MICRO Museums

Amanda Schochet is an award-winning science communicator who co-founded MICRO in 2016. 

MICRO’s mission is to provide equal access to fundamental knowledge by creating a fleet of six-foot-tall science museums that go to the places where people live their daily lives.

From Rockefeller Center to public hospitals, MICRO’s distributed museum has reached over 400,000 visitors across NYC, and recently began expanding to more states. 

Before MICRO, Amanda was a computational ecologist, using machine learning techniques for public health with NASA and for policy decisions on manufacturing with USAID. She also serves as a mentor at NEWINC, the New Museum’s social innovation incubator. 

Amanda is pursuing a more equal future built on better information, and believes that we need to work together strategically to reach this reality. 

You can hear more in her TED talk, on Science Friday, or during an impromptu ecology tour in your local park.

MICRO is a nonprofit redesigning museums for a culturally decentralized future. We squeeze ideas and stories about science into museums that can go anywhere, including transit hubs, community centers, and hospital waiting rooms. 

Museums rank as the most trusted source of information, but are broadly inaccessible. Tickets are expensive and museums are geographically concentrated in affluent areas. These kinds of injustices, when paired with inadequate public science communication and deficiencies in our education system, compound to create significant inequalities in knowledge and empowerment.

MICRO believes that access to accurate, high-quality information is a basic human right, and the absence of that access is at the root of many challenges facing humanity. 

By creating the first truly distributed museum, MICRO aims to be the most visited museum in the world, and invite visitors everywhere – especially those typically excluded from conventional museums – to be curious in a structured, truth-seeking way.

The inaccessibility of accurate information is at the root of many major challenges facing humanity and society. 

Museums are the most trusted source of public information and are vital social learning environments, but they are geographically clustered and expensive to visit. NYC has more than 100 museums, while The Bronx has only 5. A day at the NY Hall of Science, for example, would cost $110 for a family of four. 

On top of that, museum content is often designed for a narrow audience, and is accompanied by lackluster community programming. 

Scientists and mainstream media struggle to effectively communicate about science, and our public officials allow political motivations to marginalize effective scientific messaging. While the internet provides access to an unprecedented volume of information, it lacks a model for verifying sources or checking facts for accuracy.  

A recent Stanford study evaluated students' ability to assess information sources. It found that “most middle school students can't tell native ads from articles,” and describe their results as “dismaying,” “bleak,” and “a threat to democracy.” 

Humanity’s ability to combat ecological collapse, understand one another, and make decisions at any level are impacted by an exclusionary system that MICRO is designed to change. 

MICRO Museums are six-foot-tall installations designed for high-traffic public spaces. From Bronx hospitals to Rockefeller Center’s concourse, MICRO’s science museums have reached more than 400,000 people since launching in 2017.  

MICRO’s natural history series, the Smallest Mollusk Museum, uses optical illusions, a giant hologram, and a liter of slime to explore the last 650 million years of life on Earth. The Perpetual Motion Museum, our physics and engineering series, explores humanity’s age-old quest to understand and harness energy. In addition to our own MICRO Museums, we work with partners to create custom museums on any topic. 

Additional MICRO programs include the Explorer Program, which trains high school students to serve as docents, and MICRO DIY, which allows anyone to build a museum in their home using MICRO’s design principles and everyday materials. Every museum is also accompanied by free online resources, including an audio guide and short novella.

With co-founders from the worlds of science and media production, MICRO’s power emerges from a marriage of media expertise, storytelling, science, and systems thinking. 

Every MICRO museum is an access point to a new view of the world, and is easy to install and modular enough to be produced at scale.

While MICRO Museums capture the attention of any incidental viewer, we prioritize reaching people who might not otherwise feel welcome in museums, and who don’t have access to conversations about science. 

MICRO partners exclusively with venues that are free and open to the public, and prioritizes partnerships in communities that don’t have easy access to other extracurricular science learning opportunities. 

When MICRO installed a museum in the busy lobby of a public hospital in the South Bronx, what was intended as an experience for hospital visitors quickly became a local destination. Families visited with their children, and high schools nearby led field trips to the museum.

After collecting extensive community feedback, MICRO developed the Explorer Program, which trains and employs local South Bronx high schoolers to lead free science programming at the museum. This program creates powerful career opportunities, and allows us to offer community-directed, multilingual programming. Our needs assessment and feedback collection processes remain critical in understanding the communities MICRO serves. 

Additionally, researchers who contribute to MICRO have reported that the collaboration process has helped them become stronger science communicators. 

Each MICRO Museum contributes to a more democratic, scientifically literate, and empowered world. 

MICRO reaches communities that have been overlooked by traditional learning institutions, and helps to illuminate everyone’s role in sharing and canonizing knowledge. 

Through the Explorer Program, high school participants have learned to expect compensation for their intellectual output, and they have shared how much their confidence with science has improved. Along with improved research skills and public speaking, one Explorer noted that she never imagined a career for women in science before this program.

MICRO’s content is designed to encourage systems thinking and structured curiosity, and as we grow, our programs and content will engage an even broader audience. 

As a researcher, I became frustrated by how often I was analyzing urgent environmental and public health problems without any role in addressing them. I realized that a scientific understanding of a system was not enough to address the societal roots of many of these issues. I was eager for an opportunity to change outcomes, not just document them. 

I began discussing these issues with Charles Philipp, a designer and media producer who had worked at places like Aardman Studios and Cartoon Network. Charles was working in advertising, and knew how to tell stories that affected people’s behavior.

In late 2015 we found ourselves sitting in a Brooklyn hospital waiting room, across from a group of teenagers. In a neighborhood that has some of the lowest high school graduation rates in the city, we watched these young learners lose hours to boredom while they waited to be seen.   

We realized there that the built environment is full of spaces that could be transformed into opportunities for social learning. We began designing a system that would invite people to explore big ideas, investigate the world around them, and envision how they could contribute to improving it. MICRO was born.

Among the many aspects of MICRO that inspire me, I think often about the psychological impact of installing our museums in neighborhoods far from other museums. 

I’ve learned about this from MICRO’s visitors, but most deeply from my own mother, who grew up in Germantown, Philadelphia. Her class field trips were routinely to local post offices and manufacturing facilities, rather than to the dozens of premier museums just a short drive away. It was clear what type of careers were expected for her and her classmates. 

I vividly remember each time in my childhood that I learned about a new injustice. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 12, and have spent the subsequent two decades searching for levers I could pull to affect meaningful change. 

Along with welcoming thousands of learners to explore the systems that drive our natural world, I’ve seen MICRO’s museums and programs encourage countless people from diverse backgrounds and geographies to recognize that these institutions of knowledge are for them, and must be shaped by them.

MICRO is an experiment in how a small team can strategically affect change by building structures alongside entrenched and flawed institutions, and strengthen them from the outside.

I have long lived at the intersection of science, art, and communications, and am deeply invested in the creation of public art and social experiences that tell science-based stories through humor. 

I began my career using machine learning, satellite data, and other high-tech tools to address pressing social and environmental issues. In 2016, I began to consider how various factors limit access to fundamental information and leave many voices out of critical conversations. Encountering the hospital waiting room crystalized MICRO as a way to address some of the major inequalities I was witnessing in public science communication. 

My ecology and computer modeling experience have been relevant in building an effective business model for MICRO, along with cultivating a robust, ethical, and vibrant organization. 

Working with teams of scientists and researchers – many of whom were inexperienced communicators – prepared me to recruit and lead over 30 researchers to work on each museum. As a result, I am able to ensure that scientific content is designed for a broad audience and simplified without sacrificing accuracy. 

Truly the best practice for growing MICRO has been MICRO itself. I’ve been fortunate to help raise over $1 million in revenue, build our team of 10 talented MICROnauts, work with world-class audio producers to script an audio guide about mollusks, and collaborate with overextended lawyers to draft contracts with public hospitals. MICRO has been an incredible opportunity for me to add new skills to my toolkit for facilitating change. 

Last year, I had the opportunity to deliver a TED Talk at the National Academy of Sciences, which was to be distributed across TED platforms at their discretion. I felt optimistic about my talk’s capacity to inspire change, but I was nervous about the public exposure.

As I have become a more visible spokesperson for MICRO, some frightening events have occurred, where men with inappropriate interests have followed me to events where I’m scheduled to speak.

With these experiences in mind, I wished that someone else could deliver my talk, and dreamed of cancelling. Fortunately, MICROnauts were confident it would be impactful, and pushed me forward. 

The talk received a standing ovation and was shared on the TED homepage, where it’s been viewed almost 1.3M times. It connected me with change-makers of all stripes and levels of influence. 

The director of a major philanthropy shared that the talk inspired him to shift their entire giving framework toward local endeavors. An enterprising college student heard the talk, wrote to MICRO, and has since joined our team. 

I’m beginning to appreciate the impact of developing a public platform, and am encouraged to move past my concerns and step into this role.

Last year, one of MICRO’s museums was destroyed when two employees forgot to secure it inside the truck for an installation. 

The employees called us immediately to tell us about the museum and to take full ownership of their mistake. 

My cofounder Charles and I concealed our concerns about the logistical and $40,000 financial loss of an object in which we had personally invested hundreds of hours, and prioritized supporting the team. We prepared handwritten notes reminding them how important they are to MICRO, and a comforting dinner for them to enjoy upon their return. 

We deeply appreciated the trust our employees demonstrated in their transparency about the event, and when we shared the news with MICRO’s directors of content and product, they each immediately responded with deep empathy. 

Both of these employees’ roles have since expanded, and we have worked collaboratively to build stronger processes.

Losing that museum was a hurdle as MICRO worked to meet client demand, but above all, it was a reminder of the critical importance of building a culture of compassion and learning.

MICRO is an LLC operating with 501(c)3 fiscal sponsorship from Fractured Atlas.

Educational organizations and institutions are exclusionary by design. They are rooted in one location, expensive to operate and attend, and filled with content developed for niche audiences. Even with explicit plans to become more inclusive, these entrenched issues will be slow and difficult to change.

MICRO exists to swiftly restructure the museum model, redesigning it to weave science, curiosity, and social learning into the fabric of our daily lives.

MICRO’s foundation emerges from scientific thinking, especially my experience in ecology. In this vein, to understand and transform a system, we identify the limiting resources. We know that traditional science museums are expensive. Money is therefore a limiting resource in this system, so MICRO has designed a museum that is far more cost effective. 

Instead of remaining in one location and expecting visitors to come to us, MICRO goes where people already are, entering into mutualistic relationships with our venues. 

MICRO is also adaptable. We keep overhead low and scalability high, which allows us to move museums quickly, launch new topics with ease, and create content that reflects partner goals. 

MICRO challenges the very concept of a museum, encouraging everyone to think critically about how they get their information and why we blindly trust buildings with corinthian columns and century-long histories. 

By becoming a node for learning and exploration in unlikely public spaces, MICRO Museums transform every building they enter.

My theory of change is that small actions, repeated at scale, can add up to shift systems at a macro level. MICRO’s activities are instrumental in actuating this theory, and there are 5 major outcomes we aspire to achieve.

First, we must create a world where economic growth and financial stability do not rely on increased consumerism. MICRO seeks to change this by underwriting a thriving ideas economy, and compensating people for their immaterial output. In the short term, we are developing a network of knowledge-sharing jobs in the U.S. through our Explorers Program, distributed field teams, and a broad network of contributors to each museum. In the long-term, MICRO will build a business model that funds more of these types of roles, and can expand this work globally to generate financial security for a wide range of people without increasing material consumption. 

Second, we must move toward a society of systems thinkers. In the short-term, MICRO’s content and programs are all designed to reinforce the relationship between the individual and the systemic. In the long-term, MICRO will be a thought leader on how to design content that encourages systems thinking.

Third, we must create a broader public understanding of high-quality research and source verification. In the short term, each museum placed in a public location reaches visitors with fact-checked information. In the long-term, we hope to expand initiatives like MICRO DIY, which teaches people how to build a museum and conduct better research.

Fourth, we must increase the diversity of information that is canonized and preserved in the future. In the short-term, MICRO leverages content from non-traditional sources and creates community-led programming. In the long-term, MICRO will form a distributed knowledge network that employs a diverse community of curators and creators, and features content they create.

Fifth, we must build must spaces that facilitate social connection and learning. In the short-term, MICRO partners with and advises venues on how to make their spaces more welcoming. In the long-term, venues will be built around MICRO Museums, which will serve as central gathering points for social learning.

Over the last three and a half years, MICRO has reached a remarkable global community of visitors, staff, scientists, students, and community organizations. 

Over 400,000 individuals have visited a MICRO Museum, with some staying for up to an hour. MICRO currently employs 13 people, and has worked with over 50 scientists and content advisors on museum development. We have employed 6 Explorers over the last two years, and 2 remain engaged in our programming. While it has yet to be released, we expect MICRO DIY, our at-home learning initiative, to reach over 1 million learners in the next 6 months. MICRO has built a total of 10 museums, and partnered with 15 venues to host them. 

In one year, we expect to grow our revenue and visitor count by 2.5 times, and are on our way to becoming the most visited museum in the world. While the pandemic will affect these numbers, we expect close to 1 million visitors to engage a MICRO Museum by the end of 2021. We hope to launch at least 3 additional Explorer Programs in other cities, and employ as many as 25 Explorers across those programs. MICRO aims to hire 3-5 individuals in the next year, and will have a core staff of approximately 15. 

By 2025, we expect to be the most visited museum in the world, with over 80 million visitors. Our team will include approximately 50 MICROnauts, with hundreds of scientists, designers, researchers, artists, and writers collaborating on museum content.

MICRO’s goals in the coming year are 1) to expand our system for generating meaningful career opportunities in communities that have experienced disinvestment, 2) to continue building a robust, human-centered organization, and 3) to expand our physical fleet. 

1. Our work in the Bronx demonstrates the impact that MICRO Museums and programs can have on a community. In the coming year, we aim to scale this system to other neighborhoods and regions, prioritizing job creation in places where access to meaningful career paths in science can be hard to find.
2. Formalizing MICRO’s operations and building strong processes will empower our team, and anchor our organization in our mission and values. In addition to improving efficiency and employee satisfaction, stronger structures will enable us to collect and act on feedback and ideas from all parts of our community.

3. Growing the size of our museum fleet, the geographic regions we serve, and our number of museum series will directly expand our impact. We are preparing to launch the prototype of the fully-customizable MICRO Museum, which will unlock hundreds of collaboration and installation opportunities. 

In five years, MICRO aims to become the most visited museum in the world. We will continue prioritizing placements and career opportunities in low-resource regions, and elevate more voices through community-led content creation. 

Personally, in the next five years I hope to contribute to a cultural shift by designing useful roadmaps for how individuals and small groups can strategically contribute to determining our collective future.

As MICRO scales both in size and geographic reach, we need to quickly learn to build and manage a distributed team. We aim to do this in a way that makes new employees feel connected to our mission, motivated to maintain a high quality of work, and see clear pathways for growth. 

This requires sophisticated processes and infrastructure that are challenging to develop while also balancing the need to expand MICRO’s fleet of museums and program offerings. 

As we scale the reach of the MICRO Explorers Program, we also need to ensure that we have safe and responsible supervisors to accompany high school-aged Explorers.

MICRO’s growth is determined by our ability to develop partnerships with venues across the country, especially in communities with limited access to other social learning experiences. To accomplish this, we will need to continue fundraising so that we can offer as many free museum placements as possible. 

Personally, my platform and understanding of how to effect change have increased since beginning MICRO. At the same time, my bandwidth to read, think deeply, and listen to voices that I want to learn from is in competition with the time I spend growing and sustaining the organization.

MICRO is working with an executive coach and building an advisory board to help us maintain a robust organization and support our growing team. Their role is to consult on strategic decisions, and will include a task force to help MICRO build inclusive and anti-racist practices into our processes and culture. 

We are also earmarking additional budget toward raising salaries, which will help us recruit experienced candidates. A near-term goal is to hire a senior operations director, who will help sharpen internal processes. We are also building best practices around remote work, which will be especially important as we onboard remote team members. 

For the Explorers Program, we are building a scalable set of programming resources that will allow us to easily partner with local groups to hire Explorers in new communities. By collaborating with groups like the YMCA, we can leverage their experience managing safe programs and employing young people. 

Partnering with network-based organizations that have many venues will allow us to find efficiencies in impact. We will also proactively identify and pursue long-term funding sources so that we can subsidize museum placements.

Personally, I am working closely with our executive coach to structure MICRO in a way that allows me to carve out space for deeper research and writing. I am also building time into my schedule to spend more time having unstructured conversations with members of the MICRO community.

MICRO is intentional in our growth, and only works with partners who share our mission and values. 

Current funding partners include Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation; The Heckscher Foundation for Children; Tishman Speyer; Brookfield Properties; and Schmidt Futures. 

Clients we work with on custom museums include Johnson & Johnson and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. 

Current venue partners include Tishman Speyer (Rockefeller Center and the LinkedIn building in San Francisco); NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation (currently in Lincoln Hospital, previously in Bellevue Hospital); and New York Family Courts. Venues in which we were planning to launch a MICRO Museum pre-COVID include the UN General Assembly and the YMCA of San Francisco.

Community and grassroots programming partners include Here2Here; The Schomburg Satellite Academy; The Lakeside School; and The Lower East Side Girls Club. 

MICRO has historically collaborated with many venue partners. That list is available here. 

MICRO’s goal is to launch museums and programs that increase access to fundamental knowledge for as broad an audience as possible, while prioritizing communities with minimal access to cultural institutions. 

We generate the revenue to do this via philanthropic support, client relationships and venue sponsorships. MICRO Museums and content are always free to visitors. 

To engage as many people as possible in accessing fundamental knowledge, we develop content and programs that promote scientific literacy and structured curiosity, and engage audiences where they already are via our physical museum placements, which provide a social learning experience in high-traffic public spaces. 

MICRO uses creative design and innovative language to grab visitor attention and hold it throughout their experience. Museums are all human-scale, and use narrative, humor, and interaction to be inviting but never patronizing. We create the content once, and amortize the cost of that investment by replicating each series. This initial series design cost is funded by prizes, philanthropy, corporate sponsorship, and institutional collaborations. Custom museums are fully funded by client revenue. 

Venues with public engagement budgets pay MICRO a monthly subscription fee to host a museum. For mission-aligned venues without budgets, MICRO partners with philanthropies and corporate sponsors to install the museums at no cost. Philanthropic organizations and grants fund the majority of MICRO’s operating costs. 

MICRO has developed a portfolio of programs that receive continual support from foundations, and we create jobs in communities via programs funded by this philanthropic support.

MICRO has received over 350 collaboration inquiries from individuals on every continent, including Antarctica. We are working through a backlog of requests from particle accelerators, beekeeping societies, traditional museums, news outlets, community organizations, universities, and more. Our limitations are the fact that many of these organizations do not have budget, and MICRO needs funding to increase our own internal bandwidth. 

We are excited to grow our team, streamline our processes, and build our internal infrastructure to meet this demand. The creation of our fully-customizable, modular museum infrastructure is instrumental to our mission and financial sustainability, as it will allow us to seamlessly create museums on any topic. 

Our revenue breakdown includes approximately 65% support from foundations, 30% from client partnerships, and 5% from awards and individual donors. MICRO Museums are always free to the end user, with costs covered by venues and funders. 

Philanthropic grants, donations, and corporate sponsorship underwrite free museum placements in mission-aligned venues. It also supports research and development, impact assessment, and new programs like MICRO DIY. 

Large, recurring grants from foundations underwrite MICRO operating costs, including new hires, MICRO’s fabrication space, and the infrastructure to launch new regions. 

Venues will often directly lease MICRO Museums for their high-traffic spaces, such as Rockefeller Center and LinkedIn’s office building in San Francisco. 

Corporate clients, like Johnson & Johnson, contract with and directly pay MICRO to conceptualize, design, and build fully-customized museums. Clients like the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard hire MICRO to consult on museum content design.

MICRO began in mid-2016 with a budget of $15,000 raised from friends. In 2019, MICRO’s revenue reached $1,000,000. We maintain a 2.5x year-on-year revenue growth rate.

In 2016, MICRO received a $1,000 grant from Harnisch Foundation (Awesome Without Borders). In 2017, MICRO received a $50,000 prize from the Tribeca Film Institute (New Media Award). In 2017, MICRO received $260,000 from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons foundation, which they followed up with a $1,200,000 grant over three years in 2018. In 2018, MICRO received $87,200 from the Heckscher Foundation to create the Explorer Program. That foundation renewed their support in 2019 for $222,500. In 2019, MICRO received $40,000 from Schmidt Futures to launch MICRO DIY. 

Additional revenue-generating partnerships include a custom museum for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a custom museum for Johnson & Johnson.

Support in 2020 and 2021 will enable MICRO to launch new museums, engage additional partners, and formalize strong internal infrastructure. 

MICRO is seeking to generate $1.5 million in revenue in 2020 and $3 million in 2021 from philanthropic grants and client revenue. We are not currently seeking any direct investment for equity. This revenue will support the following: 

• MICRO’s staff and organizational growth, including three essential hires in operations and creative leadership
• MICRO DIY, our new at-home learning initiative that will allow anyone to build a museum in their own home
• The expansion of the MICRO Explorer Program
• The development of our modular museum infrastructure. 

Due to COVID-19, we don’t expect much of our revenue to come from traditional venue placements. This revenue will largely come from philanthropic supporters and custom museum clients.

While our current 2020 expenses remain uncertain due to the impacts of COVID-19, we estimate spending $527k on rent and office expenses, salaries, legal, program administration, research and development, accounting, utilities, business development, and software. These are our fixed costs. 

We estimate our costs of goods sold will approximate $166k, which will be fully offset by client revenue.

Business guidance from the Elevate Prize’s community of executives and partners would be invaluable as we rapidly grow our team and footprint over the next two years. Additionally, guidance from organizations with experience building and managing geographically distributed teams would help MICRO design for success as we expand to new regions.

The unrestricted funding of the Elevate Prize will allow MICRO to iterate and scale some of our more foundational ideas, and strengthen our core. We would especially focus on expanding our career ladder initiatives and improving recruiting processes.

Increased media visibility would help us increase our credibility as a new institution, and would introduce us to new partners. It would also allow us to attract new talent and increase the value of MICRO to our existing team.

Personally, I would very much appreciate guidance from the Elevate community on how to navigate and leverage a recent increase in media attention that has come about since my TED Talk. I would also like to learn more about the intersection of private work and public policy, so would also deeply appreciate mentorship from decision-makers with experience in this space.

Being included in the cohort of Elevate Prize winners would be thrilling and inspiring. Meeting and engaging with other rabble-rousing change-makers from around the world sustains my spirit as we forge ahead.

At MICRO, our fixed costs are low, so any increase in funding translates directly to increased impact. We are seeking values-aligned clients and funders, and especially those who would be interested in supporting free museum placements in mission-aligned venues. 

As we continue to build our team, it would be deeply valuable to have support in recruiting and hiring diverse talent. 

I relied on my ecology experience to craft MICRO’s original business model, and it’s gotten us to this point. As we enter a new phase of growth, we are looking for mentorship to help us refine our revenue model, scale ambitiously but sustainably, and establish MICRO as a long-lasting organization that can effect change for the next 100+ years.

As my personal platform continues to grow, I am actively seeking mentorship from people who can help me ensure that I’m using my voice effectively and wisely.

While MICRO is deeply fortunate to have a long list of interested collaborators, there are a few exciting partnerships we always have in mind.

We would love to work with Scape Architecture or other like-minded organizations that are changing the public face of the urban landscape.

We are interested in connecting with major institutional funders like the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with private philanthropies. Their support would underwrite major MICRO initiatives and organizational development. 

We are also interested in partners with significant networks of national or international venues, such as hospital networks, groups like the YMCA, and global organizations such as UNICEF, or other UN agencies. These would be deeply scalable partnerships that would enable MICRO to reach a new level of growth. 

We are also keen on expanding our custom museum development pipeline, and are seeking introductions to partners or institutions interested in expanding their impact through a modular museum format.

MICRO is also hoping to partner with educational media organizations such as PBS or Sesame Workshop to support and distribute MICRO DIY, our at-home learning initiative.

Personally, I am interested in ways that we can use MICRO’s infrastructure and network to partner with Native American communities, and facilitate the canonization of indigenous culture, languages, and histories.