After more than a decade as KID Museum, we are becoming KID.
When we founded KID Museum in 2012, we started with a simple but powerful belief: young people need more than knowledge to succeed. They need technical and human skills that allow curiosity to spark creativity, challenges to become opportunities, and kids to discover what they are capable of creating.
Since then, we have reached nearly half a million students, educators, families, caregivers, and community members. Our work has grown far beyond the traditional idea of a museum.
Today, we are not only creating transformative learning experiences for young people. We are partnering with schools, equipping educators, and developing and testing new approaches to teaching and learning that can reach kids well beyond our walls. Our new name reflects that evolution and a much bolder vision for what comes next.
The urgency of this work has never been greater. Artificial intelligence and rapid technological change are reshaping our world. We believe preparing kids for this future requires more than new technology or new curriculum. It requires rethinking how they learn.
At KID, we call this the Mind of a Maker: a mindset grounded in curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, resilience, and confidence to tackle unfamiliar challenges and shape what comes next. These skills aren’t developed simply by listening or memorizing. They’re built through making—by imagining, designing, testing, learning from failure, and trying again.
That’s why our next chapter is about fully living into our role as an innovation and discovery lab for the future. A place where young people build the skills and mindsets to invent the future, educators find the tools and support to bring transformative learning into their classrooms, and new ideas are developed, tested, refined, and shared so they can reach more kids, in more communities.
Our ambition is bold: to expand our reach fivefold over the next five years and help reinvent the future of teaching and learning in communities nationwide. Because every kid, regardless of background or circumstance, deserves the opportunity to discover their potential as a problem-solver, innovator, and changemaker.
While our name is changing, what matters most remains the same. The kid is still at the center of everything we do. Our physical space remains an essential place for kids, educators, families, and communities to come together, explore, and discover, and it’s where KID develops and shares what works well beyond any one location.
The community that has brought us this far will be essential to everything we hope to accomplish next.
We may have a shorter name, but our vision for the future has never been bigger and bolder.
Together, let’s invent the future.
Cara Lesser
Founder & Executive Director, KID
