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By Anthony Bridgeman, Director of Community Initiatives
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is truly an extraordinary place that has a transformative effect on families and children statewide. While I experience this in my day to day job, I see it on a personal level too, through my 5-year-old son. He’s made connections between things that he’s learned at the museum, his interactions with family members, and new things he learns in preschool. I’ve seen first-hand how his understanding of the world has grown through his frequent visits here, beginning with Playscape when he was 6-months-old, flicking on and off light switches and pushing buttons to make sounds. More recently he’s wandered in awe through the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit learning about Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di and asking to read about the Warriors at bedtime. It might be easy to take these experiences for granted, but I pause when I consider the families in our community who might not have the means to visit the museum on a regular basis. These could be working families with low incomes or someone dealing with a medical crisis with their child. For these families, the museum’s outreach programs are essential.
Through my department, Community Initiatives, the museum expands its reach to community members both near—in our surrounding Mid-North neighborhood—and far, from Evansville in the southwest part of the state to Albion in the northeast. Here are some of the ways our team supports these communities:
Free and Reduced Admission
Community Initiatives programs provide discounted admission or free memberships to families who qualify.
- Access Pass has a state-wide reach. Families with limited means pay a discounted admission to visit the museum as well as eight other cultural institutions
- The Foster Family Membership program is also state-wide and provides Indiana licensed foster families with a free membership to the museum. The program is supported in part by the Indiana Department of Child Services.
- Neighborhood Club Membership is a program closer to home. Families living in one of the six neighborhoods that make up Mid-North have an opportunity to enroll in the club for a free museum membership.
Neighborhood Revitalization
Regarding our neighborhood, the museum is a role model for corporate social responsibility. Although, the museum is a non-profit organization, it provides a significant amount of dollars, human capital, and advocacy to support the place that we call home.
- Winona Hospital: You may remember the old Winona Hospital that closed for business after operating since the mid-1960’s and quickly became a neighborhood eyesore. The museum worked tirelessly with area residents, city, state and federal officials, to reclaim the property, demolish it, and build a modern design inspired housing development affordable to area families.
- Neighborhood Improvements: Over the past twelve years, the museum has invested a portion of its endowment to build and rehabilitate housing in its neighborhood, incorporate a full service public library into its building, develop and support neighborhood greenspaces, and facilitate the siting of a new fire station in the neighborhood.
- Youth Programs: I truly love seeing the joy of children who participate in the museum’s neighborhood programs, Starpoint Summer Camp and The Explorers, our new after-school program. Starpoint has been around long enough that I have met adults from the neighborhood who participated in it. I’ve been around long enough here that I’ve seen one young person go through Starpoint over several summers then go on to major in computer science at Purdue University. Her mom credits the museum neighborhood programs as one of the keys to helping her to dream big about what she can do in the world. That is awesome!
- Neighborhood Development Working Group: One of the things that I’m most proud of is the museum’s role in bringing residents and neighborhood-based organizations together to network, engage, and build partnerships for getting things done. The museum established a subcommittee of its board called the Neighborhood Development Working Group. It meets six times a year at the museum and has been a resource for building civic infrastructure at the neighborhood level.
If there is any legacy that we can leave with the work we do in our neighborhood, it is that we have helped people to connect and find common goals and realize the potential of many hands coming together to do great work.
