Francisca Moraga Lopez leads Glenstone’s Community Engagement team dedicated to engaging with students, educators, and community partners across the region and beyond. Each year, Francisca and her team host over 4,000 students and educators at Glenstone for guided and self-guided visits; coordinate community programming and partnerships across Montgomery County Maryland; and lead Glenstone’s staff volunteer program, Glenstone Gives. We sat down with Francisca to learn more about how the team brings Glenstone’s mission to life. 

GLENSTONE 
What does Community Engagement do at Glenstone, and what keeps you coming back day after day? 

Francisca Moraga Lopez:   
The Community Engagement Department was founded with the goal of connecting and engaging with Glenstone’s surrounding communities beyond our wooden fence, and I'm lucky enough to lead that effort.  

Primarily, we seek to inspire the next generation of museumgoers through our school program where we have face-to-face conversations guided by the students’ curiosity. We also support educators, facilitating spaces where they can reconnect with their love of art and their passion for teaching, while expanding their toolbox for art engagement strategies. 

I love my role. What keeps me coming back is that I'm a huge museum nerd. I believe in the power of museums to transform lives, to impact communities, and to foster a lifelong love of learning and exchange. And as places to work, museums represent hubs of all fields, all kinds of minds and perspectives. Plus, there’s Glenstone itself. I've worked in many museums and Glenstone is such an amazing resource and it's my job to share it with others, to build opportunities that allow people to connect, learn or simply find rest. That is so important to me, and I love that it’s my job. 

GLENSTONE 
That's really beautiful. Can you tell us a little bit about the path that got you here and how you got into museum work? 

FML 
I'm a formerly undocumented person from Chile, and when my family arrived here, we spent the first four or five years in this country in like full tourist mode. We explored up and down the East Coast, always finding museums to visit. I'll never forget the first time we visited the Met. I was super into history and walking through those exhibits, I was in such wonder and awe. Looking at objects and materials that people held and experienced and lived with: that was it. I loved museums, and any time I had a project, I had to look for a museum that was about that topic or time in history, because they were, for me, super legit resources.  

I was really lucky to go to Williams College, where I dedicated 4 years to studying art history and Latina/o Studies and reinforcing my writing skills by double majoring in Spanish. And I worked at Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) from sophomore year on, leading school visits, working closely with the collection and with the registrars on inventory and data management. After that, I was sold: I've spent 15 years working in all kinds of museums: college museums, history museums, science museums, art museums. I've been really lucky to work in almost every department, from development to communications to collections, and as a curator in mini shows. I've had the opportunity to do a lot of things! 

GLENSTONE 
Pivoting to a Glenstone school visit – what makes it special for students who get to come here? 
 

FML 
Here at Glenstone on a school visit, we want students to walk away feeling empowered to speak about art, architecture, and nature. To feel confident in their opinions, to be open to new perspectives. Week after week, we're seeing that happen.  

We start every visit with getting to know the students, getting to know each other really, and establishing an understanding that art has no right or wrong answers. We're excited to hear what they think, and our Guide team are masterful facilitators, balancing thinking routines with drawing or writing activities and slowly revealing information. It's through this process that students can really take time to think about what they're seeing and get excited about sharing their discoveries or reveal their curiosities.  

It is a true joy to watch students leave empowered to speak their minds every week. When students arrive at Glenstone, they are sometimes quiet and shy to engage and speak to start. Because we understand that our visitors come from all walks of life and have varying experience with art, we spend the first 20 or so minutes of every guided visit getting to know each other before diving deep into Glenstone and art. This time together fosters connection and allows students to get to know the guides as people who are genuinely invested in their ideas and experience. Throughout the visit, our guides use what they’ve learned about group to make personalized connections or elevate students’ shared interests with artists. For example, if a guide learns a student is interested in animation, highlighting the work of Alex Da Corte is a great point of departure for a conversation. Starting with being personable and sharing about ourselves helps build that rapport. 

We also bring in other people's voices: we talk about making art, how we install art, and we bring out our engineers or our horticulturists or our conservators. That gives students an opportunity to hear from experts in those fields and learn about career pathways that may be unfamiliar to them.  

We serve students beyond school programs by supporting special projects, too. We're on year two of a wonderful dance residency with Albert Einstein High School’s dance company. Their students spend time researching artists that we have in our outdoor sculpture program, and then they spend the full day here on campus choreographing dances inspired by the pieces. They even bring original costumes! 

And during one of my favorite times of the year, we support rising juniors and seniors through the Montgomery County Summer RISE program. Students who are interested in various fields experience a month in the life of a Glenstone associate, and they get to experience the task and responsibilities of their chosen fields within that museum context. It’s amazing because we get to share the different directions that their careers or their interests can take them while highlighting the unique opportunity of working in an art museum.  

GLENSTONE 

How else does Glenstone engage with the community? 

 
FML 
We participate in things like career days in Montgomery County Schools, sharing the variety of industries that you can find at museums. We also participate in community festivals and fairs by bringing slices of Glenstone to different areas of the DMV. That often includes a little demonstration garden that we created out of old art crates with our grounds team or interactive activities that focus on recycling and conservation. 

One of our most significant projects has been working with the Scotland community to rebuild, restore, and rejuvenate the Scotland A.M.E. Zion Church on Seven Locks Road, not far from Glenstone. The church's foundation was destroyed in 2019 by flooding that had been caused by the county's development of the area, which left the church in a flood zone. Through community collaboration and exchange, we celebrated the completion of the project in 2025.  

To help complete that project, Glenstone collaborated with local government and other leaders to build awareness around the community, which is one of the oldest Black communities in the county. The project needed buy-in from the community, from the people that govern the community, but also from the people that live around it as neighbors.  

We worked closely with the Scotland community itself by exchanging expertise. We lent our knowledge of design, construction, and planning. The Scotland community, through the leadership of the church’s pastor, Reverend Dr. Evalina Huggins and the organizing power of the Gasaway Sisters, lent their expertise on community planning and engagement. And while we’ve now wrapped up the project, we continue to partner. We participate annually as a sponsor in the Scotland Juneteenth Heritage Festival.  

GLENSTONE 
Another cool thing that your team does is managing Glenstone’s staff volunteering efforts – can you tell us more about Glenstone Gives? 

 
FML 
Yes! Glenstone Gives is one of my favorite internal programs. Glenstone Gives is an employee benefit - it's 16 hours of paid time off to serve our communities. It's 8 hours of “associate choice”, so we get to go and support an organization or cause that is dear to our hearts. We also get 8 hours of Glenstone-sponsored opportunities to bond as a group and give to our communities. We're participating with Shepherd’s Table, Manna Food Center, and Nourish Now every year and sorting food or doing other tasks so that they can do the work of tackling food insecurity. We are also working with Weed Warriors to tackle invasive plant removal at some of our local parks because nature is really important to us! And for me it's a great extension of Glenstone's commitment to sustainability, not just physical, not just for the environment, but for the well-being of our community as well.
 

GLENSTONE 

Any other special moments you want to talk about? 
 
FML 
Yeah, there’s a moment that that happens almost every time I'm greeting a group, and it's why I love inviting as many people as possible to Glenstone. Sometimes they don't know about Glenstone at all. So I get to introduce this place that they've only just arrived at. Maybe they don't know much about art. Maybe some of them have curiosity, maybe some of them might have anxieties.  
 
But greeting them opens the opportunity for us to say, “just experience it, just walk through. Just slow down and be present.” They come back at the end of their visit and they have this face of like, “Ohhhh! You were right! That was wonderful. That was so unique. Oh, I have to come back.” If they’re students, the highest compliment for us is “I can't wait to tell my parents about it!”  

One example from recently: we had a group come from Miami University of Ohio  and the driver had been very curious to visit, but she chose to stay on the bus and get some work done, so she only saw our Environmental Center. But because she hadn't had the chance to experience the site, I gave her five postcards. And she was going through the postcards and already was like “I have to come back here.” And here is this woman from Ohio already planning her next visit because she HAS to come see Simone Leigh’s Satellite.  

That’s why our work matters – art can be so inspiring and surprising for people. You’re somewhere you’ve never been and all of a sudden you’re planning an 8-hour road trip back just to see a sculpture. 

 Francisca Moraga Lopez serves as the Community Engagement Manager for Glenstone Museum. She was named Maryland Museum Educator of the Year in 2025 by the Maryland Art Education Association.