Ahoy, Mateys! Make a Splash with Glen Echo Park Aquarium!

Glen Echo Park Aquarium (GEPA) is a Chesapeake Bay Discovery Center, which opened on September 17, 2015 with a mission to promote awareness of the Chesapeake Bay watershed through education. At GEPA, we teach interactively about the animals we exhibit and their habitats, encouraging stewardship and conservation.

Since opening, we have transformed our little brick building into a vibrant exhibit hall that illustrates how water journeys from rain here in the park through the Potomac River and into the Chesapeake Bay.

We are a small, privately owned organization growing toward nonprofit status, but we are quickly outgrowing our funding. Simply providing the three tons of salt we annually need to maintain our aquarium habitats is a daunting expense. Currently, we rely on our patrons, memberships, school field trips, birthday parties, and summer camps for our support. For many local elementary schools, the outreach programs offered by our partner organization Under the Sea are vital to enhancing their curriculum.

We hope to add more staff and enhance our current facilities and exhibits, including improving lighting and replacing glass aquarium lids. Soon, we would like to add skates and jellyfish to our exhibits, both of which need specialized aquarium equipment like a chiller. Previous donations have helped us build our lighthouse and oyster education table. A very generous donation of a complete aquarium system from Custom Aquariums allowed us to create our oyster reef exhibit.

Your donation can support:

Aquarium Equipment (chillers and lids and lights! Oh my!)
Educational programming (here and there and everywhere)
Summer Camps (crafts and games and bandaids and such)
Feeding the Fishies (food and vitamins and medicine and bugs)
Overall Maintenance (cleaning and gardening and tools and supplies)
Most immediate needs (staffing and stuff)

With your help, we can achieve our goals together!

Note: Your donation will be received by Glen Echo Park Partnership for Arts and Culture, a 501c3 nonprofit organization, and transferred to Glen Echo Park Aquarium.

Ahoy, Mateys! Make a Splash with Glen Echo Park Aquarium!

We are setting our sights on exciting new things for our exhibits and programs. Help us grow, enhance our exhibits, and add new programs.

Team Members