From Seedling to Stalwart Key #3: Restore Mission Focus
May 15th, 2025 | By David M. Wagner
Not every organization could survive a 90% cut to its budget. One museum is finding its way by restoring its focus on a unique mission.
The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, NH, faced a massive budget reduction – from $2 million a year to $200 thousand a year – when the New Hampshire Legislature voted to separate the museum from the state government, of which it had been part for 10 years.
Standing up an independent nonprofit was an added complication.
Despite those significant transitions 12 years ago, the Discovery Center is going strong – and growing every year.
The museum’s recommitment to its core mission, space exploration, has been key to that sustained growth, according to Executive Director Melissa Edwards, who has shepherded (no pun intended) the Center for the past year.
“When we added more exhibits, they mixed space with other science topics,” Melissa shares. “Now, we are reworking our installations to reflect space as the core of our work.”
Building Around the Core
The Discovery Center’s name honors two local astronauts.
Christie McAuliffe, who taught high school in the Granite State, was the first educator to go to space – aboard the ill-fated Challenger shuttle. New Hampshire native Alan Shephard was the first American to travel to space in 1961.
While the museum’s planetarium has always been its centerpiece, when it expanded in 2009, many of the added exhibits mixed in general science and other non-space topics.
Refocusing on its core mission enabled the Center to add additional space-themed exhibits while yielding general science education to other institutions.
In recent years, McAuliffe-Shepard has added a moon base mock-up, a shuttle nose cone-shaped simulator, and a portable planetarium.
As a result, Edwards says the museum is achieving wider recognition for its role in space education.
“When the total solar eclipse happened last year, the Discovery Center became the communication conduit for school education about the event throughout New Hampshire and a lot of New England,” she recalls.
Eye to the Future
With a commitment to its core mission solidly in place, the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center’s growing foothold is creating space (no pun intended) to look toward the future.
The top items on Melissa Edward’s list? Deeper financial reserves, increased partnerships with other organizations in the community, and a larger role in contributing to learning about space.
“We want to be visible as a premier place for space investigation in the U.S.,” she says. “We have a very good telescope in our observatory that could support scientific research.”
The sky, it turns out, may not be the limit. (Pun intended.)
Find Your Focus
Some questions to explore the focus of your organization’s mission:
Is the nature of your work easy to explain?
How could narrowing your focus deepen your impact?
What could you stop doing to free up more capacity for your core work?
This post is the third in a series of case studies highlighting the steps established nonprofits have taken to develop from seedlings to stalwarts. If you can sense some mission drift, let’s talk about how I can help your team identify and reaffirm commitment to a core mission.
Clear Mission Consulting, LLC, was not involved in the transition detailed above.