$300,000 anonymous challenge grant will match every gift through Jan. 25, 2027, the museum’s 120th birthday
ST. PAUL, Minn. – The Science Museum of Minnesota today launched Curiosity is in our DNA, a community campaign to raise $300,000 by the museum’s 120th birthday on Jan. 25, 2027. Every gift will be matched dollar for dollar by a $300,000 challenge grant from a generous anonymous donor, doubling the impact of every donation.
The campaign follows the museum’s recent announcement of a balanced FY27 budget, reached through difficult cuts and a months-long review of every part of the organization. Museum leaders have been clear that cuts alone cannot secure the museum’s future. Community investment is now critical, especially with significant capital expenses for the large, 30-year-old building.
“Every generation of Minnesotans has rebuilt this museum for the one that comes next,” said Alison Brown, President and CEO, Science Museum of Minnesota. “We’ve made the hard choices. Now we’re asking Minnesotans to help us build the next chapter, so our kids and grandkids get the same spark so many of us found here.”
Gifts to the campaign will support the museum’s core work: keeping hands-on exhibits running, opening the museum to families and students who couldn’t otherwise visit and laying the groundwork for the museum’s next chapter. Because every gift is matched, even small donations go twice as far:
- $5 purchases a pocket pick for cleaning and preparing dinosaur fossils
- $10 sends a child on a field trip, which for some kids is their first time inside a museum
- $35 covers over ten access-priced tickets so families with financial need can explore together
- $75 buys two tanks of hydrogen to keep the bangs, flashes, and gasps coming at Science Live shows
- $500 gives a Minnesota school a year of Lending Library membership, giving teachers the tools and lessons to inspire a love for science
- $750 pays for a bus to the museum for a classroom, sometimes the only barrier for teachers hoping to bring their students to the galleries
- $1,000 supports one high school crew member participating in Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center youth development and workforce readiness programming for a full school year
- $5,000 digitizes 50 items from the museum’s collection, enabling us to share them with researchers worldwide forever
- $25,000 funds a state-of-the-art multi-sensor probe, allowing St. Croix Watershed Station research scientists to measure water quality in lakes across Minnesota and around the world
- $50,000 pays for the museum’s garbage collection for a year, a necessary and unglamorous job that lets our visitors focus on dinosaurs, not dumpsters
- $60,000 supports six weeks of school outreach programming in classrooms, reaching nearly 20,000 students where they are
- $100,000 launches a new artist-in-residence program, where artists and scientists invent new ways to experience and share science together
- $250,000 buys new gamma spectrometers, allowing our water researchers to measure radioactive isotopes in lake mud that help us learn about the history of pollution in our lakes — and how to clean them
The museum is also preparing to open Body of Work: Tattoo Culture on Dec. 18, as well as host Dune: Part Three in the Omnitheater, the first Hollywood release shown on the 90-foot domed screen since it was built. More exciting visitor experiences are in store, but museum leaders say that this campaign will be a crucial step in realizing those goals.
Founded in 1907, the Science Museum has reinvented itself for each new era, from free public lectures to one of the first museum-based schools in the country, the original Omnitheater films and its riverfront home in downtown St. Paul. Today it reaches students in nearly all 87 Minnesota counties, conducts research on Minnesota’s lakes, rivers and fossils, and contributes approximately $37 million a year in economic impact to St. Paul.
Gifts can be made at smm.org/curiosity.
