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The Children’s Museum has established a variety of programs to support our city, our neighborhoods, and the families that fill them. The Extraordinary Transformations campaign seeks to maintain and grow these programs. Your donation makes an impact on visitors tiny and tall. You create experiences and memories for ALL. In the My Museum blog series, we’re showing you just that.
For more than a decade, The Children’s Museum made neighborhood revitalization a significant part of its strategic plan, focusing on stabilization efforts and investment in a wide range of educational programs, infrastructure improvements, blight removal, home building, and quality-of-life planning. Now acting as an anchor and convener between residents and stakeholders, we’re focusing on the improvement of education among our neighbors with the Old National Bank Mid-North Promise Program
The Mid-North Promise Program is a large cradle-to-career initiative, meaning we’re helping our neighbors achieve education and career goals from an early age and on. Mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters within the six surrounding neighborhoods* can become participants in order to seek guidance to further their education and careers.
The program is based on a simple but dynamic concept: by providing unique, enriching educational opportunities, guidance, and financial support to Mid-North families, children and their parents will have a greater chance at attaining a higher-education degree and better career opportunities. In turn, this will elevate the standard of achievement for the Mid-North communities over all.
So, how are we doing it? Well, firstly, with your help. Donations allow us to organize events and programming within the Mid-North Promise Program, and to work closely with ambitious residents to accomplish their goals. More specifically, donations:
- Provide participants with guidance on college financing options and last-dollar scholarship opportunities to cover tuition costs, available for youths and their parents seeking an undergraduate degree
- Employ Family Learning Navigators—the people that work with participants one-on-one to achieve their education and career goals
- Contribute to Promise Program families' ability to become informed and gain access to educational and community initiative opportunities. For example, informing them of our MAP program for teens or Neighborhood Club memberships.
The Old National Bank Mid-North Promise Program has been in planning since 2010, and after receiving a few grants, was put in motion in 2015. Since it’s conception, the museum has employed two Family Learning Navigators who have helped over 177 individuals benefit from all the resources the program has to offer. As of 2017, there are 44 enrolled in the Mid-North Promise Program, which includes 60 adults and 117 youth!
This program is helping kids—and their parents—heighten their educational standards and goals. Being a foundation and witness to the extraordinary transformations of our Mid-North residents is what keeps the museum motivated to maintain and grow the Mid-North Promise Program. And it’s your help that makes it happen. After all, impact starts small.
Learn more or donate to the Extraordinary Transformations campaign.
*Neighborhoods: Crown Hill, Highland Vicinity, Historic Meridian Park, Mapleton-Fall Creek, Meridian Highland, and Watson McCord
