Playing To Our Strengths: Collaborative Models for Public Engagement in the COVID Era

A number of organizations are struggling to adapt to the new landscape of public engagement in the COVID era. Most notably, science centers, such as museums and planetariums, have seen attendance numbers plummet, which raises grave concerns for the survivability of these important institutions. At the University of Colorado, we have met this challenge through collaboration between CU's Fiske Planetarium and the JILA NSF Physics Frontier Center's \textit{Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community} (PISEC) program. PISEC focuses strongly on community partnerships, making it an excellent way to connect Fiske and other CU science centers to the local community without requiring in-person facilitation. I will discuss PISEC, the collaborative model created in partnership with Fiske, and preliminary research on the impacts of this new model.