Partner with Us

We are excited to explore developing a deep, long-term partnership with you! Partnering with NHMU can take many different forms. We look for opportunities that will be meaningful and mutually beneficial to both of our organizations. We are especially motivated to develop partnerships that give us an opportunity to build trust with culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse communities – those communities that have been historically excluded from museum programming.

We strive to build partnerships that allow us to work toward our mission, to illuminate the natural world and the place of humans within it, while also meeting the unique needs of our community partners. There are a myriad of ways we could work together to bring a collaborative idea to life. To help you envision what a partnership with NHMU could look like, we have defined three “levels” of partnership – that is, three different approaches we could take to working with your organization.

Level 1 – Contributory

In this type of partnership, we are looking to help your community members feel like participants with the Museum. NHMU can take the lead in designing educational experiences for your target audience. We will look to you to tell us detailed information about what your community needs are and how best we can connect with your community members, and to get the word out about our programs to your community. We would anticipate engaging with a large number of community members, or engaging multiple times with smaller numbers of community members.

Example Partnership
Salt Lake County Library, Library Workshops

Level 2 – Collaborative

In this type of partnership, we are committing to a deep partnership with a target community group. We are looking to build trust and develop personal relationships with community members and your community at large. NHMU can manage the design process, but will look to your organization to steer the direction and content of the final product. We will be looking to work closely with you to implement programs. We would anticipate that the majority of participants in these programs would be engaging explicitly for our collaborative programming.

Example Partnership
Hartland Community 4 Youth and Families

Level 3 – Co-Creative

In this type of partnership, we are committing to supporting the needs of target communities whose goals align with ours, and who connect us to new audiences. We would look to be equal partners in the planning and design process, as well as the implementation of programs we co-create. That is to say, the needs and priorities of your organization are weighed equally with our own as we create something together. We may be able to offer our institutional resources to support your organization’s goals. These partnerships may take a long time to find their path and reach their goals, and we are committed to giving it as much time as it takes to get it right. In these partnerships, we would anticipate that participants would see our programs as community-driven.

Example Partnership
Tracy Aviary Jordan River Nature Center, City Nature Festival
Salt Lake County Library, Library Days

Ready to work with us on custom programming?

Reach out to the NHMU Community Liaison, Jacob Osborne, at josborne@nhmu.utah.edu and we can schedule a time to meet and talk about partnership opportunities.