What is Community Powered?
Community Powered is an initiative that builds resilience among Wisconsin communities by helping them recognize, communicate, and act upon their strengths, their challenges, and their histories to envision a vibrant future. Residents of participating Wisconsin communities will experience new ways to unearth and tell stories of their communities and will take concrete steps toward making their hometowns even better places to live.
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How will Community Powered work?
For the 2022-23 pilot, CP will work with four communities from different regions of the state: Appleton, Racine, Spooner, and the Forest County Potawatomi nation. CP has partnered with a library or cultural organization to serve as the home base for Community Powered in each of these communities:
- Appleton Public Library
- Racine Public Library
- Spooner Memorial Library,
- Forest County Potawatomi Cultural Center, Library, and Museum
Alongside a selected local mentor from these organizations, CP has hired four young humanities professionals from each of these communities. CP trained these young people and their local mentors in humanities and digital media skills, and is supporting them as they collaborate with local nonprofit organizations, businesses, and citizens to create a locally meaningful project.
Building on the work of the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school in Milwaukee, CP has trained these young professionals and their local mentors humanities-based, community-engaged methods that prepare them to capture and share community experiences, values, and stories of the places they live and the people who live there. Through the process, community members will tackle a challenge identified by the community and will address it with a locally designed project. In the past, these methods have produced community gardens in vacant lots, or a pocket park and updated River Walk signs. These are just a few examples of projects that utilize community vision and local spaces to meet that community’s needs.
(Want to hear more? Check out Wisconsin Humanities’ Human Powered podcast!)
Building on the work of the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school in Milwaukee, CP has trained these young professionals and their local mentors humanities-based, community-engaged methods that prepare them to share and capture community experiences, values, and stories of the places they live and the people who live there. Through the process, community members will tackle a challenge identified by the community and will address it with a locally designed project. In the past, these methods have produced community gardens in vacant lots, or a pocket park and updated River Walk signs. These are just a few examples of projects that utilize community vision and local spaces to meet that community’s needs.
(Want to hear more? Check out Wisconsin Humanities’ Human Powered podcast!)
Why "Community Powered"?
This work is “community powered” because it harnesses the energy, inspiration, and experiences of each participating community to generate projects that matter to them. Through truly collaborative projects, everyone is invited to engage equally, and everyone is given a voice. Our CP project coordinators and their local mentors participate in deep listening within their community to help the community identify and execute a project that fits their needs and vision for the future. They also train community members to execute that vision, giving the power over project development and execution to the community itself. By being community powered, these projects tell the community’s stories the way the community wants to tell them, meeting the community’s goals even as the community members build connections to one another and inspire hometown pride.
Made Possible by
Community Powered is possible thanks to the financial support of Wisconsin Humanities, a $150,000 Capacity Building Grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) Act, and a generous private donor. Additional support for building capacity in CP’s library partners was provided by a Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction ARPA Grant.
For more information, contact the Community Powered Co-Directors, Chrissy Widmayer or Arijit Sen.
Special thanks to our advisors
Anne Basting
UW-Milwaukee
Shawn Brommer
South Central Library System
Russ Castronovo
UW-Madison Center for the Humanities
Karen Goeschko
Wisconsin Arts Board
J.P. Leary
UW-Green Bay
Chad Moffet
Mead & Hunt
Ruth Olson
Center for the Study of Upper
Midwestern Cultures (UW-Madison)
Melinda Osterberg
Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
Tammy Rivera
Southside Organizing Center
Robert S. Smith
Marquette University
Chia Vang
UW-Milwaukee
