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SPOONER, WI

POP. 2,482 | EST. 1909

Overview

Pictured above are some of the people I tended to run into most often: Ruthe and Diane. They are talented and hilarious local musicians who are deeply invested in the community! Photo Credit: Nicki Harris.

Welcome to the Spooner Community Powered Project! Spooner is a town of about 2500 people in northwestern Wisconsin. Despite its small size, it has a lot of heart. From my years growing up here as a child and living here as an adult, seeing familiar faces everywhere I went brought me joy, deepened my connections with others, and cultivated a sense of community.

Throughout the past year, Angie (Spooner Memorial Library Director) and I have focused our Community Powered project on building intergenerational connections so that people engage more in our community. Through community events that provided opportunities for folks to connect across generations, we provided and are still providing spaces for the community to come together and learn more about the people, places, and things around them.

We conducted four different projects to achieve these goals. Our first project was a Veteran Oral History Project called “Stories from Those Who Served” in partnership with UW-Extension. We recorded the stories of six veterans from Spooner and collaborated with the Wisconsin Veteran’s Museum to add these local histories to their extensive collection. Our second project was a series of history harvests that invited the Spooner community to bring in meaningful objects and tell stories about them. We documented these stories and have a digital exhibit of them available on the Library’s website.

Through community events that provided opportunities for folks to connect across generations, we provided spaces for the community to come together and learn more about the people, places, and things around them.

Our third project aimed to bring youth together to talk about their community. Partnered with the Spooner Memorial Library, we hosted a Teen Powered Lock-In to provide teens with the opportunity to share their perspectives on the needs and resources in their community, design their own community service projects to meet those needs, and build connections with other teens and community leaders. After the event, we started meeting with some of the teens weekly to continue to develop their projects, and to put their plans into action! One group has developed an environmental youth program that will meet monthly to assist with community gardens, go on a nature hike, and remove Buckthorn from City Park. The other group planned and led a city trash cleanup event to help build community and help protect our environment.

Finally, we also captured railroad history in our Railroad Park Heritage Days scavenger hunt–a fun, family-friendly way to take a trip through history while walking around the park, using only your cell phone.

Here in Spooner, our goal is to build community by sharing our stories so that we can envision our shared future.

The veterans whose stories Emily captured for her veteran’s history project.
Emily photographs an object during a History Harvest.
Many teens enjoyed singing karaoke at midnight during the Teen Powered Lock-In!
Emily hosted a booth at the 2023 Railroad Heritage Day celebration at the Railroad Memories Museum and nearby Spooner Railroad Park.

Stories

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Announcing Wisconsin Humanities’ Community Powered Initiative

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Welcome to the new Community Powered Project Coordinators!

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Community Powered Team Trains in Milwaukee

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Getting to Know the Community

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Recognizing Community Assets

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Walking & Talking

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History Harvests

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Engaging Youth

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Documenting Where We Live

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Activating the Community

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Community Powered Pilot Year Completes

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Building on Strong Foundations

Special thanks to our local partners

Angie Bodzislaw SPOONER PUBLIC LIBRARY

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