The Minnesota Zoo had one of the largest education department I saw and also had one of the largest staffs, with 60 to 75 employees including seasonal workers. This large department accommodated a host of diverse and unique programs. These programs included ones targeted for older teens and adults, something that was rare to find among many zoos. When asking about this in my interview, I found the reason for this myriad of programs was twofold: partly because of the zoo's philosophy to reach out to every facet of the community, and partly because of the amount of resources at its disposal. The zoo had a formal relationship with the state but only received about 25% of their funding from it, the rest came from ticket sales and donors. With such a large department and the capacity to do many educational programs which do not generate revenue, the Minnesota Zoo was privileged enough to put on these atypical programs and wished to use its advantage to engage as much of the community as possible.
Here is a moose at the Minnesota Zoo, which was the first moose I have ever seen in person. They're so big in real life!
The programs aimed at older teens and adults included a Speaker Series, Career Day, and travel programs. The Speaker Series is free, open to the public, and brings in local or national speakers with topics related to conservation or environmental issues. The Career Day program was originally designed to help accommodate the requests the zoo got for information about zoo careers, and is now a day long program which includes interactions with employees from throughout the zoo, and behind the scenes tours. The travel program, some of which is aimed at youth, allows people to travel with the zoo to work on hands-on conservation projects which are related to the zoo's collections, meaning that their work can directly impact zoo animals, such as a popular trip to Costa Rica to work with sloths.
Some of the programs for younger children included an interactive online game called WolfQuest, developed through an NSF grant, which targeted young gamers and had over 3 million downloads. They also had a diverse selection of Zoo Camps, as well as a highly successful outreach program called Zoo Mobile.
The Zoo Mobile housed and managed all of the Minnesota Zoo's education animals. If another program wanted to use an animal, they would have to request it, and some of the animals could only be used by Zoo Mobile staff. The trend of having a separate department manage education animals was one I first noticed in Dallas, and seemed to affect zoos differently. At some it seemed to create a larger rift between education proper and the outreach program, but at the same time it could free up resources within the education department when they do not have to maintain the education animals but can still use them in programming. The housing and care of education animals varied between zoos, from the animals being completely managed by education directorial staff and housed in education buildings, to being housed off-site and handled by a separate department. These differences did not create many palpable differences in programming however, as the zoos still used the education animals they had in similar ways.
Overall the Minnesota Zoo's education department was so huge it was sometimes hard to keep track of, and they were in the middle of a transition and some heavy strategic planning while I was there. But its massiveness was a lesson all its own - it was an example of what zoos can offer when given more funding, and could serve as an example for how donating to a zoo can help that zoo offer more for the community as a whole.
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