Our Case for Support | Project and capital funding needs

• Signature Learning Experiences – create experiences that are interactive, relevant, smart about using technology and generate earned income for financial stability;

• Sustainability and Green Initiatives – provide a teaching tool for our members and visitors as well as a way to reduce Museum environmental impact and operating costs;

• Capital Replacement – ensure planned, strategic lifecycle replacements as exhibits age.

Photo by Anne Edgarton, Burlington Times

Conclusion

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.

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Make a difference

We welcome an opportunity to discuss in more depth how you can make an important difference to the Museum’s mission by supporting project or capital needs. Here are a few ideas:



Greening the Museum

What would it mean for our visitors and for Museum sustainability to have a solar-powered café or an electric car recharging station? Environmental sustainability and the greening of the Museum include a number of projects, such as using solar panels for some outdoor exhibits to reduce the Museum’s carbon footprint, reduce energy costs, and educate our visitors about actions they can take to do the same in their own homes and businesses. The Museum is seeking partners to help us become greener and demonstrate these alternatives to a large audience.



Making Exhibits New Again

The Museum has a number of exhibits that are visitor favorites and overdue for renovation or replacement. For example, our Ellerbee Creek Railroad offers rides aboard open-air train carriages pulled by a scale model C.P. Huntington locomotive. The locomotive, thanks to a generous gift from the Teer family, is a new model delivered in 2007. To add educational value to this experience, as well as ensure train operations important to the Museum’s operating revenue, the Museum now needs to replace the older carriages, make improvements to the train station and add exhibits or visual elements along the ride. The largest component of this renewal project is new train carriages totaling $185,000. Improvements to the station and exhibit elements along the ride would cost an additional $120,000.

The Museum’s Geology gallery is now nearly 20 years old and in need of updating to reflect current science and use of interpretive technology to help visitors connect with information. Likewise, the Aerospace gallery, while offering a wonderful connection with our space program, will benefit from technology updates. As proof of concept, the Museum has installed a new, unique interface with Earth satellite images – as visitors turn and tilt a display table they control the view and zoom of this interactive satellite map of our planet. By refreshing our Aerospace exhibit with strong technology interfaces we can more effectively deliver learning experiences.



Learning Laboratories – Indoors and Out 

The Museum’s five lab spaces are used as classrooms for young children through high school programming. Through a partnership with the Contemporary Science Center, one of our labs has been remodeled to be equipped similarly to a corporate lab to support the activities and content of these classes. The other four Museum lab/classroom spaces have not been updated for over sixteen years, and receive constant, hard use as essential spaces for school, family and camp experiences. We have a number of ideas about renovating our four remaining older labs to support learning around a specific discipline, including engineering (using Lego to connect to learners of all ages), medicine, or biotechnology. The cost to upgrade a lab space ranges from $100,000 to $150,000 in capital costs.

The Museum has two outdoor classrooms, built in 2009 with bond funds and private support. These relatively simple outdoor structures have proven invaluable to our camps and classes as a way to deliver educational programming on site and take advantage of our outdoor exhibits as a learning environment. The demand for these experiences remains strong, and the Museum seeks to build an additional outdoor classroom to support this growth. An outdoor classroom will cost about $70,000 to construct and equip. We also envision a better way to connect students with our wetland for hands-on learning experiences, sampling and other educational activities – a wetland dock would cost about $15,000.



Learning Experiences for Grownups 

As the Museum grows into our mission of lifelong learning, we have started with an innovative and successful platform for adult engagement with science. Our current activities are monthly science cafes, called Periodic Tables, and the Science in the Triangle website partnership. One can read seasonal updates about the Wetland and it's inhabitants on the Museum blog The Greg Dodge Journal. The Museum plans to upgrade our on-site meeting spaces to provide required technology and amenities for adult learning. Looking ahead, we have identified opportunities to move to the next level with adult engagement in science and are seeking program support of $25,000 to realize this vision.



Exhibits Improvements and Support 

There are a host of opportunities to partner with the Museum in delivering an exceptional learning environment. Our new Dinosaur Trail was funded with support from Durham County bonds and private donors who “adopted” dinosaurs. One dinosaur remains available for adoption – the Edmontonia. Supporting the Edmontonia with a gift of $50,000 will be recognized on the Dinosaur Trail donor wall and exhibit signage, and funds will ensure the successful operation of our newest outdoor environment.

In our large outdoor exhibitions Explore the Wild and Catch the Wind, the Museum is seeking partners to help us install additional drinking fountains at an estimated cost of $15,000. We also want to expand our wireless capacity to serve visitors and educational programs in our outdoor environments at an estimated cost of $27,000. There are also needs for visitor amenities in our visitor courtyard and café. With high summer visitation, we need a “mist station” in this area (estimated cost $3,000) and based on visitor input would like to include a sound system for music for our outdoor café area (estimated cost $7,500).