Looking Ahead: The Future of Kingman Museum
Kingman Museum of Natural History has been a part of Battle Creek for over a century. We’re not slowing down. Here’s a look at where we’re headed over the next five years — and what we’re working toward as an organization.
All initiatives below are forward-looking statements, pending board approval and funding.
Exhibits & Collections We plan to reimagine our exhibit spaces to better tell the stories of the natural world — and our region’s place in it. That means new permanent installations, rotating exhibits that give people a reason to come back, and a renewed commitment to making our collections accessible, both in-person and online. We want every visit to feel like a discovery.
Education & Programming We’re looking at expanding hands-on programming for learners of all ages — from early childhood workshops to adult lecture series and community science projects. Our goal is to be a hub for curiosity, not just a building you visited on a field trip once.
Facilities & Operations The building itself needs investment, and we know it. We’re exploring options for infrastructure improvements, updated climate controls for collections care, and accessibility upgrades that make the museum welcoming for everyone who walks through the door.
Fundraising & Partnerships None of this happens without support. We’re building stronger relationships with local businesses, grant-making organizations, civic partners, and individual donors who believe in what a natural history museum can do for a community. Expect to see new giving opportunities, collaborative events, and creative ways to get involved.
This is a living vision. It’ll evolve as we listen to our community, secure resources, and learn what works. If you care about Kingman’s future, we’d love to hear from you.
Kingman Museum of Natural History — Google Arts & Culture Partnership Proposal
Kingman Museum of Natural History is currently developing a proposal to join the Google Arts & Culture platform as an official partner institution. The goal is to bring Kingman’s collection — one of Michigan’s oldest, dating to 1871 — to a global digital audience for the first time in the museum’s history.
The proposal centers on three things: collection digitization at scale, virtual gallery access, and long-term metadata infrastructure. Working toward Google’s Large Scale Data Program threshold, Kingman is identifying and organizing collection assets across its natural history, geology, paleontology, zoology, and regional history holdings — building the digital inventory foundation that a partnership would require.
If accepted, the partnership would allow Kingman to publish thousands of collection items on the Google Arts & Culture platform, making specimens and artifacts discoverable through Google Search, explorable through high-resolution image viewing, and accessible to researchers, educators, and the public worldwide — without requiring a trip to Battle Creek.
Beyond visibility, the partnership aligns with Kingman’s broader digital strategy: connecting physical collection management through PastPerfect Online, community engagement through the Kingman Adventure Club app, and now global reach through one of the world’s most widely used cultural platforms. The museum sees this as a natural next step in a multi-year effort to modernize operations while honoring a 150-year legacy of natural history preservation.
The proposal is currently in early development, with staff assessing collection readiness, metadata standards, and the digitization workflow needed to meet program requirements.
Kingman Museum of Natural History — Gates Foundation Relationship Development
Kingman Museum of Natural History is in the early stages of establishing a relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the goal of aligning the museum’s educational programming and digital access initiatives with the foundation’s priorities around equity, informal learning, and community opportunity.
The museum recognizes that the Gates Foundation operates primarily through invitation-based grantmaking rather than open applications — and is approaching this accordingly. Rather than submitting a cold proposal, Kingman is focused first on building awareness, identifying the right program officers and contact points within the foundation’s U.S. Education portfolio, and positioning the museum’s work in language that speaks directly to Gates priorities: expanding access to quality educational experiences for underserved communities, leveraging digital tools to remove barriers, and building sustainable infrastructure in small but mission-driven institutions.
Kingman’s case is genuine. A 155-year-old natural history collection in a mid-Michigan city, operating largely on volunteer labor and grant funding, serving a community with limited access to the kind of informal science education that wealthier regions take for granted — that’s exactly the story the Gates Foundation’s equity lens is designed to support. The museum’s current digital initiatives, including its partnership development with Google Arts & Culture and its Kingman Adventure Club educational app, demonstrate that Kingman is not simply asking for resources — it is building something.
The immediate next step is identifying a warm introduction pathway through regional education networks, Michigan-based foundation contacts, or intermediary organizations already in the Gates ecosystem. From there, the goal is a relationship built on shared values before a formal funding conversation ever begins.
Kingman Museum of Natural History — The Educator Collection Portal
Kingman Museum of Natural History is developing a purpose-built digital platform that transforms its 155-year-old natural history collection into an accessible, educator-ready artifact lending and curriculum resource experience. Rather than relying on off-the-shelf commercial tools, Kingman is building its own portal — designed from the ground up around the needs of educators, afterschool program directors, and informal learning providers who want meaningful, hands-on natural history experiences for their students but have never had a simple way to access them.
How It Works
The portal presents Kingman’s digitized collection in an intuitive browsing experience organized by curriculum theme, grade level, scientific discipline, and Michigan learning standards alignment. Geology, paleontology, zoology, regional natural history, and more — every artifact and specimen available for lending is photographed, described, and catalogued in detail, giving educators a full picture of what they’re requesting before anything leaves the museum.
Educators have two pathways into the collection:
Build Your Own Collection — Teachers and program directors browse the full digitized catalog and assemble a custom artifact kit tailored to their specific unit, theme, or student population. Each catalog entry includes high-resolution images, scientific descriptions, suggested grade levels, handling and care notes, and curriculum connection guidance — everything needed to make a confident, informed selection.
Pre-Curated Educator Packages — For educators who want a complete, ready-to-deploy solution, Kingman offers expertly assembled artifact packages built around specific topics — Michigan geology, animal adaptations, prehistoric life, regional ecosystems, and more. Each package is designed to arrive as a fully realized learning experience, not simply a box of objects.
What Sets This Apart
Every pre-curated package on the portal comes bundled with three layers of educator support that go well beyond the physical artifacts:
Pre-Populated Grant Applications — Kingman recognizes that many educators and program directors want access to the collection but lack the time or capacity to write the funding proposals that would pay for it. Each package therefore includes a pre-populated grant application template, already aligned to relevant funding sources — including 21st Century Community Learning Centers, Michigan-specific education grants, and local and regional foundation opportunities. Educators supply their school or program details and submit. Kingman has done the narrative work in advance.
Teacher Resources — Lesson plans, discussion guides, vocabulary support, background reading, and assessment ideas accompany every package, developed by Kingman staff and aligned to Michigan state academic standards. Materials are built for both formal classroom environments and informal afterschool or summer learning settings.
Student Materials — Age-appropriate student-facing materials round out each package — field journal pages, observation worksheets, specimen identification guides, and extension activities that connect the physical artifacts to broader scientific concepts and the natural history of southwest Michigan.
The Bigger Picture
This portal is not a transaction platform. It is the digital expression of Kingman’s core mission — making a 155-year-old natural history collection accessible to communities that would otherwise never encounter it. A student in a high-poverty Battle Creek school gains the same quality hands-on natural history experience as one in a well-resourced district with a robust field trip budget. A volunteer-run afterschool program gains not just artifacts, but a complete, grant-ready educational framework built around them.
Integrated with Kingman’s broader digital strategy — including its Google Arts & Culture partnership development, the Kingman Adventure Club educational app, and its PastPerfect Online collections database — the Educator Collection Portal is a cornerstone of the museum’s multi-year effort to extend the reach of its collection far beyond the walls of its Battle Creek home.
The portal is currently in active development, with collection digitization, curriculum alignment, and package curation underway.
Kingman Museum of Natural History — Community-Powered, Volunteer-Driven
Kingman Museum of Natural History has never been a passive institution waiting for resources to arrive. From its founding in 1871 by citizen naturalists who believed Battle Creek deserved a place to preserve and celebrate the natural world, Kingman has operated on a fundamentally different model than most museums — one where the community is not simply the audience, but the engine.
That tradition is alive and growing today.
A Museum Built by Its Community
Kingman runs almost entirely on volunteer labor. The people who staff its galleries, develop its exhibits, manage its collections, write its grants, design its programs, and tell its stories are not primarily paid professionals working from corner offices. They are Battle Creek residents — educators, scientists, artists, retirees, students, parents, and professionals — who show up because they believe in what this museum represents and what it can mean for their community.
This is not a compromise. It is a strength. A volunteer-powered museum is a community-owned museum in the most literal sense. Every hour donated is a vote of confidence in the institution. Every skill contributed — whether in carpentry, graphic design, historical research, digital development, or collections care — is the community investing in its own cultural infrastructure in a way that no grant check can fully replicate.
What Volunteers Make Possible
The scope of what Kingman’s volunteer community makes possible is remarkable. Exhibit design and fabrication. Artifact handling and cataloguing. Educational programming for children. Historical research and archival documentation. Digital tool development. Grant writing and donor outreach. Event planning and execution. Social media and community communications. Collections photography and digitization.
These are not peripheral tasks filled in around the edges of a professionally staffed operation. In many cases, they are the operation — carried out by people who bring genuine expertise and deep personal commitment to the work, often at a level of quality that would be difficult to match through conventional staffing even with unlimited resources.
The Volunteer Experience at Kingman
Kingman treats its volunteers not as free labor but as community partners with real skills, real stakes, and real ownership in the museum’s mission. Volunteers at Kingman work alongside staff and leadership on projects that matter — contributing to decisions, developing programs, and seeing the direct results of their efforts in the galleries, the collection, and the community.
The museum actively recruits volunteers across a wide range of disciplines and experience levels. There is meaningful work here for the retired biology teacher who wants to stay connected to science. For the college student building a portfolio in museum studies or nonprofit management. For the local craftsperson who wants to build something lasting. For the historian with knowledge of Battle Creek’s past. For the tech-savvy professional who wants to apply digital skills to a mission-driven project. For the parent who wants to model civic engagement for their children.
Kingman meets volunteers where they are — in terms of availability, skill set, and interest — and finds ways to connect what they bring to what the museum needs.
Community as Infrastructure
Kingman’s volunteer model is not simply a staffing strategy. It is an intentional philosophy about what a community museum should be and who it should belong to. When a Battle Creek resident volunteers at Kingman, they become an ambassador for the museum in every other part of their life. They tell their neighbors. They bring their families. They advocate for the institution in conversations that no marketing campaign can reach. They become invested in its survival and success in a personal, durable way.
This creates something that cannot be purchased — a genuine, distributed network of community ownership that makes Kingman more resilient, more connected, and more trusted than an institution of its size has any right to be.
Growing the Community-Powered Model
Kingman is actively expanding its volunteer program as part of its broader strategic development. New initiatives — including the Educator Collection Portal, the Kingman Adventure Club app, the university research partnership framework, the Google Arts & Culture digitization effort, and a growing calendar of community programming — all create new categories of meaningful volunteer engagement. The museum is actively partnering with Kellogg Community College, local school programs, civic organizations, and professional networks to recruit the next generation of Kingman community partners.
At the same time, Kingman is investing in the infrastructure that makes volunteer-powered operations sustainable — clearer onboarding processes, better documentation of roles and expectations, recognition programs that honor the contributions volunteers make, and leadership development pathways that allow committed volunteers to grow into greater responsibility within the organization.
The Ask
A museum powered by its community is a museum that belongs to its community — and that is exactly what Kingman is. But community power needs community investment to reach its potential. Every grant awarded, every dollar donated, and every partnership established amplifies what Kingman’s volunteers make possible. It pays for the tools, the materials, the technology, and the small but essential infrastructure costs that volunteers cannot absorb on their own.
Kingman is not asking its community to fund a bureaucracy. It is asking its supporters to fuel a movement — one that has been building in Battle Creek for more than 150 years and is only now hitting its stride.
Some institutions are built by governments. Some by wealthy benefactors with strings attached and legacies to protect. Some by academic bodies with long-range plans and institutional resources. Kingman Museum of Natural History was built by something rarer — a convergence of community vision, private generosity, and civic faith that the natural world was worth preserving and that Battle Creek was a community worthy of the institution that would preserve it.
That convergence, first expressed in 1871, produced something that has outlasted nearly everything around it. And the story of how it came to be is inseparable from the story of two remarkable women and the land they loved.
Where It Began
Kingman Museum traces its origins to the citizen naturalist movement that swept through American communities in the latter half of the nineteenth century — a period when the boundaries of scientific knowledge were expanding rapidly and ordinary people with sharp eyes and patient hands were making genuine contributions to the understanding of the natural world. In Battle Creek, that energy found an institutional home.
The museum was established as a place to collect, preserve, and interpret the natural history of southwest Michigan and beyond — geology, paleontology, zoology, botany, and the deep physical record of the land and life that existed here long before the city did. From the beginning it was a community enterprise. Not a trophy institution built to impress. A working collection built to teach, to preserve, and to connect the people of Battle Creek to the world beneath their feet and beyond their horizon.
Over the decades that followed, the collection grew. Specimens accumulated. Knowledge was preserved that would otherwise have been lost. The museum survived the pressures that have ended so many small cultural institutions — changes in funding, changes in leadership, changes in what communities expect from their cultural spaces — because the people of Battle Creek kept choosing to sustain it. That continuity across more than 150 years is itself remarkable. It speaks to something genuine in the relationship between this museum and this community — a bond that has outlasted the individuals who founded it, the buildings that have housed it, and the many chapters of its institutional life.
Emma Kingman and the Building That Bears Her Name
Among the most significant moments in the museum’s early history was the extraordinary generosity of Emma Kingman, whose donation funded the construction of the Kingman Memorial Museum Building — a gift that gave the museum’s mission a physical home worthy of its ambitions and established a landmark that has defined the Leila Arboretum campus ever since.
Emma Kingman’s gift was not simply philanthropic. It was visionary. The Kingman Memorial Museum Building was conceived not merely as a home for one collection, but as the anchor of something larger — a campus of museums, a cultural and scientific destination that would draw scholars, students, and community members to the arboretum grounds and establish Battle Creek as a place that took the preservation of knowledge seriously. The building was designed with that expansive future in mind, its presence on the landscape an invitation to what might yet come.
That vision — a campus of institutions gathered around a shared commitment to natural history, science, and public education — remains part of Kingman’s long-term identity and aspiration. The building Emma Kingman funded was meant to be a beginning, not a destination.
Leila Post Montgomery and the Land
The ground beneath the Kingman Memorial Museum Building — and the 72 acres of botanical garden and natural landscape that surround it — came to the community through an equally remarkable act of generosity. Leila Post Montgomery donated the land that would become Leila Arboretum to the City of Battle Creek with a clear and generous purpose: to create a public green space where the community could gather, learn, and reconnect with the natural world, free of cost and open to all.
It was a gift rooted in the same values that animate Kingman — the belief that beauty, nature, and knowledge should belong to everyone, not reserved for those with the means or connections to access them privately. The land Leila Post Montgomery gave to Battle Creek became the setting in which Emma Kingman’s building would stand, and together their two gifts created something neither could have produced alone — a public campus where a living landscape and a natural history institution could exist in permanent conversation with each other and with the community they both serve.
The Museum Is Not in the Building
This is a distinction that matters and one that is frequently misunderstood: Kingman Museum of Natural History and the Kingman Memorial Museum Building are not the same thing.
The museum — its collection, its mission, its programs, its staff, and its community — exists as an independent institution. The building that bears the Kingman name, and that for decades served as the museum’s physical home, is owned by the City of Battle Creek. The museum has operated apart from that building, carrying its mission forward through other means while the building itself faces the challenges that come with age, deferred maintenance, and the weight of more than a century of history.
The City of Battle Creek is currently working to stabilize the Kingman Memorial Museum Building — a significant undertaking that reflects the city’s recognition of the building’s historical, architectural, and civic importance. Stabilization is the necessary first step toward a longer conversation about the building’s future — what role it might play, who might occupy it, and how Emma Kingman’s original vision of a museum campus might be honored and extended in a form appropriate to the twenty-first century.
Kingman Museum watches that process with deep interest and with a genuine stake in the outcome. The building that bears the museum’s name, built with the resources of one of the museum’s earliest and most generous supporters, on land donated by one of Battle Creek’s most consequential civic figures, is part of the museum’s story whether or not the museum currently operates within its walls. Its stabilization is not a municipal construction project. It is the preservation of a piece of Battle Creek’s cultural memory — and an opportunity, when the time is right, to revisit the campus vision that Emma Kingman’s gift was always meant to inspire.
The Leila Arboretum Society Partnership
The pairing of Kingman Museum and Leila Arboretum is not incidental. It is one of the most natural institutional partnerships in southwest Michigan, rooted in shared history, shared values, and a shared understanding of what public land and public institutions can mean to a community.
Where the arboretum offers living nature — trees, plants, ecosystems, and seasonal change unfolding in real time across 72 acres of public land — the museum offers the deeper context: the geological record beneath the soil, the fossil history of the creatures that preceded the landscape, the scientific framework that makes sense of what visitors see when they walk the arboretum’s paths.
Together they form something neither could be alone — an integrated natural history experience that moves from the living world outside to the preserved and interpreted record inside, and back again. A child who walks the arboretum and then enters Kingman’s galleries does not experience two separate institutions. They experience one continuous story about the natural world told in two complementary languages.
The arboretum’s 72 acres serve as an outdoor classroom that extends Kingman’s educational reach far beyond its gallery walls. Museum programming regularly engages the arboretum’s landscape — nature walks, outdoor observation activities, community events, and educational programming that treats the living arboretum and the collected museum as a single learning environment.
The arboretum also anchors Kingman’s community presence in a powerful way. Leila Arboretum is one of Battle Creek’s most beloved public spaces — a place where residents walk, reflect, gather, and reconnect with the natural world across every season. Kingman’s position alongside that space gives the museum a visibility and accessibility that a standalone building in a less trafficked location could never achieve. Visitors come for the arboretum and discover the museum. They come for the museum and find themselves drawn into the arboretum. The relationship is symbiotic and self-reinforcing in a way that no strategic plan could manufacture — it grew organically from the shared roots of two institutions committed to the same community and the same values.
A Community-Powered Institution
Kingman runs almost entirely on volunteer labor. The people who staff its galleries, develop its exhibits, manage its collections, write its grants, design its programs, and tell its stories are not primarily paid professionals working from corner offices. They are Battle Creek residents — educators, scientists, artists, retirees, students, parents, and professionals — who show up because they believe in what this museum represents and what it can mean for their community.
This is not a compromise. It is a strength. A volunteer-powered museum is a community-owned museum in the most literal sense. Every hour donated is a vote of confidence in the institution. Every skill contributed — whether in carpentry, graphic design, historical research, digital development, or collections care — is the community investing in its own cultural infrastructure in a way that no grant check can fully replicate.
The scope of what Kingman’s volunteer community makes possible is remarkable. Exhibit design and fabrication. Artifact handling and cataloguing. Educational programming for children. Historical research and archival documentation. Digital tool development. Grant writing and donor outreach. Event planning and execution. Social media and community communications. Collections photography and digitization. These are not peripheral tasks filled in around the edges of a professionally staffed operation. In many cases, they are the operation — carried out by people who bring genuine expertise and deep personal commitment to the work.
Kingman treats its volunteers not as free labor but as community partners with real skills, real stakes, and real ownership in the museum’s mission. There is meaningful work here for the retired biology teacher who wants to stay connected to science. For the college student building a portfolio in museum studies or nonprofit management. For the local craftsperson who wants to build something lasting. For the historian with knowledge of Battle Creek’s past. For the tech-savvy professional who wants to apply digital skills to a mission-driven project. For the parent who wants to model civic engagement for their children.
When a Battle Creek resident volunteers at Kingman, they become an ambassador for the museum in every other part of their life. They tell their neighbors. They bring their families. They advocate for the institution in conversations that no marketing campaign can reach. They become invested in its survival and success in a personal, durable way — creating a genuine, distributed network of community ownership that makes Kingman more resilient, more connected, and more trusted than an institution of its size has any right to be.
Looking Forward
As Kingman enters an ambitious new chapter — expanding its digital presence, launching the Educator Collection Portal, developing university research partnerships, building the Kingman Adventure Club, pursuing major digitization initiatives, and working toward a Google Arts & Culture partnership — the Leila Arboretum partnership and the legacy of Emma Kingman and Leila Post Montgomery remain central to everything the museum does and everything it aspires to become.
The First Annual Great Kingman Race, rooted in the arboretum’s landscape, is one early expression of this vision — using the physical beauty and public trust of Leila Arboretum to build community investment in the museum’s mission while creating a tradition that brings Battle Creek together around natural history, outdoor experience, and shared civic pride.
Future programming envisions even deeper integration between the living landscape of the arboretum and the interpreted collections of the museum — outdoor exhibits, educational trails, community science initiatives, and events that draw the broader Battle Creek community into both spaces simultaneously.
The Path Back to the Kingman Building
Kingman Museum has not closed the door on returning to the building that bears its name. That possibility is real — and it is one the museum’s leadership holds with both seriousness and hope.
A return to the Kingman Memorial Museum Building would be a profound moment in the institution’s history — a homecoming that honors Emma Kingman’s original gift, fulfills the campus vision she helped make possible, and gives the museum’s growing collection, programs, and community presence a permanent home of genuine historical and architectural significance. It would be the kind of milestone that defines an institution’s next century.
But it would require significant investment to make that vision a reality. The building’s interior would need substantial renovation to meet the functional, environmental, and accessibility standards required to house a museum collection and serve the public safely and effectively. Beyond renovation, a formal lease agreement with the City of Battle Creek — which owns the building — would need to be structured and funded, with ongoing leasing fees representing a long-term operational commitment that the museum must be financially prepared to sustain.
Kingman’s leadership is actively considering whether the moment is right to pursue a formal capital campaign — a coordinated, community-wide fundraising effort that would bring together individual donors, institutional funders, corporate partners, and government sources around the shared goal of returning Kingman to its historic home. A capital campaign of this nature would be among the most ambitious undertakings in the museum’s 155-year history. It would also be among the most consequential — not just for the museum, but for Battle Creek, for Leila Arboretum, and for the legacy of the two women whose generosity made the building and the landscape possible in the first place.
The work being done today — digitizing the collection, building community programs, establishing university partnerships, developing the Educator Collection Portal, growing the volunteer base, and raising the museum’s profile regionally and nationally — is not separate from the capital campaign conversation. It is the foundation of it. A museum that can demonstrate active community investment, growing educational impact, and a credible vision for its next chapter is a museum that can make a compelling case to the funders and partners a capital campaign requires.
The path back to the Kingman Memorial Museum Building runs through the work being done right now. And as the City of Battle Creek continues its stabilization efforts, Kingman intends to be ready when the time comes to have that larger conversation — about investment, about renovation, about leasing, and about what it would mean for this community to see its museum come home.
Kingman and Leila Arboretum are not simply neighbors. They are partners in the oldest and most important sense — institutions that make each other more than either could be alone, rooted in the same community, animated by the same values, and committed to the same belief that the natural world is worth knowing, worth preserving, and worth sharing with everyone.
That partnership began more than a century ago on land given freely to a community by a woman who believed it deserved something beautiful. It is nowhere near finished.
Kingman Museum was founded in 1871 by people who believed that curiosity deserves a home. More than 150 years later, we’re building on that same belief — using modern technology to extend the museum’s reach, strengthen our programs, and ensure this institution thrives for the next generation.
We are investing in a suite of purpose-built digital tools designed specifically for a small museum with a big mission. These aren’t off-the-shelf products. They’re systems we’re building from the ground up to solve the real challenges facing community museums today: limited staff, tight budgets, and the constant work of proving impact to the funders and partners who make our programs possible.
Here’s what we’re building — and where we’re headed.
Eddie — AI-Powered Grant Discovery
Named in honor of Edward M. Brigham Jr., whose decades of dedication shaped this museum, Eddie is an AI-powered agent that searches for grant opportunities on our behalf every single day. Eddie scans federal, state, foundation, and corporate funding databases, evaluates each opportunity against our mission areas — natural history education, STEM programming, exhibit development, community outreach, collections preservation, and operational sustainability — and delivers a scored, organized pipeline of opportunities directly to our team.
No more missed deadlines. No more hours spent searching. Eddie finds the grants. Our team focuses on writing winning applications.
Kingman Attend — Smart Event Tracking for Stronger Programs
Every museum event tells a story — not just to the people who attend, but to the funders who make those events possible. Kingman Attend is our custom event attendance platform that captures real-time data at every program we run: who showed up, where they came from, what brought them in, and how our events serve different communities across the region.
This isn’t just a head count. It’s a system that generates grant-ready reports automatically — the kind of detailed, demographic-rich program data that funders ask for and most small museums struggle to produce. When we apply for a grant and say we served 400 families across 12 zip codes last quarter, we have the numbers to back it up.
Eddie Brigham’s Kingman Adventure Club — Science Exploration for Kids
A mobile app designed for young explorers ages 7 to 13. Eddie Brigham’s Kingman Adventure Club turns museum visits — and the world outside — into hands-on science missions. Kids check in at museums, photograph nature finds, log structured observations using real scientific methods, and complete discovery challenges that build curiosity and critical thinking.
Along the way, they earn badges. And those badges aren’t just digital — they’re redeemable for real prizes at the Kingman Museum Gift Shop.
Explore. Discover. Earn. Repeat.
Connected to the Tools We Already Use
All of our digital tools integrate with the Microsoft 365 environment our team already works in every day. Grant deadlines from Eddie appear automatically in Outlook calendars with built-in reminders. Event summaries from Kingman Attend post directly to our Microsoft Teams channels so the whole team stays informed. Weekly digests, milestone alerts, and post-event reports flow through the systems our staff already checks every morning — no new platforms to learn, no extra logins to remember.
Online Collections Access
We are working toward making portions of the Kingman Museum collection accessible online through our PastPerfect database. Our goal is to give researchers, educators, students, and curious visitors the ability to explore specimens and artifacts from anywhere — extending the museum’s educational mission beyond our walls and into classrooms, living rooms, and libraries across the country.
A Multimedia History of Kingman Museum
In partnership with local collaborators, we are developing a multimedia experience that tells the full story of this institution — from Edward Brigham Sr.’s first expeditions to the Amazon in 1879, through the WPA-era expansion, to the museum you can visit today at Leila Arboretum. This project draws on original documents, photographs, and oral histories to bring more than 150 years of natural history stewardship to life in a way that honors the people who built it.
Why This Matters
Most museums our size don’t have a technology team. They don’t have a data analyst or a grant researcher on staff. They rely on spreadsheets, memory, and long hours from dedicated volunteers.
We’re building something different. A system where technology does the searching, the tracking, and the reporting — so our people can do what they do best: teach, inspire, and preserve the natural world for the community that depends on us.
This is how a 150-year-old museum stays relevant for the next 150 years.
Completing the vision for Battle Creek’s natural history home.
The Kingman Museum of Natural History is looking ahead. We are in the early stages of planning A Place for Wonder — a capital campaign to fund the full interior buildout of the Kingman Memorial Museum building, transforming a beloved civic landmark into the permanent, fully realized natural history museum that Battle Creek deserves. The campaign will support the creation of public gallery spaces, an education wing for students and community programs, proper collections and curatorial facilities, and the infrastructure needed to welcome visitors for generations to come. The Kingman Memorial Museum building is owned by the City of Battle Creek, and this effort reflects a shared commitment between the Museum and the City to honor that building’s legacy and its future. A Place for Wonder is in its preliminary planning stage, subject to approval by the Kingman Museum Board of Directors and acceptance by key stakeholders, including the City of Battle Creek. We look forward to sharing more as this vision takes shape. If you’d like to learn more or express interest in supporting this effort, we’d love to hear from you.
We want to stress that this is fundamentally in a feasibility posture while we seek initial sponsors and key stakeholders, including the community, to determine if this is a possibility and how we would move to planning pending board and City of Battle Creek approvals.