Class of 2024 WH Fellows Projects
The 2024 Class of Wisconsin Humanities Fellows completed their training in December 2024 and are now working on enacting projects in their communities. Each project was devised by the Fellow with their community to meet unique community needs. Read on to see what they’re working on and check back for updates as their projects grow and develop!
Tess Komas | Ashalnd, WI
“The Main Street Story”
This project will feature local voices telling the rich history of downtown Ashland, WI and its century old brownstone buildings as seen from multiple perspectives. Stories will be collected and shared via short form interviews, written media or photographs. Partnering with the Chamber of Commerce and the Ashland Historical Society Museum, the project will start with baseline research, posters to display in businesses along Main Street and setting up a virtual space to exhibit collected experiences and demonstrate the value our downtown holds in the community.
Jim Olmsted | Gordon, WI
“The Gordon-Wascott Oral History Project”
Partnering with the Gordon-Wascott Historical Society, this project seeks to record the history of the original Gordon Township, including the communities of Gordon, Wascott, and Dairyland and the people who live there. Oral history interviews will be conducted with community members and made available on the Gordon-Wascott Historical Society website, highlighting how stories generate a greater understanding of the history of Gordon. The interviews will be transcribed in the Gordon-Wascott Historical Society archives, and interviewees will be provided with both a digital and transcribed copy of their interview.
JoAnn Jardine | Superior, WI
“Signs of History”
This project will gather 10-12 people to talk about the history of Superior with the intention of placing markers on historically significant places and buildings. The group hopes to include stories from the community as well as facts and history. They will work together to decide on the best method of sharing information with the public. The goal is to create a group that will carry the project to different parts of the city and expand awareness of the history and stories of Superior.
Phoebe Burchill | Ashalnd, WI
“The Stone Soup Community Cookbook Project”
This project will host a series of story circles over meals at Ashland’s Stone Soup Café, a pay-what-you-can restaurant. Building on Stone Soup’s unique place in the community, this project will invite participants to share a story about a meaningful dish or event involving food while they gather together and share a meal. After the meal, participants will be invited to submit that story and recipe to the Stone Soup Community Cookbook. At each gathering, popular Stone Soup recipes will be distributed so participants can take home a bit of Stone Soup’s story and culinary repertoire, and be inspired to submit their own food stories and recipes. Through these story circles, the community will work together to build a Community Cookbook, telling their family stories and bringing the community closer together.
Tammu Schutz | Chetek, WI
“Tuesdays in the Village”
The Pioneer Village Museum is excited to announce its new Folk School, Tuesdays in the Village. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month, there will be traditional skills classes, projects, group activities, and a communal meal, followed by an enrichment activity. Enrichment activities will be anything from speakers to music and dancing. Learning traditional skills and activities, like canning or weaving, will help the Pioneer Village Museum fulfill its mission of preserving history and passing it on to the next generations.
Alison Moffat | Superior, WI
“Sounds of Superior”
In collaboration with the Douglas County Historical Society, the Sounds of Superior project will invite the broader community to share their stories of creating and appreciating music in Superior, Wisconsin. Community members will be invited to a history harvest at DCHS to share their musical memories with items and/or oral histories. These stories and artifacts will be shared as part of a DCHS exhibit showcasing Superior’s musical histories. Future goals include developing an interactive digital exhibit on music in Superior that ties the experience of making and experiencing music to notable local spaces.
Nick Eliot | Ashland, WI
“In the Divide”
Through storytelling and guided community conversations, In the Divide hopes to bring together a polarized rural Northwestern Wisconsin community. Focusing on a different topic each session, this series brings in speakers who have lived in the Chequamegon Bay region to tell personal stories that highlight different experreinces and challenges faced by the community over the past several decades. Attendees will be encouraged afterward to share their own experiences and start discussions on how a better understanding of this history allows the community to begin healing its divide.
Community Powered Pilot Program Projects
From June 2022-May 2023, Community Powered ran a pilot program in four communities around Wisconsin: Appleton, Forest County Potawatomi, Racine, and Spooner. Our model during the pilot program looked a little different from how the program looks now. In each of these four communities, we hired a full-time project coordinator and paired them with a local mentor at a library or cultural institution. In June 2022, we hosted a training for the four Community Powered Project Coordinators (or CPPCs) and their local mentors in Milwaukee, where we offered a series of workshops that built the foundation for our current training program. We then took the team to Merrill, Wisconsin for a weekend to try their newly learned skills on the ground.
After the training, we sent the CPPCs back to their communities where they spent six months getting to know the community, collecting and listening to stories, doing asset mapping activities to learn about local strengths and challenges, and spending time brainstorming with community members about what type of project they could conduct together. At the end of the first six months of the pilot year, the CPPCs and their partners proposed a project that they spent the last six months of the pilot completing those projects and passing them off so they would be entirely under community control.
Our pilot projects were successful in kickstarting exciting new programs around the state and allowed Community Powered to hone its training workshops and test out its process. Our ongoing training program was built from the success of our original teams of project coordinators and local mentors. To read more about their projects and successes, check out their stories below!
