2025 Together we Thrive

More than $2.5 million in grants has been awarded to fund projects ranging from exposing little kids to nature, the link between movement and emotional wellbeing and building a robotic telescope.

 

Monique Chism, Under Secretary for Education, announced the awardees of the 2025 Together We Thrive Planning and Implementation grants in late June. Winning proposals were selected by an external panel of individuals whose expertise includes education policy, STEM education, rural and urban education, experiential learning, teacher engagement and training, arts integration, and civic engagement and social studies education. Together, these grants represent $2.5 million in funding for our Smithsonian educators and their partners.

Together We Thrive Planning and Implementation Projects
2025 Grantees

(For a full list of all grantees, including those from 2022, 2023 and 2024, please visit https://sinet.sharepoint.com/sites/OUSE-Together-We-Thrive)  

Nature Needs: Assessing Nature-Based Learning Needs for Early Childhood Educators (Planning Grant)

Anna Davis, PI, Alison Cawood, Co-PI, and Karen McDonald, Co-PI
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Laura Klopfer, Co-PI, and Emily Porter, Co-PI
National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI)

Led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, the Nature Needs project team will conduct a needs assessment to better understand the landscape of nature-based learning in preschools and to assess what preschool educators need in terms of classroom resources and training to feel comfortable and confident bringing nature-based learning to their students. The team will use surveys and focus groups of teachers in preschools across the country, as well as site visits to local preschools representing a range of community contexts. The team will disseminate research results with the intention of guiding future development of Smithsonian’s nature-based learning resources and professional development offerings for preschool educators.

Artful Movement: Social-Emotional Wellness from Coast-to-Coast (Implementation Grant)

Jennifer Reifsteck, National Museum of Asian Art
Laura Hansen and Nicole Bryner, Smithsonian Affiliations

Through Artful Movement, the National Museum of Asian Art and Smithsonian Affiliations will work together with museum and classroom educators serving PreK-5th graders from across the nation to develop tools and support systems to enhance social and emotional wellbeing through mindful, relevant, and purposeful engagement with art. For the past 5 years, the National Museum of Asian Art has successfully worked with teachers to integrate Artful Movement—an approach that uses Project Zero Thinking Routines, slow looking with art and objects, mindfulness, and movement—into classrooms nationwide through virtual field trips, hands-on teacher training, and as a daily practice woven into classroom routines. With the support of the Implementation Grant, NMAA and Smithsonian Affiliates will build on this success, expanding the program through co-creation collaborations with 9 Smithsonian affiliates and teachers in FL, IA, IL, MD, OH, OR, TX, and WY. Products from the collaborations will be made available on a website for broad distribution.

Classroom Cultivation: Exploring Plant Ecology (Implementation Grant)

Karen McDonald, Shatiyana Dunn, Alison Cawood
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Kathleen Munn, Smithsonian Gardens

Through Classroom Cultivation, educators, horticulturalists and researchers from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Smithsonian Gardens will engage community partners, teachers, and students across the United States to provide opportunities for middle school students to strengthen their science identities, better understand the importance of native plants and pollinators, participate in authentic plant ecology research at their schools, and contribute to restoring native plants in their communities. During the two years of the project, students in the Washington, DC region, Delaware, Minnesota, Alaska, and Nebraska will grow and conduct experiments with native plants, expand native plant gardens in their communities, and build and deploy motion-activated cameras to monitor pollinators.

Science by Design: Using Design Thinking To Address Environmental Issues (Implementation Grant)

Alison Cawood, Rylee Wernoch, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Kim Robledo-Diga, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum

The project team of Science by Design will engage middle and high school students and educators, and community organizations in Baltimore, MD, and New York City to use environmental data to support student-driven actions and solutions to local problems, strengthen science and design identities for youth and educators, increase their sense of environmental agency and civic engagement, and enhance their data literacy and design skills. Educators from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum will collaborate with existing partners, students and educators to design hands-on learning resources and professional development workshops that integrate design practices and local environmental data and issues, such as urban heat and water quality. The workshops will result in the development of products co-designed by students and community partners that address community-expressed challenges, learning materials that can be applied across content areas, and digital resources for students and educators across the country.

Smithsonian Open Skies: Scaling Up a New Educational Robotic Telescope Facility To Create High-Impact Pathways for Authentic STEAM Inquiry Using Real Data (Implementation Grant)

Mary Dussault, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Nicole Webster, National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)

Through Smithsonian Open Skies, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Science Education Department, in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History and Harvard University Department of Astronomy, will create a modernized, universally accessible remote observing and activity education portal, which will provide a pathway of authentic STEM and STEAM learning experiences, remote access to professional-grade telescopes, and online tools for data analysis and visualization, to learners across the nation. The education teams initially will work with a Teacher Advisory Board composed of middle and high school educators from Boston and Washington, D.C., to develop professional development that helps teachers support compelling, relevant, and accessible science learning for young people of all backgrounds. The subsequent phase will entail the delivery of focused professional development experiences with 100 teachers across the country to test the program’s scalability. The resulting collection of final deliverables will include websites, multidisciplinary resources, teacher guides for using the Open Skies telescopes with strategies for drawing on students’ interests, sample student products, a set of on-demand video tutorials, and standards and skills alignment information.

About Together We Thrive

Research shows that with the right supports, all children can learn and thrive. Building on the Smithsonian’s respected reputation as a trusted resource, Smithsonian educators working Together with educators across the nation can help students and ultimately our nation Thrive. Through the creation of the Together We Thrive initiative, OUSE is excited to support Smithsonian educators’ pan-institutional efforts to reach educators, students, and families in our unique Smithsonian Institution spaces and in classrooms across the nation.

The Together We Thrive Grant Initiative is funded through an endowment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and from a gift from Jeff Bezos to the National Air and Space Museum.