A handbook for starting and running a Community Science Workshop
3. A CSW’s Contents and Layout
4. CSW “Curriculum”: Projects, Activities, Exhiblets, Specimens
6. Leadership, Operation and Development of the CSW Organization
7. Considerations for Starting a CSW
This chapter will outline the basic scheme for setting up a CSW within a few critical areas. More details on how to run a CSW in terms of administration, planning, projects, and programs are dealt with in other chapters.
A CSW is designed for a community where most residents are not able to access the benefits of a CSW using their own resources. The best situation is when representatives from the community are involved from the beginning, better still if they are actively doing the legwork of setting it up. Many existing CSWs have staff composed primarily of people from the immediate neighborhood of the community being served and this is clearly a huge asset.
The ideal CSW has its doors open for all interested participants from the neighborhood and broader community, and many of the existing CSWs have that reality during open-door hours. Two issues are worth noting about this.
First, there are some people you really don’t want participating, for example:
It is worth having a plan to deal with each of these unwanteds. Some (footloose kindergarteners) are easily turned away, while others (adults/teens who dominate the space and don’t respond to reason) are more difficult.
On the final category, there is a balance. In general, kids don’t mix with adults in drop-in programs, and for good reason. Most established programs for kids require all adults, sometimes even parents, to register and get background checks. So usually if you don’t know the adult interested in taking part in your CSW, the answer is no. However, the exceptions are quite valuable. If the neighbor woman wants to bring tamales from time to time, that’s a good thing. If a retired scientist wants to hang around and help develop your exhibits or specimens displays, you’ll want that support. How well you know them turns out to be critical.
For the unattached adults and unwavering bullies (and bored troublemakers): if they seem worth the effort, consider adopting them as volunteers. This will allow you to put some structure around their role in the space. Keep yourself tuned-in to the return-on-investment here. If it becomes very difficult to quantify the “vibes” benefit or cost to your space; if you find yourself puzzling about it, then this person likely isn’t worth having around. Consider at the outset that getting rid of them after things go awry is way harder than turning them away at the door in the first place. Here is an example of how having bona-fide entrenched members of the community infused in the operation is hugely valuable: they will be far ahead in knowing who this person is, what their intentions are, and what extra baggage they bring. They’ll also know if this is a complete stranger to the area.
The other issue for CSW participants is this: even when the doors are wide open, which population ends up filling the space is still an open question. The graph of CSW participants’ ages peaks around fifth grade at most CSWs open to the public at large. It’s a wide peak, with plenty of kids from as young as second grade up to middle school, but there are rarely large maximums at either end, and that makes sense. Younger kids don’t have the dexterity, conceptual awareness, or patience to take full advantage of a CSW. Many of the tools and materials are not necessarily safe for the pre-school crowd. Most CSWs have a low age cutoff policy at around seven: any younger than that and an older family member must accompany them. Older kids, on the other hand, may feel too cool to be participating in something so full of play, tinkering, and young kid energy. Even kids who are solid regulars through the ages of the peak often drift away when they reach high school.
One exception to this is if special projects or activities or clubs can be arranged catering specifically to high school students, for example: Community/Citizen Science Projects, electronic or digital fabrication projects, high-end wood or metal working, microscopy, animal husbandry or plant propagation, etc. The possibilities are endless, and each one takes a good bit of concerted effort to be rolled out, but they fit well within the CSW environment if staff and resources are sufficient. Then the key is to get a solid group and glue it together with plenty of good times.
If you have the time with everything else you’re doing, create a “teen CSW counsel” (or whatever you want to call it). Give them a sense of identity to the space with titles, events, pep talks, even a budget, as well as times when they report to leadership on how things are going and what changes ought to be made.
The average age of kids in the CSW is important because it sets the atmosphere of the space and the level of complexity of the projects. By all means it is possible to have an enormous range of project options, from toddler-level to high-end high school, but often the majority rules and many projects end up geared for the majority age-group.
At the same time, kids of any given age will often attract more kids of that age. It is good to give this some thought as you choose CSW location and programs, as each of these will have a hand in determining what age groups will fill the CSW space. Best is to have a goal to make your space as multi-age as possible.
Closely related to participants, location is perhaps the element of most importance to consider for a CSW. Museums sometimes state a goal of having “porous walls” so the community can easily flow in and museum programs out. This is a fine way to visualize a CSW, but the real aim is for a CSW to be so enmeshed in the community that it is indistinguishable from it: CSW is community is CSW.
As a rule of thumb, the CSW should be walking distance from hundreds of low-income residences. Better still, it is directly on a main walking thoroughfare for the community. If the CSW is not in close proximity to its community, it may still be possible to run a successful CSW, but drastic steps must be taken to ensure that the right community is ever-present at the CSW. Even if kids and families can be bussed in, that will be an expensive prospect in terms of time and money, and it would create quite a different feel from a space where participants can pop in and also leave whenever they want. As this “transport of community” will be an ongoing burden for CSW staff and budget, it is obviously best to avoid a suboptimal location.
Good signs for a good CSW location are low-income apartment complexes and depressed commercial areas. Near a school tends to be a great location because kids and families are already lingering nearby.
Inside a school has great benefits as well as liabilities. Aside from already being chock full of kids, a school space can often be had for free, and the educational mission overlaps with and complements the mission of CSWs. That said, having to work around school schedules and other rules can be a burden.
A few CSWs have run in high school spaces, even though high school students rarely constitute more than a small fraction of participants at a CSW. The biggest impact high school students have had at most CSWs has been as volunteers, interns, or paid staff.
San Francisco’s Mission Science Workshop has been at Mission High School for many years, and the situation is nearly ideal: a separate entrance to the building without alarms or locks that need to be coordinated with the school. There is even a bit of space just outside the door that is available for projects. A few connections with teachers there have provided a steady stream of interns.
Salinas CSW ran for four years out of a mid-sized classroom in a large public middle school—7th and 8th grade—that serves kids from Alisal, a region with the largest concentration of low-income families on California’s Central Coast. The school was somewhat of a fortress, with locked gates and security guards, which made it an ongoing inconvenience to get anyone from the outside in. There was no direct entrance to the classroom from the outside, except through windows. Drop-in sessions were mostly limited to students from the school, and family nights involved making a corridor from a school gate to the classroom. On a couple of occasions CSW staff were working away unaware when the custodial staff finished up early and set the alarm, thus triggering an expensive police call. All in all it was a huge hassle.
The benefits, however, outweighed the liabilities. During the years at that school, Salinas CSW never put much effort into outreach and publicity, but had an average of more than 30 participants per day at the drop-in sessions. The students were already at school, an institution that the families knew and trusted, so it was easy for students to get permission to just stay on after the school day was over. Students involved in other after school activities, including remedial homework “academies,” could always stop into the CSW as well when they were done. Kids from the “daycare” after-school program had permission to come to the CSW during certain times, and classroom teachers could suggest or even require students to attend drop-in hours to complete assigned hands-on projects. It became clear that the middle school environment was a perfect match for a CSW.
Many CSW programs have used spaces in elementary schools, and a few CSW satellite sites have been run out of elementary schools. San Francisco CSW’s newest site is in an elementary school in a high-need area of the city, and being there enables easy tailored service to all the teachers there. Fresno CSW has had many contracts in which a classroom was loaned to their staff to carry out sessions with any and all classes in the school. These situations can, of course, be extended to after-school services.
A few final notes on CSWs in schools:
Parks are another great location for CSWs. Obviously a park is already a destination for kids and families, and the public agency in charge of the park should be interested in more services for visitors. Perhaps the best aspect of a CSW in a park is that when a kid is getting too rowdy or disrupting the work of others and it becomes necessary to eject the young scholar from the Workshop, they land not in some hostile environment but in a grassy playground, often just what the kid needed in the first place. CSWs sites or satellite sites in Watsonville, Fresno, Oakland, and Salinas have been run in parks with great success.
Public libraries are another possibility. CSW programs in Greenfield, Salinas, and Watsonville have run programs in libraries, but to date no CSW has been based in a library. Certain aspects overlap nicely (a public center for kids and families, a space for learning), but others clash head on (spotless vs. messy, quiet vs. noisy, compact space vs. limitless need for more). Public libraries since 2010 began launching “makerspaces”. By now nearly half of public libraries have a 3d printer as they shift from simply being a place for paper books (especially as more and more reading occurs on a screen) toward community skill-building and creativity. This was a huge pivot, as booky librarians invited tools into their space. Imagine moving bookshelves into an automotive garage and having them adopt the idea of having more reading take place there. The initiative has stood the test of time, though, and appears it’s here to stay. This may be good news for CSWs as one of the biggest struggles libraries have with sustaining an active “creative studio”, or “innovation lab” as some are now called, is the consistent struggle of competent staff to run, maintain, and educate visitors on how to use these fancy machines. CSW to the rescue! No need for fancy machines! Tinkering can be better without them.
Storefronts may work for a CSW. Once again, foot traffic from the target community is the key factor, along with the price. The Excelsior CSW—one of the sites of Mission Science Workshop—runs out of a storefront with a magnificent multilevel space that was once a discount retail store, right in front of a major bus stop on a major thoroughfare in southern San Francisco. They pay market rate for that space (and market rate is ridiculous for most things in San Francisco), but have found it worth the cost as they serve an enormously broad community there. Ithaca and Greenfield CSWs are also storefronts of sorts.
Housing a CSW inside another mission-aligned institution (not a school nor a municipality) that serves kids and families, is an idea many of us have long had but that has only recently been tried. In June 2024 Ellen opened the Martinez CSW within the Boys and Girls Club of Contra Costa County. While the allocated room is a bit small, it fits all the main tools and materials, and the main Boys and Girls Club room is also made available when necessary. There was much discussion around safety and liability regarding tools, access, membership, and use by non-CSW BGC employees. Things are looking reasonable now in 2025 after more than a year: hundreds of kids have been served and the partnership remains firm.
In low-income depressed areas, security can be a serious concern. From time-to-time police have chased armed gangsters through the park hosting Watsonville CSW. Fresno CSW had serious ongoing issues with crime and intimidation in the years they ran a CSW at Granny Park in Fresno, and ultimately direct threats to staff led to the city pulling the CSW from that location. The Oakland CSW was across the street from a known area of illegal drug sales, activity which sometimes seeped into the CSW.
In such situations, CSWs need clear strategies and procedures to ensure the safety of participants and staff. It is important to establish clear protocols about who is in charge of security issues and who is available to help in the case of an emergency. If the CSW is on the property of another institution, school, or agency, this issue must be worked out in conjunction with the staff members of that institution.
It is also good to keep firmly in mind that security challenges are an indication that the CSW is in the right community, serving the right population. Such challenges are likely an everyday reality in the lives of the CSW participants, and their families may be resources in dealing effectively with these challenges. Here again it can help tremendously if the CSW is run by the friends or relatives of the neighbors
A strange and unpleasant reality related to location is a burr under the saddle for several existing CSWs: organizations competing for limited kids. In certain locations, a rising army of nonprofits, agencies, and school programs have amassed increasing funding and programs to serve the “underserved.” Several of us have noted that some of these underserved communities can have a heck of a lot of services, at least around certain subject content and at certain time periods. There seems to be no simple solution for this, but certain strategies can help:
A final note: it’s happened several times that a CSW has morphed from one location to another, sometimes abandoning one space upon getting a better one, and sometimes maintaining both spaces while putting extra weight on the new and better situated one and gradually deprioritizing the suboptimal one. San Francisco’s Mission Science Workshop has been located in Mission High School for around 20 years, and in that time the area around it has experienced a massive high-tech-driven gentrification. MSW started up another CSW site around 13 years ago in the Excelsior, a solidly working-class area, and then yet another in Bayview, one of the most economically-challenged areas of the city. The Mission High site continues to operate, but many of the participants are in the form of groups selected specifically to avoid using scarce resources to serve the upper income families that now dominate the neighborhood.
Another example of shifting location is Fresno. Manuel has established more than a half dozen CSW spaces in the last 30 years, many of which eventually got nixed due to budgetary or political winds of fate. He became accustomed to the realities of politics and city government pressures (Fresno CSW was under the City of Fresno for many years.) and stayed flexible. Each time he was able to get one up and running, most often in a city park, he used it to run programs across the school districts of the area and to serve the other parks.
The right space is one of the necessities for establishing a CSW. Aside from the location, the physical space must adequately house the programs of the CSW. Care and maintenance of the space will take a significant portion of the CSW staff’s efforts, and if market rates are paid for the space, that will be a serious chunk of the CSW’s budget.
The ideal space has these attributes:
There is some debate about the minimum workable size of a space, but we all more or less agree that the more space you can garner the better. The Oakland CSW ran for nearly 25 years in a renovated and converted house of four main rooms and two small ones with an area of around 800 square feet. There is an unavoidable maxim of life in a workshop environment: all storage space and all work space will be filled to overflowing immediately upon installation. San Francisco’s CSW has two spaces with over 2,000 square feet each plus storage. They routinely “run out” of space. Seriously, whatever you think will be enough in terms of space, add getting some more to the list.
Great CSW spaces look like real workshops. José formed the Greenfield CSW from within the hollow shell of their old city hall: carpets removed, derelict furniture kept, 2×4 shelves built into every nook and cranny. The original San Francisco CSW was an old university print shop and the two large San Francisco spaces were once an aging store front and a school auto shop. Manuel in Fresno ran CSWs out of used doublewide portable classrooms for decades. Claire in Pittsburgh built a slightly upscale quonset hut on her property to protect her participants from the elements. While some parts of a CSW space may be polished and clean, in general the look should be “industrial lite,” communicating there is work to be done here.
Ellen and her staff were doing CSW-like work for years around the town of Martinez, Contra Costa County in California, before identifying an adequate space and finally being able to officially join our fold in 2024. Erik of the Free Science Workshop in Ithaca, NY ran programs with his Physics Buses for years before hearing about CSWs at a science museum conference and making an inspiring visit to California’s CSWs. He now believes that the community space of a CSW is of primary importance and should be viewed as the base for other mobile or school-based programs.
Compromise is unavoidable, even in the best of situations. Sometimes in order to work towards an ideal location, a suboptimal space must be accepted. San Francisco’s ideal CSW in the storefront on a busy street with colossal storage in an ideal neighborhood comes at a clear financial burden, just as spaces at schools and institutions come with a set of rules and expectations.
It is nice to hold tight to the storybook image of a CSW as an extension of the garage shop, happy kids streaming in and out, exploring and tinkering to their hearts’ content. But the hard cruel world necessitates an institution if the CSW is to serve more than a handful of friends and neighbors. Funders need a bank account where they can send their support. Partners need to sign MOUs with a reliable entity. Salaries and benefits for staff need to be doled out from somewhere. Someone will be held liable for anything bad that happens, and will want insurance. The institution fills all these needs.
To date CSWs have or had the following institutional positions:
| Division of municipal government |
|
| Self-standing nonprofit organization |
|
| Project of a nonprofit fiscal sponsor |
|
| Division of another educational or nonprofit organization |
|
Here a rough summary of the pros and cons of the different institutions
| Institution | Pro | Con |
| Division of municipal government | Stability, employee benefits Administrational support Perks from municipality: vehicles, space, employee help, etc Piggybacking publicity and outreach with municipality | Beholden to city’s priorities and limitationsVulnerable to political windsChanging councilmembers to keep up with |
| Self-standing nonprofit organization | Independence Flexibility | Must build and maintain all supportSelf reliant for publicity and outreachMust learn and comply with all legal, fiscal, HR, and admin requirements |
| Project of a nonprofit fiscal sponsor | Independence within sponsor’s mission Flexibility Sponsor takes care of legal, fiscal, HR, and some admin requirements | Must build and maintain all supportStandard cut, around 12%, of all income goes to sponsorSelf reliant for publicity and outreach |
| Division of another educational or nonprofit organization | Stability Administrational support Perks from host organization: vehicles, space, employee help, etc. Piggybacking publicity and outreach with host organization Easy to transfer programs to other sites run by host organization | Mission is subordinate to host’sVulnerable to internal politics and funding priorities |
Large pros often come with large cons:
Each CSW director has opinions on which is the ideal institution. GACSW folks have discussed the various institutional possibilities for CSWs over the years and come to a few shared agreements:
Claire in Pittsburgh enjoys the great freedom and challenge of running her own organization and notes that having complete control of her spaces is a reassurance that’s just not possible to have under other institutional arrangements.
Curt, who founded both Watsonville and Salinas CSWs, notes that in both cases there was little choice in institution. The City of Watsonville jumped at the chance to have a CSW, so it made sense to move ahead with that promise of support. The City of Salinas was not interested in taking on a CSW, nor was any other local institution, and Curt was not interested in the responsibility of running every aspect of a nonprofit, so a fiscal sponsorship was a great (and the only) option.
Manuel locked horns with the city of Fresno many times over the years, but also took great advantage of the position he held there to spread CSW programs to many communities. Now that he’s retired but still promoting CSW work in the area, he is not willing to go back under the control of the city government. He also is not interested in running a self-standing nonprofit, so again fiscal sponsorship makes the most sense.
Darren ran Watsonville CSW for several years and writes the following about his unfortunate departure:
“The WESW was forcefully transferred from the Department of Public Works to the Department of Parks and Recreation. I met with everyone I could and shared my concerns and worries about the implications of this move. They were all brushed aside.
Once we joined Parks, we lost the ability to drive many of our vehicles, we lost budget, we lost the ability to hire students, and admin services took a huge hit too. For instance when I would submit 12 month evals on time for my hard-working staff they were lost, displaced, and or denied.
At one point I asked for six months of personal leave citing mental health reasons for myself and my family. The city manager granted me one month. This was an example of the city showing how they really felt about me and the program.
I had raised 1.3 million dollars during my five or so years there, and still the leadership seemed to have a deliberate plan to systematically dismantle the Watsonville CSW.”
GACSW helped the Watsonville CSW do an end run around those issues in the years after Darren resigned. The City of Watsonville now runs only a couple programs out of the original CSW there, while a new organization consisting of many of the same staff, called Science My Way, runs several other programs based mostly at schools, and has a budget several times as large as the City’s CSW budget.
José says being under the City of Greenfield is a clear and acceptable tradeoff: he is obligated to serve several of their annual events and put some time into various city projects unrelated to the CSW, but in return he has a good and stable position and a reasonably stable chunk of the CSW funding coming from the city. He has to stay on top of local politics and develop and maintain good relations with the ever-changing city council. He also notes that the more outside funding he can bring in, the more leeway he has within the city.
Some of us stop from time to time and drift into thoughts of a fairytale CSW wonderland where all staff are volunteers and all materials are donated so that the CSW doesn’t need funding!! Then reality smacks us upside the head and we go after more money. To be sure, such wonderlands can and do exist, say in small model railroad clubs or local sports organizations, and that was the reality at Dan Sudran’s original CSW garage. But CSWs have a mission to serve entire communities of underserved kids and families, and such an operation requires serious funding.
CSW funding can be divided into three categories:
The first category depends largely on the relationship of the CSW to its institution and there is not much to say about it. Obviously, as with most funding, the more the better. CSWs that are nonprofits or fiscally-sponsored don’t have this category at all, and that can make quite a difference.
One way to gauge the financial stability of a CSW is to visualize what it would take to kill it off. Envision losing funding sources one by one and closing down programs and letting employees go until only the director is left. CSWs that are part of municipalities are often seen as the most stable: the director’s salary is usually a main part of the line item support of the operation, and would still be there even if everything else has burned to the ground. That is in theory of course; it could equally well be the case that the city sees things going south and cuts that line from the city budget.
The second funding category, fee-for-service contracts, is the largest category of support for many CSWs. This makes them different from many nonprofits. CSWs have a service to offer and if that service is in demand, it is just a matter of finding entities with funding to contract for this service. While fundraising for grants and donations can sometimes feel like begging, getting a contract is more of a transaction, money for a job well done. The contract states the expectations clearly and there is often not much required in the way of reports or documentation.
The downside of contracts is that they end. It is often impossible to get anything more than a handshake agreement that the contract will be available next year. When the contract is over, the staff who carried it out will still need to be paid and the materials will need to be stored. This is one reason it’s good to have various types of funding.
Sometimes CSW program directors or coordinators do the bulk of the work bringing in contracts from local partners, as opposed to the executive or development directors. Setting up contracts requires detailed knowledge of what programs are possible, what it takes to make a program happen, what locations are available, and what funding is available. Again, relationships and reputations are critical. Many school districts we know don’t ever make their detailed budget public but rather try to fill their needs and spend their money based on programs they know and believe in. Nothing beats an insider, and when you’re in, life is good.
When seeking a contract, there are several things to consider. Obviously it is important to be sure that the current staff, resources, and space could make it happen. But even if the funding is available and sufficient, and it has been determined that the CSW could do the program, it is critical to stop and consider if it should do the program. Some considerations are:
Some of us have taken contracts that serve kids and families that are not necessarily underserved or low-income. We have done this in an intentional way that reaps clear benefits: more money in the coffers, more connections with institutions, or better donor relations. In general, however, most of us agree that it is not sustainable to spend a lot of resources and staff time serving people outside your mission just to make money. Better to put that time and energy into seeking grants that will allow direct service to your community.
“Fundraising” generally refers to the final category of gifts and is often the work of CSW directors. Fundraising for a CSW is not a lot different from that of any small nonprofit, thus much good (and bad) advice can be gained from the massive literature available on how to run and fund a nonprofit. Four rough categories of CSW gift funding are:
In some sense it’s not complicated: Get a hold of lists of existing grants in each of the first three categories and start making contacts! Corporate donors in particular may be less formal in their giving, and just require the right connection to begin a long and fruitful relationship.
Individual donors are often reached through campaigns, often during “giving season” at the end of the year. Some CSWs have ongoing relationships with individual donors including providing periodic updates and newsletters, and even sending them little token projects made by kids. For all gift funding categories, but especially for individual donors, it is always wise to have excellent images and video clips going up regularly on social media. This does a lot of the talking for you.
The great majority of expenses at most CSWs are payroll, and that can be a problem for some funders. To avoid making the fact too obvious, it is possible to write a budget that represents things on a program level (this many dollars for this program, this many dollars for that) or on a student level (this many dollars per student per day or per program) to avoid breaking it down into materials, staff, and administrative costs. If pressed, the breakdown is entirely justifiable if you can get it through the donor’s head that CSW programs use mostly scrap and donated materials so of course that line item is small, and that CSW staff are locals from the very community being served so their salaries will actually be additional community benefits of the grant!
CSWs serve a whole range of benefits which can all be used to lure funders. Three large areas of benefit are 1) youth development/healthy families, 2) STEM/STEAM education, and 3) career pathways. Each of these can have very different funder/donor bases. It is easy to elevate CSW benefits in any one of those areas to strengthen your grant application, while mentioning the others as additional perks.
Naturally, you want to find funders who have missions aligned with yours. It is important to remember that donors also have goals, and if you match one of them, you are doing them a favor in taking their money: it’s a win-win. Some CSWs have found themselves in the unfortunate situation of competing with other local nonprofits for a finite pie. Sometimes the goals of these other nonprofits are excellent, unassailable. Still, we all believe strongly in the potential of a CSW to transform individuals, families, and communities, so we can stand strong in the face of competition.
It is best to get Superman or Wonder Woman for a director. They will need extraordinary superpowers, what with so many skills necessary: tinkering, craftsmanship, scrounging, fundraising, class management, conflict resolution, publicity, administration, partner building, financial planning, visionary skills, and a deep working knowledge of every known field of science and technology…
All joking aside, we have long been consternated by the implausible position CSW directors find themselves in immediately upon entering the position. It is simply unrealistic to expect a single person to possess all the necessary skills. When a person is found that does, like founder Dan Sudran, it is hard to avoid the creeping suspicion that the universe has produced an extreme anomaly, a cosmic blip, and that it would be a big mistake to expect another one anytime soon.
One way around the impossible demands for a CSW director is to divide the duties among two or more positions. One version of this is to set up an executive or development director position that oversees the organization, finances, staffing, and critical administration, and a separate program director position that oversees programs and content. This assumes a certain size to the organization, which assumes a certain budget. Several CSWs have run for a long time with no more than a couple of full-time positions plus a few part-timers and some interns. The largest ones have around eight positions at around full time and/or a dozen or more part-time positions. These larger CSWs then deal with the challenge of keeping everyone on the same page, at best learning from each other, at least aware of what the other parts of the organization are doing.
Whether or not a CSW can swing two directors, development and program, it is good to have a clear-eyed view of the limitations of the director(s). Most existing CSW directors end up working a good bit of overtime at least during certain periods of the year, and while that may be necessary and even feel good at times, it is critical to keep this to a manageable, sustainable level. This means delegation to other staff who can step up, and reasonable expectations in the way of goals for expansion and service. Nobody wins when a director burns out.
In any small organization, things go better when several people can step in to substitute for someone who is out. This also makes things easier when a staff member quits. In most existing CSWs, the director acts as a substitute for program delivery at least from time to time. Many current directors enjoy direct service within programs and make sure to set up their schedule so that they have a steady stream of it.
Some excellent staff members across the CSWs are of the “grow your own” variety. That is, they began as participants or interns, stayed connected if not employed at the CSW during their formal education and then slid into higher positions as their experience and backgrounds allowed. These individuals emerged from the community served by the CSW and have a high motivation to continue this service. Naturally, they know all about the community and so are aware of the needs, sensitive to various issues, and prone to finding the most effective avenues towards serving the community.
One final possible staffing solution that so far no CSW has more than cursorily effectuated is to have an employee of a local school district, college, or other institution be contracted to carry out programming at the CSW. Some districts call this Teacher On Special Assignment. The benefits could be significant:
This situation would require excellent relations between the offering institution and the CSW, as well as good mission overlap. It also depends on the offering institution not being too desperate, as many school districts seem to be these days.
Many of us believe that working at a CSW is not just a job, but rather a form of activism, making the world a better place. Many of us subscribe to Dan Sudran’s vision that CSWs are part of a movement that is improving society by offering kids and families opportunities to take charge of their own education and joyfully learn through personal observation and exploration. To work in that movement is far different than getting a job in, say, retail. You end up putting your heart and soul into it, and the monetary benefits are but a necessary side issue. If you are of this ilk, we welcome you!
CSWs all have a board. The self-standing nonprofits have a board of directors who hold great power. Fiscally sponsored CSWs have local advisory boards as well as the board of directors of the fiscal sponsor. CSWs in municipalities have the city council, which often ultimately calls the shots on how much funding and support goes to the CSW. CSWs that are parts of other institutions have the governing boards of those entities.
There is broad flexibility as to how much contact a CSW director has with their board. When things are going well, perhaps the board is no more than a good cheerleader. When things are difficult, a good board can make or break the CSW. It is good to get the best people you can on your board! Excellent boards work hard for the CSW: fundraising, connection building, donation gathering, thought partnering, even volunteering from time-to-time.
Aside from your board, it is a great idea to make a concerted effort to seek out more advisors, supporters, and collaborators. In the end, any one of them could become crucial to the success of the CSW. In many cases no formal relationship need be established, but rather the slow growth of a trusting informal friendship or collaboration.
Here are some broad categories for CSW board members and supporters:
Whatever else it may amount to, starting a CSW is always a legwork operation of gathering the materials, troops, and connections necessary for successful operation. A CSW is a stuff-intensive operation, and it needs to have the right people connected with it as well. It can be daunting to visualize amassing the glorious conglomeration of stuff and staff seen at an existing CSW, but it is not necessary to have nearly that much in place before starting things up. In fact, as long as you have the Four Big Elements in place (see below), you can fling the door open and let the magic begin!
It is a huge benefit to have the community—kids, parents and other friends—on board and active in the space from the very beginning. Aside from the physical and technical support that can come from the community, establishing bonds and buy-in with these people is super important. CSWs are rooted in communities; they are in fact useless without their communities. In the best situations, CSW become integral elements in communities, becoming entities that the community assumes, relies on, and can’t imagine losing. Guiding the very first steps of a CSW with broad input from the community will avoid heading off in the wrong direction.
The legendary story of the opening of the world-famous Exploratorium in San Francisco is quite inspirational for us. The Exploratortium was founded in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the Manhattan Project leader, Robert. Frank had been teaching high school science and gained attention in secondary education for the effectiveness of hands-on experimentation and tinkering. He started the “Library of Experiments” in Boulder and soon realized it all should be open for interaction by the public in an informal space (sounds like a CSW anyone?). When offered the cavernous Palace of Fine Arts for nominal rent, Frank hauled all his science teaching and demonstration gear to the Palace, put a sign up that read “Here is being created a museum of science, art, and human perception” and opened the door. Thus anyone attracted to this mission was welcome and able to take part. Frank essentially staffed the place with people who showed up with ideas and skills.
It is instructive to note what Frank didn’t do. Unlike the vast majority of famous institutions of informal public education, Frank didn’t assume that he alone knew the best way forward. He was keenly aware that the community would have as much insight as him into what the Exploratorium should become. Other fledgling institutions take a different path, spending millions to set up everything just right before opening the door. Some fail with this strategy for the very basic, almost trivial reason that in their self-confident hubris they missed something pivotal in their plan, something that would have come to light easily had the community been involved from the start.
The Watsonville Community Science Workshop opened in 1997 in a room of a community center in a park near downtown Watsonville. Kids and families were already in place, and started to help when the materials began flowing in the first few days. The first advisory board meetings comprised mostly neighborhood parents and were held in the bleak, cluttered space as workbenches and counters were being constructed and tools and materials were being arranged. There was no doubt whose space it was.
These have all been described above, but they merit a bit more discussion in regards to the bare minimum necessary to open the new CSW doors.
Before that though, it is important to reiterate the assumed “zeroth” element to have in place: a community that wants and needs a CSW. If you don’t have that, you have nothing. It is best if the director, staff, board, and institution all have serious roots in that community. In fact, it is best not to visualize a CSW coming into a community from the outside, but rather growing from the inside.
Another key point is that none of the big four is necessarily primary to any other; all four are required, interrelated and will be interacting continuously for the life of the CSW. Any one can be found first or last.
After more than 30 years, it is still an open question for us at GACSW how best to support and sustain the startup of a new CSW in a virgin community. If it is within a half-hour or so of an existing CSW, it will very likely be best to visualize the new site as a satellite of the existing site, at least at first.
But if it is farther, and nothing is in place, what is the best strategy?
Naturally, several of these elements may best crystalize together. Some will be useless before the others: a perfect space, for example, will get you nowhere without people and funds. Money without the right people may be a genuine liability. And of course the community will have much to say about the direction; community leaders may be the key to determining the best course of action.
The director, institution, and space are all-or-nothing considerations. Funding on the other hand is squishy from the beginning. It is very common to map out a reasonable minimum budget, and then immediately begin questioning whether it’s enough. Certainly a key decision to make is how much of the initial budget needs to be in place before programming can begin. Many of us have had the tendency to move forward on a seat-of-the-pants plan and try to make it work by bringing in more support and resources building on success as it happens. But of course a funding gap is a miserable state of affairs, especially for staff depending on that funding for their livelihoods, and there is a limit to how frugal one can be.
Here are several formation stories from existing CSWs:
Martinez CSW. Ellen Concepcion had essentially everything she needed except a space for years ahead of her grand opening at the Boys and Girls Club in Martinez. She was director of a non-profit that easily encompassed the mission and programs of a CSW, and she had ties to many funding sources: director, funding, and institution all in place. With the finding of the space came a deep collaboration effort with an institution, the Boys and Girls Club, that would have a good bit of say on what went on at the Martinez CSW, at least inside their space. More than a year on, things still look hopeful.
Ithaca CSW. Erik Herman, a science teacher on the run from the classroom, showed up in Ithaca with a part-time job at Cornell doing hands-on science with undergrads, a Physics Bus, and a dream to start a CSW, having toyed with creating one at his previous school in Arizona: director in place. Through presentations and programming with his Physics Bus over four years, he gathered partners and funding. Eventually they found a space and set up a non-profit under which to run the Ithaca CSW called Free Science Workshop.
Pittsburgh CSW. Claire Fox had worked for years as co-director at Ithaca’s CSW, so she knew what it was all about. When she packed up her new PhD and headed to Pittsburgh to start a CSW, she had a Physics Bus with a bit of seed money in her pocket, and knew she wanted to run the CSW as a self-standing non-profit: institution, director, and seed funding in place. Her remaining tasks were to identify a good neighborhood and get a space. She found a good spot and worked with a marginal space and mobile programs for four years. Now she is well set up with excellent spaces in two neighborhoods.
Greenfield CSW. José Sanchez was working as a program coordinator at Watsonville CSW when the Greenfield city manager called Curt, director at Watsonville, to ask about the possibility of starting a CSW there. Roger Wong had previously been Assistant City Manager in Watsonville and was keen to get the benefits of a CSW into his new community in Greenfield: institution in place. Jose was ready for a new challenge: director in place. A small bundle of seed money was still available from the expansion fund controlled by the San Francisco CSW: seed funding in place. Soon the brilliant space was identified—the old city hall—though Jose had to run things out of vehicles and the local library for many months before the space was ready for his move-in.
Fresno CSW. Fresno was one of the sites started with the original NSF expansion grant through San Francisco CSW. Contacts were made within the City of Fresno and SF CSW leaders made a trip to visit a rec center in Fresno to see the lay of the land. When the city said yes to the seed grant, that solidified the funding, institution, and space. With great serendipity, future Fresno CSW director Manuel Hernandez was on duty with programming in the rec center the day of the visit, and nothing has been the same since.
Salinas CSW. Salinas may have the longest formation story: Dan Sudran had a dream of opening a CSW in Salinas for decades, having worked there in his days with the UFW. He began making trips there from San Francisco to do presentations and meet people in early 2015. Bart Evans was living in Santa Cruz at the time and was able to support this effort. Soon a couple of schools and a library had allocated space to run CSW programs. It is a long commute from SF, and Bart eventually moved to SF as well. What’s more, the local institutions were only hesitantly supportive, and no local staff were located. Thus operations in Salinas came to a halt by 2018.
Curt Gabrielson had also dreamed of a Salinas CSW during his time at Watsonville CSW. Salinas is 40-minute down the road and has a similar demographic as Watsonville with three times the population, and the same nagging issues of unaffordable housing, gangs, and low school achievement. When Curt returned from Timor-Leste in 2019, he began making contact with the connections Dan and Bart had established. He began some small programs and delivered a bunch of kits to Salinas during the pandemic through Greenfield CSW. He knew he could get a seed grant from the Dan’s CSW Trust, as well as other local grants and contracts: director and funding in position. Now just missing a space and institution.
Curt found neither the city nor the county, nor any of the school districts, nor other agencies were interested in being the institutional base for the Salinas CSW, and he wasn’t interested in creating a self-standing non-profit, so he made moves to partner with the same fiscal sponsor that SF CSW had used for years: Community Initiatives. The final element fell into place in early 2021 when he was offered a space at El Sausal Middle School. Students were all at home doing distance learning due to the pandemic, but it was clear that they would be back in the fall, and he was there to meet them with the Salinas CSW in August 2021.
(In another twist of fate, the classroom space that was promised was not forthcoming and Curt had to run all programs out of two sheds for a full year, during which time he served 12 classes from three other schools as well as the El Sausal students. The next year the school came through with a great big classroom space for SCSW.)
Santa Cruz CSW. Sal grew up attending the Watsonville CSW from time to time. He got a position as a high school intern there for a while before going on to other things. Several years later he worked at Salinas CSW coordinating and running programs for two years. Then, in 2025 he got a seed grant and was able to start the Barrio Science Workshop in Santa Cruz together with the staff of Barrios Unidos, a community organization he’d been working and volunteering with for several years: director, funding, institution, and space all came together with remarkable fluidity.
In addition to The Big Four, it is good to have a head start on finding sources for tools and materials. The goal there is to have the space pleasantly stocked on day one. One strategy that has worked well is to let friends and the greater community know that you are in the market for any tools or scrap materials currently languishing in someone’s garage shop. A pile of scrap wood as well as bottles, cans, lids, doodads, and whatchamacallits will come in handy.
Many community partners can be chatted up before anything happens for real at a new CSW with the covert goal of finding out who the real valuable collaborators will be, and likewise, who to avoid. Finally, staff will make or break a small organization, so if the CSW will need more than the director from the get-go, it is always best to have some known options instead of just putting up an announcement and crossing your fingers.