Children's Museum & Theatre of Maine

At the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine, we set the stage for every child to imagine and learn through play.

Goal One: Expand Belonging (DEAI): Expand physical and programmatic accessibility, anchor diversity and equity practices, and foster inclusive connections and resources.

Goal Two: Cultivate Curiosity: Link social-emotional learning across programs, develop evaluation practices to assess program impact, and promote experiential learning in early childhood education.

Goal Three: Strengthen our Core (Infrastructure and Operations): Foster organizational culture that invests in people, advance systems for transparency and stability, and manage risk and plan for resilience.

CMTM regularly pays for staff to attend conferences for professional development. Our HR and Finance Manager attended an HR conference last year, our Executive Director attended the Association of Children’s Museums conference, and our education staff attended the Maine AEYC Early Childhood Education Conference. Additionally, our Director of Education and Exhibits was accepted into MuseumLab, an 8-month professional learning program for museum professionals, which she began in September 2023. CMTM also made a recent shift in our daily management structure that includes a new leadership opportunity for mid-level staff called the “advocate” role. The team member in the advocate role takes the lead in managing the front-of-house staff on a day that CMTM is open to the public. The advocate role comes with a merit-based raise and additional guidance from a manager.

First off, here at the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine (CMTM), we are less than three years into operations at our new building, which was completed in June of 2021. This building has doubled the size of our organization, including our physical space, staff, and budget. We are still adjusting to this exciting reality and have settled on the right number of staff members to properly run the Museum & Theatre on a daily basis. We are also still adjusting to post-Covid norms, while still offering monthly mask-required sessions to ensure all of the children and caregivers that visit us feel safe and comfortable in our space. Second, CMTM has made significant increases to staff salaries in the past nine months following an extensive period of research into cost of living increases in the area and local salary averages. The cost of living in Maine has increased significantly and we are proud to have been able to increase staff salaries to ensure that all of our team members are making a living wage or higher. Third, we are seeing incredibly high uses of our discount and access initiatives. As the cost of living in Maine has increased so significantly, many families don’t have disposable income to pay for activities such as a visit to CMTM. We offer a wide range of discounts, such as Museums for All, which allows anyone receiving government assistance to pay just $1 per person to come to CMTM. The high usage of our access initiatives has had a large impact on our budget, so we are in the midst of designing and pursuing a number of new philanthropic opportunities to help sustain these programs. Everyone belongs at CMTM and we want to make sure that anyone who wants to can come through our doors. And finally, we are finalizing a new strategic plan, which will begin to be enacted this year.