Community Powered will partner with Appleton Public Library, Racine Public Library, Spooner Memorial Library, and Forest County Potawatomi Cultural Center, Library, and Museum.
In each of our four pilot communities, the young coordinators will be paired with a mentor from our local partner organization. All of the local coordinators and mentors will come together this summer to start their training in humanities and digital media skills. Throughout the project year, WH’s Community Powered staff will support the local teams as they collaborate with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and citizens in their communities to create a meaningful project. But it all begins with listening to the stories that communities want to tell.
“We have called this program ‘Community Powered,’” says Chrissy Widmayer, WH’s co-director of the initiative, “because the young project coordinator and their mentor will engage in deep listening within their community to help the community identify a project that fits their needs. Using the humanities toolkit Community Powered will provide, they will also train community members to execute that vision, giving the power over project development and execution to the community itself.”
Powering Into the Future
Building connections between neighbors is exactly what Community Powered hopes to accomplish. Our partners in each of our communities are already thinking about how Community Powered will help them do just that.
Yee L. Vue of the Appleton Public Library said Community Powered’s emphasis on building community was what immediately made her want to participate. Yee will serve as the local mentor on our Appleton Community Powered team.
“Community Powered will be a powerful building tool to give us the opportunities to connect with people, to reach for our goals, and to create a community that gives us a sense of belonging,” Yee says.
Through our support of these communities and the work of all those involved, we’re excited to unearth diverse histories and strengthen the humanities throughout Wisconsin. Carrie Richmond, a Teen Librarian in Racine who will join Community Powered as a local mentor, stresses this sense that Community Powered can highlight the best of each community to inspire hometown pride.
“Racine is full of wonderful resources,” Carrie says. “What it really needs now is something to shine the light on them, and then to help energize and sustain that focus. Community Powered offers the chance for Racine to experience and benefit from just that.”
Like the Wisconsin communities it serves, Community Powered has endless potential. We are excited to see where it takes us, and to report back in the coming year as the work that begins this summer begins to bear fruit. Meanwhile, we’re already dreaming of a future when Community Powered grows to touch people in all corners of the state, exemplifying the best in grassroots humanities work for the next 50 years.
A local resident from the Center Peace blocks in Sherman Park uses an architectural game-kit to explore ways to change and rehabilitate the interiors of old duplex buildings to address current lifestyles and aspirations of community members.
Photos courtesy of Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field
Residents in Merrill, WI participated in a community workshop led by Prof. Arijit Sen in February 2019. Our four Community Powered Project Coordinators and their mentors will visit Merrill this June during their training where they will see a community-powered project in action and learn from Merrill’s Aware and Active Citizens Group about how they are collecting and sharing local history through interpretive signs, websites, school curricula, and more.
