We are excited to announce Major Grant Awards for six outstanding public humanities projects in Columbia, Door, La Crosse, and Milwaukee counties!
NOTE: The next Major Grant deadline is December 15th. We are making some changes to our Mini Grant program. To prepare for the new pilot program, we are currently offering only our Major Grants. We anticipate launching the new pilot grant program in the summer of 2024. Be sure to sign up for our e-newsletter to be notified about all WH news!
Check out our Grant Program to learn more about what we fund!
Door County Reads (DCR) has been Door County’s annual community read for the past 16 years, bringing multifaceted learning and literacy experiences to Door County. The DCR Committee was awarded $10,000 in support of the 2024 program for young adults. “Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith, and illustrated by Nicole Neidhardt, focuses on the intersection of the natural environment and indigenous culture. The program will incorporate Indigenous voices and connect the themes in the book with the pre-contact history of Door County. Through this programming, the DCR Committee hopes to build relationships and foster listening, learning, and intergenerational and intercultural understanding in the community.
The Historic Indian Agency House was awarded $5,251 in support of a collaboration with the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum and Cultural Center. The “Walking Wawa’ąįja” project includes the development of an outdoor exhibit and a community walk that traces the route of what was, for well over 1,000 Ho-Chunks, the beginning of a decades-long struggle. The Historic Indian Agency House was built in 1832 at the ancient portaging trail between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers. During the 1830s, this site functioned as an Indian Agency—or embassy—between the Ho-Chunk Nation and the U.S. government. Today they work to foster a multi-dimensional understanding of the period that inspires and shapes the quality of civic responsibility among those who contemplate the lessons of history. The exhibit and program will segue into a vibrant Ho-Chunk cultural arts event, underscoring the key reflection that Ho-Chunks endure as a people today.
Marquette University was awarded $10,000 in support of a collaborative project between the Center for Urban Research, Teaching and Outreach (CURTO) and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Living for the City: Stories from Black Milwaukee” is an integrated oral history project that includes a traveling exhibit linked to a digital archive of interviews of middle-class and affluent African-American residents of metropolitan Milwaukee representing the fields of academia, business, entrepreneurship, law, and other professional careers. The exhibition will travel to four Milwaukee public libraries and America's Black Holocaust Museum with an in-person community forum at each site. The project will broaden the narrative of Black Milwaukee by highlighting the lived experiences of Milwaukee’s Black middle class while also complicating existing narratives about Black Milwaukee that are focused primarily on poverty, residential segregation, criminalization rates, and educational achievement gaps.
The La Crosse Public Library was awarded $10,000 in support of an interactive online exhibit to preserve cultural and historical artifacts surrounding the history of the 1980 Cuban migration crisis known as the Mariel Boatlift. The project will offer an educational exploration of this paramount moment of the Cold War when 125,000 Cubans fled to the US and nearly 15,000 Cuban refugees were brought to Fort McCoy near La Crosse, Wisconsin. The digital exhibit will be hosted by LPL Archives and created by a team of humanities experts alongside some of the protagonists of the Mariel exodus. It will be used as part of a larger conversation about the ways in which different generations of racially diverse migrants in Wisconsin have forged a collective identity of cultural exile under the shared experiences of detention and racial discrimination.
HELP, Door County's only domestic violence agency, was awarded $10,000 for FYRED Up!, a youth-inspired showcase about healthy relationships that includes poetry, stories, music and dance. Partnering with playwright and performer Lachrisa Grandberry, Northern Sky Theatre, and Crossroads at Big Creek, this play empowers youth domestic violence educators to address an often-hidden community problem and to be active educators to their fellow neighbors. Students from the University of Green Bay’s school of Social Work will organize talkbacks after each free performance.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was awarded $9,986 in support of programs designed to accompany an exhibit called "Growing Resistance." The project highlights extraordinary accounts of ordinary people fighting systemic apathy and racism in connection to food, housing and land in four neighborhoods of Milwaukee. The exhibit is built around stories taken from research conducted over the past decade by professors, students, and community partners. A series of public programs will bring together neighborhood residents at pop-up events, community walks, story circles, repasts, and discussions.
