Mighty STEM Girls+

Mighty STEM Girls+ directly supports educators in K-12 settings in providing afterschool enrichment designed to keep girls engaged in STEM. In our community, underrepresented populations in STEM make up the majority of the local population, and local schools lack resources to provide STEM enrichment specifically targeted at establishing, deepening, and sustaining interest and engagement in STEM. Discovery has offered a Mighty STEM Girls afterschool program in various schools and community centers since 2016. The curriculum is scalable with different units and levels of depth so it can be done as a brief survey course or as a more in-depth exploration of fields in STEM. Each lesson has a STEM pioneer as a highlighted role model, with biographies and trading cards to tell her story (origins, overcoming obstacles, and her work), and a hands-on exploration of her field for the students to try themselves. 

According to a 2019 special report by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on federal roles, women accounted for about 14.77% of science jobs, 6.97% of technology jobs, 5.62% of engineering jobs, and 1.93% of math jobs, for a total of about 29.29% of the federal STEM workforce. Within this breakdown, about 60% of the women in STEM identify as white. The special report includes recommendations to recruit women in STEM fields, with a particular emphasis on historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. 

By contrast, only about 20% of the population of Bridgeport, CT, the community in which we are located, identify as white. Our community primarily represents these underrepresented groups, and it is essential that girls in our region be given the resources to change these workforce statistics. The Mighty STEM Girls+ solution seeks to highlight STEM pathways specifically using role model pioneers who come from diverse backgrounds based on race, ethnicity, language, ability, age, gender and sexual identity, and profession, so that our students can see themselves and the pathways available to them before the drop-off in interest and engagement known to take place around middle school. The focus is on pathways rather than strict pipelines, and the students gain skills, practices, and ways of thinking that allow them to envision themselves in roles that may not even exist yet, knowing that they have the capacity to overcome obstacles and solve problems in real-world settings.

Our current program serves girls and non-binary youth in grades 3 and 4 with afterschool programming that includes a STEM pioneer and hands-on engagement with her field. In schools, the program runs for the spring semester and includes up to 18 weekly lessons run by a teacher from the school and trained by our staff. In community centers, the program is run by a partner from the center who receives training from our staff, and the length of the program depends on the community partner and how their existing programming runs (such as weekly over 6 weeks, daily over 3 weeks, etc.). 

The next stage of growth for the program is taking advantage of its scalability. If our educators design curriculum and provide training and materials, we are able to train facilitators for the program from any school, community group, or other sector that wants to host Mighty STEM Girls+. When we originally began the program, we did all of the teaching with in-house staff, which greatly limited our capacity, but with the new model, we are in twice as many locations and can easily continue to expand to meet the needs of the community and beyond. The proposed solution represents this next phase, which includes: designing and implementing an online professional development course in a learning management system; creating opportunities for middle and high school students to act as local mentors in the program for elementary students; providing coaching for middle and high school students in career development, particularly in areas of self-advocacy, negotiation, and equal pay. 

Locally, we also provide student and family support, including scholarships to our summer programs and family memberships to the Science Center, so that students in the program receive year-round support in their pathway exploration that includes building a base of understanding and support with the adults in their lives.

We currently serve girls and non-binary youth in grades 3-4 in Bridgeport, Connecticut; some are served through schools and some are reached through other community organizations in which they participate. All are eligible for free or reduced price lunch at school, and the majority identify with racial and ethnic backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in STEM. In working with the community partners who facilitate the program, we have learned that opening the program to a wider age range will make it possible to deepen the impact the program has on the lives of those students, as we can create scalable, scaffolded activities for a wider range of participants. 

Our newest iteration of the solution proposes to not only differentiate activities to reach a wider audience with hands-on activities, but also to bring in opportunities for more engagement with real-world mentorship, role modeling, and career coaching. This would expand impact to middle and high school students.

Additionally, our expanded program would have an emphasis on professional development and scalability, so the impact could be on populations well beyond our local region with facilitator training taking place from anywhere. Training will take place in an online learning management system, and impact, best practices, and needs can be communicated through engagement among facilitators and Discovery education staff managing the program within the portal.

Discovery is proud to partner with schools and community centers throughout Bridgeport to serve the students in our city with high-quality science. In the past year alone, Discovery has hosted about 3,500 students on field trips as well as served over 100 students with our after school enrichment programs. Additionally, thanks to our generous supporters, we offer free admission on Wednesdays to all Bridgeport residents as well as dozens of scholarships to our summer programs and subsidized memberships to over a hundred Bridgeport families. Through programs like our K-12 rocketry enrichment Discover NASA, Discovery has built relationships with Bridgeport teachers that enable them to imbed STEM throughout their teaching, and our STEM Accelerators program offers year-round academic, social, and other support services to families throughout the city. Beyond the classroom, Discovery cultivates relationships with dozens of other Bridgeport community centers, cultural hubs, and other tourist destinations to work collaboratively on initiatives across the city that benefit all residents and stakeholders. Mighty STEM Girls+ is one of these collaborative programs, and the expansions proposed are based directly on feedback from those community stakeholders from our existing work with their audiences. Our team, particularly our Team Lead, works closely with teachers, administrators, service and support providers, and other community members every day to ensure that our services are meeting the needs and wants of the community in evidence-based, standards-aligned practices.

We aim to serve 50-75 students per year with Mighty STEM Girls programming with our current model. Our long-term goal is to make the curriculum and teacher training available so that the solution can be scalable to thousands of students, as educator packets and training can go far beyond our local community.

We believe strongly in the impact of Mighty STEM Girls+ based on nearly eight years of experience with iterative offerings throughout our community. We are applying to the challenge because we know that our program can make a difference in the futures of women in STEM by inspiring girls to follow pathways and envision themselves setting and succeeding in their goals, and we want to make the successful programming scalable to a regional or national audience with appropriate supports in place to maintain quality. While additional funding is a piece of making this happen, the access to communities of practice, networking, and support systems for scaling and reaching industry partners is our main goal in applying to this challenge.

Erika Eng joined the Discovery team in 2016, and since then has worn many hats within the organization, from Business Operations Director, to COO, to her most recent role as Executive Director of the newly coined SHU Discovery Science Center and Planetarium. After graduating from SUNY New Paltz in 2004, she pursued a career in the Aerospace industry as a sales executive until the birth of her first son in 2012. Now a mother of 2, she is following her dreams in the non-profit sector. Her passions lie in leadership, community, inclusivity, and education. She is currently serving as Chair of the Women's Leadership Network of Greater Bridgeport, on the Board of Directors for BRBC, Leadership Greater Bridgeport, and the CORE Advisory Board for the STEM Ecosystem. In 2022 she was awarded the BRBC Rising Star award 2021, and is a proud Alumna of Leadership Greater Bridgeport Class 30. As a child, she attended a museum magnet school in Yonkers, NY, and notes that experience as something she draws on, giving a unique perspective to her current role. She is honored to work in that space now, and to be able to offer those same opportunities to students in the greater Bridgeport region. 

Mighty STEM Girls+ is innovative in how it approaches the issue of gender equity in the workforce as an issue rooted in childhood. Studies show that there is a drop-off in participation, and even interest, in STEM fields among girls that is progressive, like a "leaky pipeline." By the time these losses take place, intervention is not going to reach as wide an audience. Thus, we propose that the solution lies in reaching students prior to the drop-off and building in them skills, engagement, confidence, and resilience that will see them through the stages where they might otherwise find themselves losing a sense of belonging in STEM. It could change the landscape of interventions for workforce development by establishing a viable, scalable model for change that can be implemented anywhere.

Our impact goals for the next year are to provide new variations of activities that will make them appropriate for wider ranges of ages, and building out a high school mentorship and career coaching element that makes the program a longer investment for participants to sustain meaningful change. In five years, our goal is to expand regionally, with new sites added each year and new facilitators trained and offering programming in underserved communities across Connecticut and beyond.

Current indicators we collect are related to success of program activities, which include measurements of engagement, confidence, and skills mastery. As we make progress towards expansion goals, additional indicators will include number of facilitators trained and number of lessons/units offered in communities in our region and beyond.

Our current activities (providing out-of-school enrichment programming designed to highlight and embody women in STEM) have immediate outputs of students who recognize career options and pathways available to them; feedback from participants each year we have run the program shows a direct link between participation and the ability to visualize themselves pursuing STEM careers and using STEM skills in daily life. In the long-term, the anticipated outcome of these activities is to build a strong enough foundation in STEM engagement that participants will persist in STEM and pursue education and careers in STEM fields. 

With the proposed expansion model, additional activities include more student-facing services as well as facilitator activities. The student activities will include new emphasis on wider age ranges, providing more opportunity for practice in STEM skills and engagement, and with a particular focus on high school students acting as mentors and receiving their own coaching to facilitate their active pursuit of STEM pathways. The facilitator professional development will ensure that best practices are being met with each activity at each level in each setting, and allow for much broader impact by creating more spaces for the student-facing activities to take place. With this broader impact, real change in the STEM workforce is possible.

While the student activities themselves are not specifically tech-based, we propose to utilize technology to make the expansion happen. In our first efforts to expand, we quickly identified that consistency in training was key to ensuring that program goals would be met, and we received feedback that additional support for review in an asynchronous format would be helpful for facilitators who have taught the program before and wanted to review but did not need the full initial training. The use of an online learning management system to build a professional development course that can house all of these resources will make training more consistent as well as allow for practice activities and revisiting content as needed.

13 full-time staff

28 part-time or per diem staff

5+ community partners (anticipated to continue growing)

We launched our first Mighty STEM Girls program in 2016, with a new iteration in 2018 (Mighty STEM Girls 2.0) that was more data-driven and results-based and included updated curriculum, and in 2021 reworked the program as Mighty STEM Girls+ to reflect the inclusion of additional participants who may identify differently as well as new role models more reflective of the audiences we serve.

The Discovery Museum provides dynamic, hands-on STEM experiences that resonate with the innate curiosity, learning desire, and spirit of exploration of our guests. We encourage young learners to ask questions, solve problems, and engineer solutions today so they are better prepared to embrace the challenges of tomorrow. Our exhibits are all designed with accessibility and inclusivity in mind. We are home to multilingual exhibits, exhibits designed for blind/low vision guests, assistive audio devices, as well as in the process of opening a Recentering Center for sensory needs. We recently opened a new family lounge, family restroom, and lactation space to ensure that all guests and staff feel that they are welcome and fully included. We offer free admission to Bridgeport residents every Wednesday and provide discounts, transportation, and other assistance for many schools to participate in education initiatives.

Discovery's team includes individuals representing diversity of age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, language, ability, and belief. We are committed to recruiting partner sites for all programming that are similarly representative of the constituents they serve, and seek to train Mighty STEM Girls+ facilitators who are genuine members of the community in which they work. 

It is the policy of Discovery Museum to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, Discovery Museum will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. 

Our business model includes services to families/individuals as well as to groups such as schools, community centers, and camps. Some of our services are revenue-based, and we provide value by including access to new content and interactive elements as frequently as possible, as well as continually offering more guest amenities. We provide interactive exhibits, dazzling shows and presentations, high-quality education programs, and beloved public events. In the coming year, we are also launching community science initiatives designed to provide more opportunity for authentic engagement based on clients' interests and goals. We take feedback from our stakeholders seriously as we plan new initiatives, and our current strategic plan is centered on goals for sustainability, scalability, and accessibility.

Our funding comes from diverse sources, including earned revenue, individual donations, foundation grants, corporate sponsorships, and state and federal support. We offer revenue-based programs designed to support our community-based efforts to ensure sustainability of the organization as a whole.

Our largest education program, STEM Accelerators: Future Innovators, is in its tenth year of operation; original funding was provided by a private family foundation and diversified to include foundation and community support, and is currently supported by federal funding. Upgrades and expansions to our planetarium and technology initiatives are supported by an endowment from a private donor. We have a diverse portfolio of corporate sponsors for various programs and services, and were able to reopen post-COVID with an entirely new set of exhibits, amenities, and upgrades due to fundraising efforts.