Drinkwater: Our math museum is growing fast & parents say “I wish this was around when I was a kid.”

Tough questions, new insights, diverse perspectives. Welcome to questions of the day with fanuel muindi. All right. Welcome to another edition of CivicSciTV’s questions of the day. My name is fanuel muindi, and I’m so glad to be your host yet again, because today we have a special guest, someone I met in New York at the Simons foundation sandbox meeting Summit. This is Tracy Drinkwater, the president and founder of the Seattle universal math museum. I love the acronym some where she also now, wait for it. She also serves as the current acting executive director. Tracy, welcome to scitv.

00:50

Thank you. Fanuel,

00:52

so I wanted I’ve been meaning to ask you this question, can you just briefly take us through the journey of starting some How did the idea come about?

01:04

I keep trying to get in the center there, but I’m backwards. So how did it come about? I was a middle school math teacher, which had been a lifelong dream of mine, that I did sort of mid midlife career change, and I wanted to take my students on a math field trip, and there’s nowhere to go on a math field trip. All these other subject areas get to go on these really fun field trips. I love going to museums and science centers and children’s museums, both with my kids and with would have loved to have taken my students to these places to see the math and there’s just aren’t those opportunities. So I thought there should be a math Museum, and I Googled it, this was around 2013 and found that there was one other math Museum in the United States that had been founded in just the year before, and Glenn Whitney and Cindy Lawrence were involved in that at the time, I started following all their news and collecting information. And then in 2015 I went out there to talk with both of them, and they were very gracious. And Glenn Whitney said, of course, Seattle should have the second math museum in the country. Well, the cool part of that story is that now he’s on our board and supporting us in getting launched and I started the I had done a few other things after teaching. I was a school board director, a consultant and tutor, and I taught future teachers at Seattle University and their college of education, where I had gotten my master’s, and all the that time and all my education about more education in Washington State, I kept thinking, we need a math museum. We need a math museum. And so I finally, in 2019 started the nonprofit, and I had one other board member. I had been talking to different people about it, and one of our state senators signed on to be our first board member other than myself. And then we started recruiting more members, and the pandemic started. And so we took advantage of zoom and being able to meet with people all over the country and hold lots of kind of those organizational meetings, and do lots of work online to get our our groundwork laid. And as we emerged from the pandemic, we had started doing a few programs, and now we’re doing lots of programming. We are about to finish our third fiscal year, and we have over 80 events that we’ve accomplished and more than 3000 participants, which is more than double what we had done the year before. So we’re growing exponentially. We’ve both in our revenue and in our participation in community events. So we don’t have a location yet. We’re doing lots of programming with community partners, with schools, libraries, other community based organizations. We’re focusing on trying to make offerings available to people who have been historically marginalized from math enrichment opportunities, and so we’re offering a lot of programming for free in South King County, where the demographics are such that people have fewer opportunities and there are lower test scores according to the data on the annual tests. And so we are trying to make an impact where we can right.

04:28

Thank you for that sharing that there’s so much in there. Where do I begin? Where do I begin? One of the questions that I think our viewers, our viewers, our other founders in this space are probably wondering, is probably asking. Tracy, so I know about science museums. You are math Museum. Help me understand here, what’s the difference? Where’s the overlap? Where’s the difference? So

04:58

from the beginning. And I’ve been about hands on math, so when I was studying to get my Master’s in teaching in both Special Ed and math at the through the secondary level, I knew that, because we all learned differently, and I was the kind of learner that could learn from the book, learn from the teacher. I didn’t need a bad math teacher till I was my third quarter of college, that was not a good fit for me. But I know that that doesn’t happen to everyone, and a lot of the traditional ways that math is taught is not reaching enough people, and people get disillusioned, bored, dissatisfied, get told they’re not a math person, or start to feel like they’re not a math person, and we want to make everybody feel like they are a math person. So I knew that that hands on experience was really important, and I know that for me, a math museum meant hands on exhibits like at a lot of science centers and children’s museums, where I had been taking my kids regularly for several years, my own children, and so to me, it wasn’t. It was never going to be, you know, slide rules and calculators behind glass with a historical text next to it. It’s not that kind of a historical meeting Museum. But at the same time, I want to be able to tell the history of math in ways that are engaging and creative, and allow people to feel like they’re in the historical time period, or they’re learning about different parts of the world than maybe they think math comes from. It’s a worldwide phenomenon that cultures from around the world, for centuries, have been developing math to meet their needs, to solve their problems, to build their buildings, and that they’ve come up with similar and different ways of dealing with it, and sometimes the white Europeans get credit when it was actually the Africans that discovered things beforehand, centuries before and the Middle Eastern cultures have developed mathematics beautifully for centuries. So so wanting to tell that story, but also have people experience math in this new way, in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve numbers and definitely doesn’t involve two dimensional black and white worksheets. We want 3d full color. You’re walking into the math problem. You’re seeing math all around you, seeing math in art and culture. And we’ve made that case to a recent funder, this Arts Fund of Washington State, that we are an arts and culture organization, and they gave us a grant for that. So we are do a lot of our programming as math and art, create things, make and take see the beauty in it, that there’s a lot of math and music and art, visual arts, we’ve had a math and art exhibit that we hosted a couple of years ago that was our first big event, and it really makes an impact on people. They’re like, wow, I haven’t seen math from this perspective. And so we’re trying to surprise people to help them see that because you may like math or art or technology or history or science or sports, you innately have mathematical abilities that you don’t really see as math, because maybe it’s not like the school math that you grew up with, but that your mathematical intuition is there. It’s part of being human, and that you appreciate art or music because of the mathematics behind it, the things that please our eyes and our ears are mathematical principles that you can discover and be delighted by and realize that just like music, there are aspects of that that you can like and you don’t have to like every single genre music. You never say, I’m not a music person,

09:06

yes, and I think that’s the beauty about this, right? It’s immersed in so many different things, right? And I think I can, I can see the pitches that you’re probably making to diverse funders. And I hope we can talk a little bit about that too. So you say you have no location yet, program location that is right, correct,

09:23

but also, you know, we’re, we’ve got, we’re a zoom baby organization, or we, we’ve been meeting online from our homes during the pandemic. And so, you know, I have storage space in my house. Some of our staff have stuff stored at their house with their educator kits that we take places and our materials and things. We have not made a decision yet to spend the money on a location, because we’re still in the process of fundraising and researching areas and spaces and we haven’t found the right fit yet for our budget. And for for our needs for a space, and we want to have more to offer at a location before we sign a lease that may be locking us into a place for two to five years. And we’re hoping by this fall, to make a decision. We’re also, you know, we only just started hiring contractors about a year ago, I’ve been volunteering. We’ve had all volunteer run organization. We’ve had over 70 people contribute over 9000 hours of volunteer time since we started in 2019 and that’s just grown every year to reach that point. And then we’ve got now about nine contractors working part time, each of them, and we’re just this month, starting to hire employees, and they will mostly still be part time. And I’ve been working on it full time, volunteering my hours to contribute to this mission, and I’m just going to keep doing it until someone says I can’t, and no one’s

11:09

and this is what I love about doing this, is that we can get his insights, that some websites can have this information, but you really get to hear the actual person that is on the ground trying to do the work. So Tracy, thanks so much for sharing this. So you said you were zoom, baby. So he’s telling me everything right now is still online, all your programming. No,

11:29

not the programming, but you know, we, we store all our documents online. We have most of our meetings on Zoom, I see, and we’re able to avoid traffic, which is nice, and a lot of us are kind of far flung, but the traffic we do engage in is when we have an event. So we have events at schools. We’ve done after school, programming in school, programming, math fests during the evening at schools. We’ve been in several libraries in our area in South King County, where I mentioned has the demographics that we’re really trying to reach, and so we do regularly a few times a month at each of those libraries, we partnered with a Jewish Community Center to put On programs, and those are paid by the participants. We’ve done a program with the YMCA of Greater Seattle at a low income housing unit. We offer that for free. The library events are for free. We do Simons The reason I met you, Simons Foundation, the science sandbox sponsored us to partner with another math organization called Zeno. They serve kids from three to five years old, and we’re more broad, but we have a program that’s lasting six months with families. A parent or caregiver comes with their child aged three to 10 or children, and we meet two or three Saturdays a month, and we have different themes, and we present lots of math toys and games and puzzles and building materials. And we have something different each week that we show up and we engage with them, and then we give them some of the materials that we’ve playing with to take on continue the learning. And so that’s been all paid for by Simon’s Foundation.

13:23

And this is great. You mentioned the partnership grant that you got right from the Simons foundation. I’m curious from so from the programming side, who is attending these events you mentioned, you kept saying, people. I’m assuming there’s some young people in here, but this is not exclusive to them, right? Adults can also come along. I’m assuming parents bring their kids to this, right? So

13:45

like the school programs that’s with kids are participants, right? But we have staff that assist us one way or another. The libraries is usually families, kids as young as infants and Babes in Arms, but mostly it’s a three and up that are engaging with us and and we encourage the parents to play too, and they don’t have to sit right next to their kids play with them. We say, you know, if you want to work at that table and they want to be at this table, go play. This is for you too. We really want to show the parents as much as the children, that math is something to engage with in a positive way. It’s fun, it’s creative. You can spend we tell people spend as long or as little time as you want. It’s really kind of anti school. We’re not directing you as much as facilitating the learning. It’s very self directed. So if a child wants to stay at one table for the whole time they’re there, which may be two hours, they can do that, and we will engage with them and encourage them. But if they want to go spend just like five minutes at each thing, they can do that too, because that’s what they need. They get to decide what they need. I. And we want it to be that. We want everyone to come away with a positive, emotional experience with men, because not everybody has had the opportunity to get that. And we get terrific response from the parents saying, I wish this was around when I was a kid. I get that all the time, and I just That’s my compensation me and motivating me to show up every day is that people are saying, this is meaningful, this is amazing. This is filling a niche. I wish it were around when I was a kid. I love that my kids are getting to experience math in this way, and the kids want to come back. And the best is when the kids don’t want to come, they get dragged there, and then they won’t they don’t want to leave. And that’s always a nice compliment, too. You know, the parents are trying to bribe their children to lead the program because they have to get to soccer practice or something like

15:50

that. And that’s great that I’m just thinking about, like, what kind of data point is that right? The kid was brought against their will, and now they want to stay right. So that leads to my next question, Tracy, what metric keeps you up at night, at least that you’re thinking about all the time for some

16:09

fundraising, how much more money can we bring in? That’s the you know, because what we’re doing is great and but it costs money, and we don’t want to charge all of the end users, because the whole point is that a lot of people have not had the opportunity to experience math in a way that has worked for them, and they may not be in a well paying job that they can sign their kids up or themselves up to be tutored, or maybe they haven’t even gone to College, and they are trying to just give their kids and, you know, an opportunity, but there are limitations on their time and their expenses, so we try to go to where people are so they don’t have to spend too much time in the car. We try to offer things for free in certain areas, but that costs us money, and so we’re using a lot of our donations from individuals, corporate sponsors, grant opportunities from foundations as well as government, local government, to provide these things for free. And so the more money we get, the more we can do. And we need to hire an executive director, which, because I’m things have just gotten so big, I can’t do it all anymore, right? I used to have two other part time jobs when I started, and I slowly let those go. I let my tutoring go. I let my teaching at Seattle. U go because I it just was getting so big, and now it’s so big that I’m like, help. I need more I need more staff. I need an executive director, and I want to stay involved, be the board president and fill in in any way that I am needed, but I would like for someone to take on the main role and lead us into the next phase of our journey.

17:53

Yeah, and it’s amazing that we’re at this stage right now, rapid growth. Right? Everything is happening. You’re overwhelmed, right? Something, something, usually it’s, it’s both good and bad, right? Yeah, you is pain point. But also you’re like, Okay, this is great. Are you looking to hire this ed in the now or in the next six months? In the next six months? Okay, yeah, okay. Because for those of you watching one of you know, great people, get in touch with Tracy. And if you’re watching this later, and it’s like, within a six month period, look at the date that this video is

18:24

posted. You can look on our website for on the jobs page and see it posted. We we’ve been hiring educators as well and summer interns, and we pretty much got those wrapped up for this summer. Yeah.

18:38

And I think fundraising is a metric that, if you that people I’ve talked to definitely keeps coming up, that they need more money, of course, right? To do things. Talk about your partners. You developed, of course, you’ve had the Simons foundation, right? Who else is in this wagon? Because I know in your business plan, which, by the way, do you have a PDF online with your business plan, which is amazing, by the way, there’s a number there three, three and a half million dollars target, goal, right? So who are you targeting to get this funding? And at the top of your list, what is it that you want?

19:15

So we’re targeting government, federal, state and local government, we because we think this is a it’s a we’re in an education crisis, and math is not been our strong suit, both nationally and in Washington State. We feel like this needs to be addressed. The Seattle area has some of the highest job growth in STEM fields, ignoring the last set of layoffs, but those happened all over the country, and so we have all these great stem organizations. But. We don’t have we’re not educating our youth in this area to be able to earn those jobs, so earn that kind of money. So we think that that means that the government should be contributing to that, but also the corporations themselves. So we are talking to several of the high tech organizations about funding, most of them only want to fund programs right now, and we need, we do need some infrastructure money, and that three and a half million covers hiring of more professional staff. That’s probably our number one priority, because it’s hard to do more without the staff. We are also wanting to have a location. So looking at a temporary location, because our long term vision is to have a full fledged Museum. But that’s not going to be possible with the three and a half million. That’s going to be more like a 20, $25 million minimum, so, but the three and a half million will help us hire more staff, secure a temporary location where we can do our own programming, as well as continue with the partnerships and other locations and the outreach. And we want to buy a an electric vehicle to have all of our activities and some portable exhibits do that outreach. So right now, we’re using personal vehicles, and that’s just not sustainable. The van would be an outreach van like a lot of museums have. I know our local Science Center has, and we both met the folks who run the Bio Bus in the Boston area. And so I think that’s expanding to New York or the other way around anyway, being able to take those things, we’re developing the portable exhibits that would go inside of that, as well as beads part time housed at the temporary location. So all of that together, you know that that price tag is covering three years of staff to support that as well. So

22:04

yeah. And then I think there’s so much in there too evaluation, of course, which we didn’t talk too much about, that you want to be tracking right? The impact

22:11

already with all some of it’s required for certain grants, but it’s to do anyway for our right.

22:18

And then that is a pain point, I think, from any organization to do that, well, right? Capturing that data, of course, you want to grow. So there’s so much growth here, I wish we can just keep talking. Oh, my goodness. I feel like we’re barely scratching the surface here. And at the beginning, you mentioned that, hey, you’ll

22:35

have me back, right? Yes, yes. If

22:37

we’re going to have you back, we’re going to have you back. And in fact. So this is amazing because you are, again, one of two math museums in the US, if I’m saying that correct, the other one is in New York, right? I believe. So it’s amazing that it’s 10

22:51

years so they’re like, yeah, there, there are, are. They were my inspiration. Once I thought of the idea and found them, I was like, Okay, this can be done.

23:02

And it’s great to hear that inspiration that is, and also the fact that they’re they’re on board, right on your side, helping

23:08

you on board now, yes, yeah, to talk. We see each other at events and have visited each other, so yeah, they’re great. This is some I forgot to mention, we partner with local museums too. So our Pacific Science Center and our Museum of Flight in the Seattle area, we do programs with them. They’ve been so supportive and wanting to help us and providing their space for free for us to have events or for to collaborate on events together for their audiences. So that’s been outstanding experience. Yes, yeah,

23:44

and again, oh, that’s why we need to have you back, because we’re going to unpack, for example, how do you develop partnerships, right? What kind of training is involved? You have a big advisory board where, I’m assuming there’s some scientists in there, mathematicians, right? How do we get more of those faculty, for example, doing math engagement, shall we say, right math outreach, which you probably are doing and will do so please have you back. Tracy, this was phenomenal. Thank you so much.

24:12

Thank you. It’s a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for having me.