Mary Pat, a representative of the Dallas Holocaust Museum, told the Arts and Culture Advisory Commission on March 20 that the museum’s mission is to teach the history of the Holocaust and advance human rights by encouraging “upstander” behavior among visitors.

The museum, founded in 1984 and with a museum facility that opened in September 2019, uses a three-wing permanent exhibition and local survivor testimony to educate students and families, Mary Pat said. The museum reported about 60,000 student visits on site each year and described a K–12 initiative it calls the Upstander Partnership that provides classroom-ready lessons and in-person visits by museum educators.

The Upstander Partnership, Mary Pat said, is operating in multiple school regions and reaches students through a mix of field trips and in-class teaching. She told commissioners the program currently reaches roughly 150,000 students through its combination of direct visits and distributed curricular materials and that staff expect to add another region next year — including, she said, Fort Worth ISD — which would raise that reach to about 250,000 students.

Commissioners asked about priorities and challenges. Commissioner Daniel Head asked what the museum was most excited about and most concerned about for the coming year; Mary Pat said the priority is growth in school programming while the chief concern is public attendance and earned revenue. She said the museum opened six months before COVID-19 and has not yet established a full-year attendance baseline; lower attendance has created a larger fundraising burden.

To address operating stability, Mary Pat described an endowment campaign with a stated goal of $30 million. She said museum leadership currently draws a small share of budgetary support from its endowment and aims to grow that support to reduce reliance on annual fundraising.

The museum also described special exhibitions and technology-based visitor experiences — including a testimony theater and interactive holographic presentations of local survivors — and highlighted a current exhibition on Rosenwald schools as an example of public–private partnership and local history programming.

The commission’s members praised the museum’s outreach and local partnerships and encouraged museum staff to promote free-admission days, outreach to community groups and partnerships with local schools and arts organizations. Mary Pat asked commissioners for help spreading the word to boost public attendance and noted a free-admission day on the birthday of Booker T. Washington, April 5, on the museum calendar.

The presentation took place during the meeting’s community-spotlight segment; there was no formal commission action on the presentation.