Donate and Support | Special Projects

Realizing the full potential of the Museum requires enthusiastic supporters and committed partners. Investments to support our annual fund as well as special projects such as exhibit fabrication, educational programs, and maintenance are critical to our success.

We are seeking donors and partners for the following projects:

Learning Laboratories – Indoors and Out

The Museum’s five lab spaces are used as classrooms for young children through high school programming. One lab has been updated to serve high school immersive experiences. The other four Museum lab/classroom spaces have not been updated for over sixteen years, and receive constant, hard use as essential spaces for school, family and camp experiences. We have a number of ideas about renovating to support learning around a specific discipline, including engineering, medicine, or biotechnology. The cost to upgrade a lab space ranges from $100,000 to $150,000.

We'd also like to build a third simple outdoor classroom for our burgeoning camps and classes. An outdoor classroom will cost about $70,000 to construct and equip. We also envision a better way to connect students with our wetland for hands-on learning experiences, sampling and other educational activities – a wetland dock would cost about $15,000.

Exhibits Improvements and Support

In our large outdoor exhibitions Explore the Wild and Catch the Wind, the Museum is seeking partners to help us install additional drinking fountains at an estimated cost of $15,000. We also want to expand our wireless capacity to serve visitors and educational programs in our outdoor environments at an estimated cost of $27,000. There are also needs for visitor amenities in our visitor courtyard and café. With high summer visitation, we need a “mist station” in this area (estimated cost $3,000) and based on visitor input would like to include a sound system for music for our outdoor café area (estimated cost $7,500).

Learn more

Contact Julie Rigby at 919/220-5429 x317 or julie.rigby@ncmls.org

Click here to support the Brontosaurus Fund

Make a Difference.

Thanks to Biogen Idec Foundation for supporting the Investigate Health! Lab with critical equipment and supplies. Thanks to this generous support, our visitors can use real tools of scientists like Vernier data collection equipment, quality microscopes and have the consumables to learn through open-ended inquiry! We offered more than 50 different programs at the Lab this year.

Thanks to a $15,000 grant from the Duke Energy Foundation, the Museum has installed a solar-thermal hot water system for our cafe and photovoltaic lights for our rocket and entry. Using energy from the Sun, we are taking a step towards a more sustainable Museum and reducing our operating costs!