Mystic Aquarium Awarded $2 Million Grant For STEM Mentoring

MYSTIC, CT — The Mystic Aquarium is the recipient of a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in support of its national STEM mentoring program.

The goal of the mentoring program is to "positively impact the social development and academic achievement of 6- to 10-year-old youth from under-resourced communities by providing high-quality, conservation-based group mentoring experiences in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)," according to a statement.

“This grant enables Mystic Aquarium to advance our work with youth-serving organizations throughout the United States to provide young people with caring mentors, transferable STEM skills, and the tools to tackle environmental issues unique to their own communities,” said Katie Cubina, Senior Vice President of Mission Programs for Mystic Aquarium and Project Director.

The STEM mentoring program connects youth with peer and adult mentors at a 4:1 mentee-to-mentor ratio in weekly after-school sessions that cover a wide variety of topics, including team-building, career exploration, and STEM content all under a conservation theme.

Some of the activities that mentees and mentors engage in together include testing water quality, building models of renewable energy devices, and taking action to protect threatened and endangered animals.

The weekly STEM Mentoring session also prepare youth to participate in Mystic Aquarium’s growing Environmental Stewardship initiative, where youth design their own projects to address an environmental issue in their local community.

Past projects include creating butterfly gardens, initiating recycling programs, helping to restore wetlands, and organizing community cleanups, according to a statement.

An additional feature of the STEM Mentoring program is a Leadership Academy for peer mentors participating in the program. These youth, ages 12–17, come to Mystic for a week in the summer to live on a local college campus and attend workshops on topics such as leadership skill-building, hands-on STEM experiences, how to improve community connectedness for mentees, and how to help mentees design and implement their own environmental stewardship projects.