordinary experiences indoors, outdoors, and through virtual media where children and adults learn through the pursuit of their own interests and curiosity. Realizing the full potential of the Museum will require enthusiastic users, committed partners and engaged stakeholders.

As the Museum moves forward, investment to support our key annual priorities as well as exhibit fabrication and maintenance, educational programs and ongoing refurbishment will be critical to our success as an important community resource. We invite you to visit us, experience what the Museum is all about and learn more about what an investment in the Museum of Life and Science can do for our region.