LA Family Night at the Aquarium

Green space, park access, and trees

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Cabrillo Marine Aquarium hosts thousands of school children visiting on field trips each year. Many of them come from schools only 20 to 30 minutes away, yet every year we hear excited exclamations from students who are seeing the ocean for the first time. This shows us that students and their families do not have equal access to the City of Los Angeles's many coastal parks and outdoor spaces. Through this grant, we seek to address this access issue by bringing families from throughout the city to the Aquarium and its surrounding coastal park, to enjoy an evening together during an a grunion run. In addition, we plan on partnering with the Department of Recreation and Parks and museums to exhibit and share information about their activities and free programs to increase awareness of and participation in outdoor and educational opportunities in local neighborhoods.

LA Family Night at the Aquarium launched in April 2022. For each annual event, we partner with LAUSD's Beyond the Bell Branch of The Office of Outdoor and Environmental Education to identify underserved Title 1 elementary schools (K – 5th grade) from each LA City Council District. Families from those schools are invited to the event and are provided free transportation, food and education / science-related giveaways.
The first two years, we had 17 buses come from 11 LA City Council Districts and this year we had 29 buses come from 12 LA City Council Districts. In 2025, we want to make sure that all 15 LA City Council Districts are represented to ensure that families from every area of the city get to enjoy access to the Coastal Park in a truly inspiring and interactive way - seeing grunion come up on the beach to spawn.
The Aquarium is a part of the City of Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department (RAP), which operates a network of parks and free and/or low-cost services throughout the city. In 2025, our goal is to have RAP staff from throughout the city come and share what programs and services they offer to increase awareness of other parks and ultimately inspire families to return home and participate in outdoor activities in their neighborhoods. We will also invite museums such as the Griffith Park Observatory, the California Science Center and others to do the same to make sure families are aware of all the free / low cost educational opportunities available.

In our experience, families who play together and share outdoor experiences together build bonds that last a lifetime. This also applies to families who learn together. We think it's so important for families to experience ocean and marine science together because parents who experience ocean activities with their children, such as hatching grunion eggs and watching grunion spawn on the beach, tend to be more encouraging and supportive of their children pursuing science and STEM related careers. Having more families connect to the outdoors and science can only benefit Los Angeles County by inspiring environmental stewards to care for our natural places and future scientists to study and better understand our natural coastal and ocean environment.

For a variety of reasons, the ocean isn't accessible to many Los Angeles families; the reasons often include lack of time, transportation, and/or financial resources. We measure the event's impact by the number of LA City Council Districts that participate, the number of buses required, and the number of families/people that attend. In 2025, we will also measure success by the number of other RAP and museum staff who participate and share information about their programs.