The Campaign for DISCOVERY Children’s Museum

The mission of DISCOVERY Children’s Museum is to foster a welcoming, vibrant, and inclusive environment where all are invited to engage in playful and educational experiences that ignite a lifelong love of learning. It’s a mission that we work hard to fulfill every day through our immersive, hands-on, play-based museum experiences that are accessible to all families.

DISCOVERY’s role in education is unique in that we can place our children’s needs for play, exploration, inspiration, and out-of-classroom learning above all else. Now we’re ready to create even more opportunities for our kids to make life-changing discoveries today, tomorrow and well into the future.

Our Next DISCOVERY – $15 million

1. Making our world-class children’s museum experience more accessible for all kids by updating and improving our educational exhibits and facilities.

• Goal: $12 million

2. Expanding educational programming to provide targeted support to schools, educators, and our youngest learners.

• Goal: $3 million

Lasting DISCOVERIES – $10 million

3. Increasing our endowment and operating reserves to ensure the Museum’s resilience to serve our region’s children and families for decades to come.

CHILDREN ARE EVER-CHANGING-AND WE MUST BE, TOO

Today, our children are growing up in a dynamic world that is changing as fast as they are. At DISCOVERY, we rise to the challenge of change. We must constantly evolve to meet children on their path as they grow and change: answering new questions, preparing them for jobs and careers of tomorrow, introducing them to new people, and inspiring curiosity about the world in which they will live. When we inspire the leaders, thinkers, and discoverers of the future, it pays off for all of us. This campaign will create new possibilities for generations to come, possibilities that include inspiring a better future for all of us who call this place home.

EXPERIENCES

A Gift To Refresh and Enhance the Museum Experience for All Visitors

We’re our community’s home for discovery. After nearly a decade in our current home, we’re ready for a refresh – one that can transform our museum experience with state-of-the-art exhibits and programs that ignite the fullest potential for discovery for children of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds.

Cosmetic Improvements

If you’ve ever had kids around, you know that things can get messy and worn out fast. Even after 10 years, our current space is a wonderful, safe, and welcoming environment for our children. But a space used by young people incurs wear and tear that requires regular capital improvements. It’s time to update the Museum and make sure it looks like a place that reflects our standing as one of the premier non-profit educational organizations in the state.

A Welcoming, State-of-the-Art Environment

Beyond the cosmetic updates, visitors will notice other improvements that will make the museum experience better for everyone. This includes improving flow through the museum exhibits and floors, easing congestion and bottlenecks during busy times. Lighting will be updated to provide a brighter, warmer environment. Parents, grandparents, and other caregivers will be thankful for additional seating. And we’ll use state-of-the-art technology to reduce the amount of noise in our exhibit spaces. These quieter spaces will better serve our guests with sensory issues and the use of innovative design and engineering solutions reflects our core emphasis on science and technology.

DID YOU KNOW?

The industry standard for exhibit renewal in the children’s museum field is every 8-10 years.

A MUSEUM DESIGNED FOR AND BY THE COMMUNITY

We asked our community: What would you like to see in an improved DISCOVERY building? The answers are at the heart of our campaign plans. After a six-month master planning process with extensive community input, we learned which exhibits inspired the best learning, and which designs made over a decade ago no longer serve our kids’ needs today. We have a better view of which exhibits can engage our younger visitors and can foster critical brain development, and how to tailor risk-taking and technology features to older kids engaged in STEM, STEAM and STREAM education.

UPDATED EXHIBITS

THE SUMMIT

One of our most exciting plans is to dramatically re-imagine The Summit—the central feature of our space—as a creative land-to-sky climbing tower.

The Summit spans three floors and helps visitors travel through different levels of the Museum in a playful and physically engaging way. This bold, colorful, and immersive feature will continue to be a main attraction, while sparking imaginations in more dynamic and age-appropriate ways. We will incorporate new concepts that help kids discover the natural environments they mirror: a desert at the ground level, treetops and the forest in the middle, and the sky/outer space at the top. The new climbing tower Desert to the Stars will expand engagements for early childhood
visitors and inspire learning around environmental science, biology, astronomy, and physical education, while enabling risk-taking and physical exploration by all ages.

TODDLER TOWN

The foundations for a lifetime of curiosity, learning, and literacy are laid in the play experiences of early childhood. Our youngest guests deserve the rich, dynamic, fun, and engaging play-based learning experiences that they’ll get in the newly redesigned and improved Toddler Town. The beloved mining activity will be expanded by adding more wheelbarrows and a screen-based interactive area. The smaller visitors’ crawl zone will be moved to a less trafficked area against the wall and re-themed to reflect the Las Vegas desert. The art-making area will be given a central location within the gallery, dividing the high-energy (and sometimes loud) mining exhibit from the quieter crawler area. We’ve also added accessibility features so all children have the ability to have a self-directed experience.

YOUNG AT ART

Long a favorite exhibit, Young At Art is getting a high-tech makeover featuring two new state-of-the-art interactive activities that will inspire even more creativity while introducing lessons about the key elements of artistic expression. A large-scale, user-generated tesselation activity will have three art stations that will let artists collaborate by manipulating shapes, colors, and artistic styles to create giant works of art. Our other new art activity brings new meaning to the phrase “body of work.” Equipped with state-of-the-art interactive motion-tracking technology, artists can collaborate using body movements and gestures to create large-scale masterpieces on a semi-transparent wall. Multiple visitors can cooperate to create an endless variety of effects and images, all while caregivers view the creation in progress.

WATER WORLD

Our Water World exhibit has provided tens of thousands of children with their first lessons about how we get our water, how it’s used, and why it’s vital to conserve it. The redesign and renovation of this popular exhibit space will make it an even better and more educational experience for all guests by bringing in additional opportunities for cooperative play and serving as a model for water conservation. The redesign of the large water table will provide a hands-on learning experience showing we get energy from the Hoover Dam and how turbines work to generate power. The new interactive valve play feature will encourage cooperation from up to six visitors, challenged to activate a series of valves to direct water into an overhead turbine tank. If successful in their endeavor, the turbine will spin and generate electricity to light up the Las Vegas skyline overhead. Other gallery enhancements will include themed overhead sound attenuation and custom flooring reflecting the local watershed, as well as a new filtration system that will help us conserve water in an exhibit that relies on it.

POTENTIAL/POTENCIAL

How we harness and use energy is the key to our future. Potential/Potencial is a new exhibit where children and visitors will play and work together to explore foundational concepts of energy, think about how energy impacts their lives, and increase awareness of the broad range of careers in high-tech industries. Visitors will engage with experiments that teach the fundamentals of energy, work together to power a city, and listen to stories from a diverse range of workers in the energy industry, providing inspiration for young learners to see future career possibilities.

UPDATED EXPERIENCES

A Gift that Expands Our Educational and Community Outreach Programs

DISCOVERY Children’s Museum is much more than a fun place to let the kids run around and play on a hot Vegas day. In addition to the core programming we deliver through our interactive educational exhibits, we offer community outreach programs that reinforce developmental learning for children of all ages.
Our current programs include: 1) hosting field trips that allow students the opportunity to explore science and technology-related careers; 2) DISCOVERY on Wheels, which bring engaging, hands-on science experiments and health science education to classrooms across Clark County; 3) YouthWorks internships, which offer a unique opportunity to gain work experience by interacting in a positive and engaging manner with guests of all ages and in supportive roles throughout the museum. The work experience includes strengthening awareness of professional etiquette, time management, decision making, working with others, communicating with management, and periodically participating in professional development workshops and externships.

These programs have become essential educational resources across Southern Nevada for children of all ages, from toddlers to teenagers for more than 30 years.

By offering these community outreach programs, the Museum plays an integral role in the learning landscape of our region. Our committed team of educators and child development specialists run programs designed to spark inquiry-based learning with content and curriculum aligned with Nevada State Content Standards.

With support for Our Next DISCOVERY campaign, we can launch a range of new educational opportunities in and outside of our space, with a special focus on families who have difficulty accessing early childhood education, homeschool families, and middle school and high. school students.

We’ve identified four core areas where campaign funds will help us make valuable contributions to the educational environment in Las Vegas: 1) growing our popular DISCOVERY on Wheels program and offering it free-of-charge; 2) augmenting early-childhood literacy programs; 3) creating a robust robotics program for elementary and middle schoolers; and 4) expanding our YouthWorks program.

DISCOVERY ON WHEELS

DISCOVERY on Wheels takes our hands-on science curriculum for Pre-K through middle school students into the community. Expanded access to DISCOVERY on Wheels will provide visits free of charge to all schools and add three new grade-level lessons (6th – 8th). New lessons will incorporate health science education and a first-hand introduction to medical professions with life-sized medical models and real clinical tools. The expansion will require an additional DISCOVERY van and Learning Experiences Coordinator staff, grow program capacity from 10,000 to 20,000 students per year, and allow DISCOVERY to offer visits to childcare locations and community centers.

YOUTHWORKS

YouthWorks is a paid internship program that offers at-risk teenagers a unique opportunity for professional work experience at the Museum along with one-on-one mentoring and academic and personal development support.

YouthWorks was founded in 1993 to address Las Vegas’s high dropout rates. Since then, YouthWorks has provided an invaluable internship experience for over 4,000 teenagers. Our interns are given opportunities to engage in real, meaningful work and take on progressively responsible assignments during their internship. YouthWorks interns also get professional development and enrichment opportunities throughout the program, with an emphasis on developing critical skills such as successful interviewing, resume building, managing a professional online presence, understanding personal finances, and college application support.

As part of Our Next DISCOVERY, an increased investment into the YouthWorks program means we can increase the number of paid interns from 17 to 25, create more professional development opportunities, expand outreach to increase our volunteer pool (which is the first step toward a paid internship) and hire an additional YouthWorks Program Coordinator.

ROBOTICS PROGRAMS

Building on the Museum’s new robotics program will encourage exploration of STEM fields and foster the development of technical skills needed to be career ready in the future. DISCOVERY will add daily robotics programming in the DISCOVERY Lab makerspace, offer a Robotics Summer Camp, host a regional competition for local school teams each year, and sponsor a DISCOVERY team focusing on the underserved homeschool community who do not have access to the resources that school teams have. Support for a complete robotics program includes classroom robotics kits for various age groups, additional completion and practice fields, competition robots, professional development training, and dedicated staff and facility resources for a DISCOVERY Team and an annual competition.

EARLY CHILDHOOD LITERACY PROGRAMS

Incorporating early literacy experiences into the Toddler Town program schedule will make skill-building STREAM activities accessible to all Museum guests, including 30% who come through admission subsidy programs. These weekly workshops will emphasize pre-reading and pre-writing skills through guided and inquiry-based STREAM-centered learning experiences. The highly interactive learning experiences invite a caregiver to participate alongside their 1 to 5-year-old children to learn skills and practice literacy-building activities. The support we need to implement high-quality literacy programming includes creative supplies for hands-on engagements, educational staff to guide activities, and marketing to publicize the program as a valuable resource to parents of young children.

ENDOWMENT AND OPERATING RESERVES

A gift that leads to lasting discoveries – $10 million

As a community non-profit, we need to ensure the opportunity to experience discovery is as accessible as it can be. Our endowment fund serves as a long-term investment in our financial health and our ability to serve children across Southern Nevada. The cost of admission to the Museum does not cover the total cost of operations for the proposed growth in our programs, making our endowment a critical source of funding for our day-to-day operations and the programs that allow more children, regardless of financial circumstances, the opportunity to experience DISCOVERY.

Over the past three decades, we’ve been responsible stewards of donor investments. Our financial foundation remains strong. While a number of children’s museums permanently closed during the pandemic, we emerged with our entire staff intact, without debt, and positioned to grow. If anything, the pandemic proved how crucial a healthy endowment fund is to our ability to provide our much-needed programs for children even during tumultuous economic conditions. Making these investments in DISCOVERY was the right thing to do.

This campaign will more than double our endowment, from $6 million to $14 million, allowing us to:

• Continually maintain, update, and improve our facilities—stewarding major capital investments, and improvements we plan to make with our current campaign
• Keep admission prices affordable and accessible to all Southern Nevada’s children a priority
• Invest in ongoing internal initiatives and programs like YouthWorks and early literacy
• Focus on the biggest needs of children in our community, not our biggest funding needs
• Endure fluctuations in earned revenue

Now is the time to secure a future full of Lasting DISCOVERIES — and an endowment investment is the place to do it.

PLANNED GIFTS

Supporting our Lasting DISCOVERIES endowment campaign through a planned or deferred gift is an opportunity to leave an indelible mark on the Museum while receiving special tax benefits.

DISCOVERIES don’t just happen-they are ours to create.

How we invest in our children says everything about the community we are and can be. As one of Las Vegas most enduring nonprofits and our only children’s museum—we owe our children the best, most dynamic experience possible. With the experiences they have here, they’ll begin to discover who they are, who they can be, and prepare for the challenges they will face in the future. The next exciting careers, transformational relationships, and big ideas for a better world are waiting to be discovered – but that all depends on what we do today.

DONATE

Please contact the Campaign Department at 702.382.3445 ext. 133 for more information about planned giving opportunities for our Lasting DISCOVERIES endowment campaign.

All conversations will be held in strict confidence.

Send a check or money order:
DISCOVERY Children’s Museum
360 Promenade Place
Las Vegas, NV 89106