Announcing our 2025-27 Strategic Plan
Dear Friend of the Museum,
Launching a new strategic plan is a big moment for any nonprofit. It’s the culmination of a lot of work and brings us from thinking deeply about our future to actually enacting it. It feels like the turning of a corner, full of fresh new possibilities and exciting momentum. It is also a force for alignment, bringing an entire community into agreement about what the organization is best positioned to take on.
I’m proud to share Discovery Museum’s new strategic plan for the years 2025-2027. More than any other plan in our history, this was the product of myriad voices. We held ten focus groups of nonprofit industry and government leaders, community partners, Museum members and visitors, funders, and more. Our entire staff participated in brainstorms, discussions, and debates. We invited everyone on our 81,000-address email list to take a survey and received 504 responses with feedback and ideas for our future. And we invited our young visitors to answer, with a drawing, the question, “What’s one thing that would make Discovery Museum even better?”
The result is a focused action plan for strengthening Discovery Museum following ten years of tremendous growth in facilities, service, and capacity. We will be working to ensure that we are putting our unique expertise to best use in service to the most urgent needs of our region’s families. Expanding the ways we activate our mission in schools and with community partners. Investing in our staff, so they have the tools to do their jobs well and are compensated equitably. And tending to two facilities projects that demand our attention—Discovery Woods, which has been so loved that the sustainability of its trees has been compromised, and our more than 140-year-old Administration Building.
These ambitious plans will require all the energy and confidence of our staff team and the investment of our community. We have already crossed the starting line!
I would like to acknowledge our Strategic Planning Team, Board of Directors, and our entire staff, who immersed themselves in this process so that we could dream and imagine and then plan a path toward an even stronger Discovery Museum. And what a joy to work on this with people who, one and all, want the Museum to be better so we can do better for kids and their caregivers. Thank you.
You can read the Discovery Museum 2025-2027 Strategic Plan Executive Summary on our website. Please send any reactions, ideas, or how you’d like to help to mbeam [at] discoveryacton.org (mbeam[at]discoveryacton[dot]org).
Marie R. B. Beam
CEO