The Wild Center

Program Overview

Nestled inside Adirondack Park in Tupper Lake, NY, The Wild Center connects learners of all ages with the natural world, encouraging visitors to become caretakers of the environment. The Center blends science, art, and outdoor play to educate visitors about a variety of environmental science topics. The Center collaborates with local farmers, artists, and institutions to create interactive learning experiences for visitors of all ages.  

Stephanie Ratcliffe is The Wild Center’s executive director. Stephanie shared insights from her experience developing interactive environmental science exhibits and programs. 

Community Needs

What communities does The Wild Center serve?

The Wild Center is an anchor for the local community here in Tupper Lake, NY and the surrounding areas. We’re also a welcoming gateway place for tourists. Every summer, there’s an influx of 10 to 12 million tourists coming to Adirondack Park, and our museum serves as a visitor center in a lot of ways.

What needs does The Wild Center address?

When someone comes to a new place, they really want to be anchored in that place, to understand where they are. Our visitors want to understand more about the natural world of the Adirondacks. They want to learn about the science behind the beauty they’re seeing. The Wild Center gives people a very place-based understanding by teaching them about the flora and fauna that make the Adirondacks unique. When people understand nature at a deeper level, we know they’ll join us in helping to be stewards of natural places.

How do you design experiences to meet visitors’ unique learning needs? 

We try to identify what our visitors already know, so we can start where they are and take them to the next step. Before we opened our Climate Solutions exhibit, we surveyed visitors using a tool developed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. We found that 84% of visitors were alarmed or concerned about climate change. With that knowledge, we worked to meet visitors where they were and focus on climate solutions.  

We design experiences with different levels of engagement for kids and adults. For example, as we were developing a new trail, we talked to children’s museums and child development experts as part of the Caretakers of Wonder initiative. We asked, “What foundation can we put in place for young children, so they’ll be ready to keep learning and having conversations about the climate as they get older?” The advice we got was simple: Help kids establish a relationship with nature through fun, unstructured play. So, alongside the trail, we created a giant ball run called the Raquette River Roll. The whole idea is that kids are having a blast in nature. We also placed labels along the trail to help older kids and adults interpret what they’re seeing — providing details about the forest, for example. 

How do you encourage visitors to apply what they’ve learned at The Wild Center?

The Wild Center hosts a Youth Climate Summit, a two-day event where high school students can create a climate action plan for their school or their community. We offer workshops to help students develop their action plan and activities, like starting a garden at school to empower teens to be climate changemakers. In our Climate Solutions exhibit, we profiled people who are making a change in our local community — like two students who started their own compost business after attending the Youth Climate Summit!  

The exhibit also included interactive displays that prompted visitors to think about how they could use their skills to take care of the environment and their communities. We want visitors to leave The Wild Center feeling empowered — because when you roll up your sleeves and do something in your community, no matter how small, you’re one step closer to creating solutions. As the old saying goes, “Think global, act local!” We all can’t do everything, but we all can do something. For example, I don’t know anything about regenerative farming, but maybe I can support a local farmer by buying their product. We encourage people to focus on those manageable action steps.

Funding and Partnerships

How is The Wild Center funded?

The Wild Center has received multi-year grants from IMLS, which have helped us invest in deep collaborative work and innovative programs. The Center has also received funding from the NEA, state-level organizations, and family foundations.

Does The Wild Center work with any partner organizations?

The Wild Center partnered with the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center to design an aquarium-based exhibit called Ways of Knowing: Haudenosaunee Stories and Culture. The Cultural Center’s director, David Fadden, designed the exhibit around the Thanksgiving Address, a traditional Haudenosaunee way to start an event or ceremony — by bringing people together to give thanks and show gratitude for each part of nature. To prepare for this exhibit, we took the conventional science content down and made the aquarium David’s canvas. The exhibit explained how the Haudenosaunee culture relates to nature — including their perspective about where humans sit in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom.  

The Wild Center also collaborates with artists and composers. For example, artist Brenda Baker created an installation called The Clothesline. We spent a year and a half collecting clothing from local farmers who grow food for our community, and now we have a 500-foot clothesline around our pond. You walk through and see the oil spills, the rips and patches on the clothing. We incorporated videos of the farmers talking about regenerative agriculture and how they’re working to leave the land better than they found it.  

How does Wild Center promote knowledge sharing across cultures?

We developed a three-year internship program for Native students in partnership with two other local organizations. To make the program as supportive and accessible as possible, we really customized the internship to each intern’s life circumstances. Our interns are all passionate about cultural education, and they’re using the skills they learned through this experience in their communities.  

Some of our former interns have also come back and created exhibits for The Wild Center. For example, one intern came from a family of basket weavers. She planned an exhibit about basket weaving and how the material used for the baskets is threatened by an invasive species. Another intern created an exhibit featuring molds of artifacts — objects from her ancestors that had been found in the Adirondacks. There was a commonly held but incorrect belief that Native people never lived in the Adirondacks, and her exhibit corrected that by telling the story of the original stewards of the land.  

Program Impact

What is the impact of The Wild Center? How have you measured and evaluated success?

We often do visitor satisfaction surveys in the context of our learning experiences. When we evaluated our Climate Solutions project, we found that people felt empowered to take action in their communities. Typically, our goal is very specific and tailored to the experience we’re creating. Sometimes it’s demystifying a scientific concept or raising awareness. Sometimes it’s a simple question like, “Are kids having a wonderful time in nature?” If families are having fun and building relationships with nature, that’s a success.

Network, Collaborate, and Share

What advice would you give to someone implementing a similar community-based program?

It’s all about relationships. In a true collaboration, when you’re co-creating a learning experience, you can’t control the outcome. When we planned the Ways of Knowing exhibit, I didn’t know going into the relationship what the end result was going to be. And thinking about our internship program for Native youth, none of their incredible ideas were on the table when we started — they emerged through the partnership. There has to be a true commitment to relationship building and allowing things to emerge from working together.

How can people learn more about The Wild Center?

To learn more about The Wild Center, visit WildCenter.org.