2025 Annual Impact Report
Note from the Founder
I know I speak for a lot of people when I say that 2025 was a hard year. The world is changing, and (just as the Red Queen explained to Alice in Through the Looking Glass), we have to run as fast as we can just to keep up.
It has been difficult for us as an organization, too. We had our 10th anniversary in 2025. For the past decade, we have been providing all our content for FREE to our audience. We fund our work mostly through grants. But there’s much more competition for grants since government funding has become so uncertain. In 2025, 10 of the 12 grants we applied for were rejected or reduced. We ran a readers’ fundraising campaign to help ends meet.
Yet in hardship, creativity thrives too! In 2025, we came up with an entirely new interactive format for our science teaching content. It was received with enthusiasm by our audience.
And we still published 32 excellent scientific articles, 60 new videos, and served over 10 million students in the U.S. and around the world.
We are proud of our work.
We persist.
Thank you for your support!
Our Content
Scientific Articles
In 2025, we adapted and published 32 new scientific articles.
- All of them come complete with a visual media component: a research recap or a lesson idea video.
- Each includes a text-to-speech audio version (also available as a podcast) for improved accessibility.
- Most articles are adapted for middle school or lower high school reading level. But we offer some for elementary school kids as well as upper high school.
- All articles offer assessment questions, a teacher’s key, and additional lesson plan ideas.
- Many are translated into Spanish and 20 other languages.
- We covered topics from a wide range of fields: from animal behavior to weather.
Reach
- Our scientific articles had 447,000 downloads from our website (in 12 months).
- Our top article was What happens to astronauts’ DNA in space? with 10,100 downloads. (It’s also available in Spanish.)
- Most downloads are by teachers who share the article with their entire class, so the number of students we reached is in the range of 10–13 million.
Read for yourself:
Interactive Lessons
We created and published 3 interactive lessons based on SJK articles. This new format contains:
- figures to click, sliders for zoom, and crosswords to solve
- brief videos
- outlines with key points
- short checkpoint quizzes and a longer final assessment
- funny cartoons as rewards
Each is a self-paced, 30-min lesson that can be completed on any device. All the research is still there, just in a new format that’s even easier to digest. An ideal nugget of scientific knowledge for students in middle and high school and a great base for a follow-up discussion in class.
Reach
- Launched on 1 September 2025, SJK interactive has had 3,000 online users in its first quarter.
Try for yourself:
Videos
We created and published 60 new videos on our YouTube channel. They are organized in 3 playlists:
- SJK Academy: Scientific Research Recap – blackboard video summaries of our articles in a format inspired by Khan Academy.
- Lesson Ideas and Teaching Tutorials – additional video resources for teachers.
- SJK Audio Edition – audio versions of nearly 200 adapted articles.
Reach
- 69,000+ views on YouTube in 12 months.
- 2,500 hours watched.
Watch for yourself:
Podcasts
We maintain 3 shows, available on all podcasting platforms:
- Ask-a-Scientist – fun interviews with researchers whose papers we’ve adapted.
- Lesson Ideas – additional teaching tips and resources for middle school teachers.
- SJK Audio Edition – podcast version of our SJK Audio Edition playlist on YouTube.
Reach
- 12,000+ downloads in 12 months across the three shows.
Listen for yourself:
Our Audience
Stats
At the end of 2025, we had:
- 3.6 million views on the map of research locations we covered in our articles.
- 23,000+ subscribers to our monthly newsletter.
- 1,700 subscribers on our YouTube channel.
- 7,500+ account followers on Instagram, Facebook, and our Facebook group SJK Official Community.
- 2,500+ account followers on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, BlueSky, and TikTok.
Who are our readers?
The majority are educators.
- Middle school (48%) or high school (50%) teachers.
- Subjects: general science, biology, chemistry, physics, English as a second language, general social science, psychology, and history.
- Each teacher who uses our resources shares them with an average of 45 students.
- 60% teach at economically disadvantaged areas (schools with Title 1 or Free and Reduced Meals Program).
- 80% of their classes include students with English as a second language.
- 75% of classes include special education and neurodiverse students.
Geographic distribution of readers:
- 64% of our readers are in the USA.
- 18% are in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
- 18% are from 150+ other countries around the world.
Feedback from Educators
Thank you so much for the incredible work you do at Science Journal for Kids. Your articles have been an invaluable resource in my classroom, helping my students build essential research skills in a way that is both accessible and engaging. I’m truly grateful for your commitment to making real science understandable for youth.
This lesson on eDNA is AMAZING! Your article and interactive lesson plan not only make this complex topic easier to comprehend, with the cutest little animals and brilliant scientists, but it makes the learning so enjoyable for any student. Are there plans to make more of this type of lesson?
Our Team
Science Journal for Kids is produced by a close-knit team of:
- 5 editors
- 4 writers
- 2 designers
- 4 outreach & marketing managers and volunteers
The current core team has been stable for over 4 years, which shows each team member’s motivation and dedication to the organization’s educational mission.
Our Partners
Collaborations
We develop partnerships with organizations that share our mission:
- Harvard University’s LabXchange – a free online science teaching platform that has republished 370+ pieces of content from SJK.
- Skype-a-Scientist – a grassroots science communication platform that connects researchers with classrooms. We adapted this article prior to the scientist’s session, who shared it directly with the 84 classrooms joining the call.
See for yourself:
Supporters
In 2025, Science Journal for Kids received financial support from:
- Goggio Family Foundation
- GM Foundation
- Moderna Foundation
- Change Happens Foundation
- 34 individual donors
Thanks to these generous supporters, all of SJK‘s science teaching content is available for free. On behalf of all our readers, thank you for your trust!
Financials
2025 Revenue: $117,000 in total
- Grants from foundations: $88,000
- Program services (publication fees): $22,000
- Donations: $7,000
2025 Expenses: $100,000 in total
- Program services: content creation: $89,000
- Management and operations: $6,500
- Fundraising: $4,500
