– Gavin Luter: Hi, everybody.
My name is Gavin Luter.
I’m managing director of the UniverCity Alliance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We’re here today to tell you a little bit about something that’s really cool that’s going on at the university.
In the theme of University Place, we wanna let you know about cool things happening at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in particular, how the University of Wisconsin-Madison is helping impact the state and help us realize our state motto, which is “Forward.”
How do we help move the state forward?
There’s a lot of talk about the Wisconsin Idea.
I think everybody probably watching this program knows about the Wisconsin Idea.
But for those of you in the audience who don’t know about the Wisconsin Idea, it’s basically kind of a guiding light that we have at UW-Madison that says that UW-Madison should be trying to benefit the entire state.
And we’re gonna tell you about some work that’s going on at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that is actually helping realize that vision.
And it’s called the UniverCity Alliance.
So first of all, I wanted to start by saying that I think it’s no secret that universities are not always accessible.
I have a couple of pictures up here of, you know, Bascom Hall looking very far away.
It’s on top of that big hill.
It’s one of the only hills on the Isthmus.
And then, you know, this is a picture of a gated campus.
This is the University of South Florida, it just so happens, but a lot of campuses have gates around them.
And actually, universities intentionally were kind of sequestered from the rest of society.
I don’t know if you all have heard about Oxford University.
Kind of one of the most prominent, one of the first universities that was really kind of the modern Western university, is the model that we’re using now.
It was intentionally not placed in London because they wanted to be separate and apart from society.
They thought if you were engaging with society, that that actually made you more biased, you know, less able to actually see society from afar and to study it.
So this is the tradition that higher education is kind of couched in in kind of the modern era, campuses which are separate and apart.
And, in fact, I don’t know, even my own family, when they visit a campus and they go to an urban campus, they’re like, “Oh, “you can’t tell one campus building from the rest “of the city, and we don’t like going to that kind of campus.
“It’s prettier to go on, like, a campus that’s really sequestered from the rest of society.”
So there is this kind of ivory tower, so to speak, image that universities really have, that they are inaccessible.
We’re not really sure how to get into them.
So, okay, that said, we noticed an opportunity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Local governments in particular was an area that– or kind of a separate group of community partners that were really underserved by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the sense that there aren’t a lot of partnerships that we have between units of local government, cities, counties, towns, villages, even school districts, sewerage districts, as well as special purpose districts, like lake districts.
Yes, of course we have Extension, and we can certainly talk about Extension in a minute.
And they serve county government, but they are not really serving all of these local governments.
So what we noticed about the local government sector is that they have a huge scope of challenges.
Virtually everything that people do every day somehow touch local government, whether it’s sending your kids to school, going on a walk, a bike ride, flushing your toilet, basically putting out your garbage.
These are things that local governments do.
And as more people tend to move to these areas of kind of concentrated population, the scope of the challenges that they face are massive.
Even, to a certain extent, finding employment opportunities is now really falling on local government.
How do you make your community attractive enough for employers to come in?
And so, the scope of it, I mean, everything that we rely on in everyday life, local government is kind of expected to deal with it.
And not to mention, I don’t wanna get, you know, I don’t wanna say anything too controversial, but we know that, you know, sometimes the federal government and the state government aren’t always able to work things out.
And so the onus, then, and the burden kind of falls on local government to get things done at the end of the day.
They’re the people who have to help keep the lights on, so to speak.
And local government is also our smallest and leanest form of government itself.
The federal government and state government have a lot more capacity.
They have a lot more staff to deal with things.
But at the local government level, we’ve dealt with local governments who don’t even have paid staff.
Some of them do have paid staff, but very, very limited.
Some of them wear hats like, “Oh, I’m the emergency manager “and the economic development director, and I also manage elections.”
So sometimes, these smaller local governments have limited capacity.
And oftentimes, local governments lean to looking toward thought partners.
And when I say thought partners, people who are willing to work with them to think through issues and challenges.
In, I would say, the most formal sense, local governments actually hire a lot of consultants.
They go out to bid on a lot of things, for RFPs, to do studies and things like that.
So, oftentimes, this is a clear message to us that local governments are desiring thought partners that they wanna be intentional.
They wanna do the best they can to serve the public.
And so they want people to help think through that with them.
Now, in higher education, on the other hand, we have a lot of experts, but they’re incredibly siloed.
There’s a ton of research in the university arena saying how kind of decentralized and how siloed universities are.
I mean, if anybody has ever been to a university, you know you exist in your department.
You get a degree from this particular department.
It’s hard to make interdisciplinary degrees work.
Also, a thing that we do is we train the future generation of workforce.
Virtually everyone who is in the workforce who has a professional position today is required to have some sort of post-secondary education degree, whether that’s a two-year technical college degree or if it’s a four-year.
In some cases, master’s and PhDs are required for courses.
So we are training the future generation of workforce.
Also, a lot of people tend to go into work at a university, especially researchers, because they want their research to have an impact.
Almost everybody who comes to work for a university wants to make sure that their work can actually influence the way that we’re thinking about things, and maybe even doing things at the operational level, whether it’s in industry, nonprofit, or the public sector.
So, we realize that, you know, there are kind of interesting, complex challenges and potentially even opportunities to bring higher education and local governments together.
So we thought, what about this really interesting question?
What if we could take existing things that we already do?
So let’s think about courses, existing courses and other structures that the university already does, to work with a single local government over an academic year, to work on the projects that are really challenging to them, and do so at a scale that magnifies value for all.
That was kind of the guiding question of, or kind of behind the UniverCity Alliance.
In a sense, there’s a lot of stuff that we already do, and how can we bring our community partners and local governments together with those things that we already do?
So I wanted to offer a very brief timeline of what, how the UniverCity Alliance got started.
I’m gonna talk a little bit more about what it is.
But in 2015, we had a meeting on campus and said, “Hey, who’s interested in connecting universities with cities?”
250 people showed up to that conference.
We invited some outside speakers and that kind of stuff, and we were really blown away at what we found was a really big interest on campus.
And these are not just people who are interested in working with cities in and around Madison or Wisconsin.
These are people who are working on projects in Cairo, Sydney, Shanghai.
A lot of people are working on, and we have somebody on our advisory board who does biking and walking infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.
I mean, you never really know where people are interested in working in.
And we essentially, after that meeting, said, “Who’s interested in keeping the conversation going?
“We don’t know what that looks like, but who wants to keep the conversation going?”
So we established an advisory board in 2015, and then in 2016, we hired a postdoctoral student.
That’s actually a misnomer.
We had a postdoctoral student who was on campus who was already hired, and his boss said, “Hey, could you take on this additional responsibility?”
So we didn’t hire anybody new at that point.
And then this postdoctoral student kind of went out to see what’s possible.
And then we found a thing called the EPIC model.
Now, when you say “Epic” in the state of Wisconsin, especially in Dane County, you immediately think of the software company.
That is not what we’re talking about.
We are talking about the Educational Partnerships for Innovations in Communities Network, so that we call that the EPIC Network.
And it’s a group of universities who are trying to make universities more connected with cities.
So, we found the EPIC model.
It was actually based at the University of Oregon.
They started a thing called the Sustainable City Year Program that brought local governments together with cities, and they were using existing courses, and we thought, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.”
So, in 2017, we created our own version of the EPIC model, called UniverCity Alliance.
And are there any Rotarians in the audience?
I don’t know if there are any Rotarians.
I’m a Rotarian.
Anybody out there watching, if you’re a Rotarian, you should be proud at this next moment.
We did a talk at the Downtown Madison Rotary Club and said, “Hey, we found this cool model.
“We wanna bring together cities and universities, “but we need a pilot.
“We need somebody who’s willing to say, ‘We’ll go through this with you.'”
And it just so happened that, I believe his name is Bob Miller.
He was the mayor of Monona at the time.
And he said, “Hey, we need help.
“We love UW-Madison, but we’re just far away from UW-Madison “where we don’t always enter the picture enough “at UW-Madison.
“We’re not huge, we’re not the city of Madison.
But we think there’s an opportunity to innovate.”
And so, the mayor at the time said, “Hey, use us as a guinea pig,” which is interesting because we try to pride ourselves on not using cities as guinea pigs.
But he was willing to go through this as a pilot for the city to say, “Could this work to address our challenges?”
And then in 2018, that really took off, and we started to work with Dane County as our next partner, and then they hired me.
I’m the full-time managing director.
I’m the first full-time managing director that was hired to advance UniverCity Alliance.
But at the end of the day, what is UniverCity Alliance?
That’s what you all are probably thinking.
“Okay, yeah, Gavin, this is all great, but what are you talking about?”
It’s essentially an advisory board of interdisciplinary groups of people on campus trying to develop relationships with each other to develop interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems based in local governments.
In the university, as I mentioned, we struggle with the issue of silos.
I mean, I’m sure even in the village of Waunakee, you have your own departmental silos.
So sometimes it’s difficult to get people to work across departments.
We at the university don’t have a lot of structures that support us doing the work interdisciplinarity.
So we got all these people and said, “Hey, would you like to do work across your own departments and silos?”
And they said yes.
I would challenge anybody watching this or, you know, in the audience when we get to Q&A, tell me another structure where the Division of Extension sits next to the Global Health Institute, sits next to the School of College of Law, sits next to the business school, sits next to the Data Science Institute.
You get the picture.
There aren’t a lot of tables that are set around the university that get people talking across departments, and let alone getting projects off the ground, you know, together.
So that’s essentially what we are as an advisory board.
And we manage…
I would say the main thing that we manage is the UniverCity Year program.
So, the UniverCity Year program, this is what I wanted to, you know, educate you all about.
We’re gonna have a great example in Waunakee in a second.
But UniverCity Year is essentially a four-step process that happens over three years.
We put out a request for partnerships all across the state to any local government who’s interested in working with us.
You don’t have to have an existing connection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I know sometimes that can be frustrating to, you know, “Hey, we wanna work with UW-Madison, but we don’t know how.”
How do you actually tap into it?
So what we found, based on our practical experience and also based on other research, is that if you have an open-door, clear application process, then people that you don’t even know about could find it, fill it out, and get in the door.
We don’t wanna just rely on, “Oh, I know this person and I know that person.”
And, you know, then you get kind of the good old boys network.
Instead, what we wanted to do was throw it wide open, put ourselves in the middle of local government conversations to say, “How can we help?”
So the four-step process is that a community identifies issues and challenges that they want help with.
These do not have to be any– There are no limits on the kinds of projects that communities can pitch to us.
And you will see in a second, we’ve had many different kinds of projects.
Then we serve as internal matchmakers for these projects to existing courses.
So what we’ve done, with my great colleague Abby Becker and my great colleague Shelly Strom, we’ve kind of mapped the university to find all these different courses on campus who are willing to teach using a community-based learning or kind of real world solutions-focused or problem-based learning approach.
And we also have great colleagues at the Morgridge Center for Public Service who are also doing this work to try to find people on campus who are willing to do these projects.
So instead of, I mean, I don’t wanna say the “real” innovation, but kind of the innovation that we came up with is instead of the local government having to find those people on our campus and knock on every single door of somebody that they think should be interested in working with them, we take on that burden for them, make the matches, and try to understand what that faculty or what that group of students can do or can’t do.
And then we connect, make that connection.
And then the students, while they’re working on, you know, their classes, they are producing some sort of issue, you know, deliverables on these issues.
And then the local governments, at the end of the time, receive deliverables that help them advance their goals.
I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second.
We’ve been around since 2018.
I told you 2017, 2018.
And we’ve had some time to get outside of Madison.
We used to think, “Gosh, we can’t do this except in driving distance to Madison.”
And then the pandemic happened, and I think we all realized that we can do things, a lot of things virtually.
So we’ve actually worked in 35 communities across the state of Wisconsin, as far away as Polk County, as close as Monona in Dane County, and also as far away as Egg Harbor and Marinette.
We have worked with cities, counties, towns, and villages, and actually a couple of school districts as well.
I have all these listed on here.
I’m not gonna belabor the point here, but we’ve worked with a wide variety of very populated and very not populated places, places in the state that are underserved, places in the state that are probably served well enough.
It really doesn’t matter.
We’re not– we’re kind of agnostic, so to speak, for the other… for anywhere that we work.
We’ve engaged about 2,500 students in 325 projects over the last 8 or 9 years, and we’ve actually worked with nine partner institutions.
What does that mean?
It means that we’ve done projects alongside UW-Milwaukee.
We’ve worked along Ripon College for a project.
We’ve worked with UW-River Falls.
We have worked with UW-Parkside.
We have worked with Marquette University.
So there are other universities and colleges that we’ve engaged in our projects.
Why?
Because we think that higher education should show up and be useful for communities.
And we wanna pull more people along in that journey with us, regardless of whether they’re with UW-Madison or not.
I just wanted to highlight that we are offering real-world experiences to our students.
Hypothetically, in your mind, raise your hand if you think– You don’t have to raise your hand necessarily, ’cause it might mess up everything, but…
But hypothetically, raise your hand if you actually learned everything that you needed in the real world from your time in a university or college.
Like, hardly anyone ever raises their hand.
See, that’s why I knew it wasn’t gonna mess up the shot.
Because we know that universities sometimes are not always great, in general, of providing the real-world experiences that students need.
They’re getting a lot better, there’s a lot more emphasis on it, and there’s a lot more discussion about it.
But we think we are part of this growing chorus of people on campus that are saying, “We’re gonna help provide those real-world experiences.”
So these are actually pictures of our students with community partners across the state.
Madison, people in, you know, the city of… Well, this is actually the village of Cottage Grove.
And then we actually had, you know, kind of community partners come in and actually lecture to our students.
Why?
Because we think that practitioners who are out there, especially in the world of local government, have a lot to offer our students about how the world actually works, how the world actually operates.
And we think that it is not okay to not offer that as part of the learning experiences for students.
We know that faculty don’t know everything out there, and they know.
Like, we also need people from the world of work to come in, the professional world, to come in and talk to our students.
So I think that’s one thing that I really also wanted to highlight.
I told you that I’d give you examples of many different projects that have been done, so that you can see there’s literally no boundary to the type of projects that we have worked on.
So we’ve worked on affordable housing, for instance.
People come to us and they say, “If we want to build affordable housing, “where should we build it?
“How would the financing work?
“What would the design need to be?
What partners would we need to work with?”
So we have worked with Urban Economics and Real Estate, which is a department on campus, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Planning and Landscape Architecture, to do those kind of, I mean, in the professional world, they call it a pro forma, but kind of a back of the napkin calculation of what would it take to make affordable housing operate and exist?
In this case, this is a picture of a pocket neighborhood that one of our faculty on campus is really, you know, big on how do you create affordable housing, and you can use pocket neighborhoods as one approach.
So, just an opportunity to get real-world, you know, examples of what other communities have done and showing communities what’s possible.
So we’ve done projects in housing.
We’ve also done projects on health, well-being, and equity, working with Public Health, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Industrial Systems Engineering, and Journalism and Communications, among many others.
But sometimes, people come to us with public health challenges.
You know, we’re struggling with alcohol and drug addiction among our youth population.
How do we address that?
So we go out, we help them find best practice reports.
And in some cases, these communities wanna write grants to support things that aren’t already happening.
So our students can actually get them started and actually write a grant for these communities that need that assistance.
I put the great seal of the Ho-Chunk Nation up there because one of our great projects around diversity, equity, and inclusion is actually gonna be captured in the story that Waunakee is gonna be talking about.
But we’ve actually had several projects recently that have said, “How can we make our community more welcoming for people who are not originally from this country?”
I don’t know if you all realize this, but there is a workforce shortage in the state of Wisconsin.
People are not, you know… We don’t have enough people to always fill our jobs.
So more often, these cities are looking toward countries outside of the United States to find people to come up and take these jobs and house them.
How do they do that in a way that makes these people feel comfortable and welcome in their community?
I’m talking everywhere from Rice Lake to Wausau to Waupaca.
We’re not just talking about Madison and Milwaukee here.
And so, when these people come and they’re taking– they’re like, helping us fill workforce shortage jobs, we don’t want them to feel like they’re a sore thumb sticking out.
We wanna have parks and recreation opportunities for them.
We want them to feel like their workplace accepts them.
So how do they do that?
We’ve had a lot of communities ask for help around that ’cause that’s a real head-scratcher.
I think a lot of people are just struggling with that issue.
We’ve also worked on a lot of economic development projects.
What you see here is actually an example of something that we did in Pepin County.
We’ve had many people come and ask us for economic development and tourism marketing in particular.
And so this is, you’ll see, kind of a mock-up of a little themed, destination-themed vacation that people could do, like get married in Pepin County, and what are all the cool places to get married?
At one time, we actually worked with Adams County and Juneau County and Wisconsin Rapids, and our students separately worked with those places.
But they were like, “What if you all actually did promotion of tourism across county lines?”
And they’re like, “Well, that’s not really how we’re set up to work, but I guess we could.”
And our students came up with an idea of “Wiscursions,” themed vacations for people to do, that maybe if you just go to Adams County, you can’t get everything, but if you go to Juneau and then you go to Wood County, you can really make a whole vacation out of golfing or out of, like, outdoor exploration or Wisconsin history.
So those are just examples.
We’ve also had people ask us for help with, “We want… “We’ve just built a business park.
“How do we attract the businesses there?
“What is a trade market analysis saying that the demand for the businesses are?”
And then we can go out and recruit.
We just worked on something like that in Columbia County, specifically in the city of Portage.
And they are building a new place, and they wanted to have an anchor tenant.
And they said, “You know, it looks like, from your analysis, “like a good national coffee chain would be good to start to attract people here.”
I know that might sound small, but like, when you’re trying to get a business park off the ground, you just need one or two tenants to start getting traction there.
And so they found this national coffee chain based on our research, and now they’ve– they’re open and operating in Portage.
So I think those kinds of things are cool.
And in particular, I wanted to just highlight Journalism and Communication, Extension, Ag and Applied Economics, Master’s of Business Administration in Arts Administration.
We do have an Arts Administration MBA that you can get on our campus.
These might not be the usual suspects that you would think to ask about economic development, but we know who these people are and we know that they want to help.
But that’s because we’ve done the work to build those relationships on campus.
And that’s, like I said, one thing I think is really the secret sauce of our program.
We’ve also worked on public safety kinds of issues, police, fire, EMS kinds of projects.
You know, people have very…
Some people have very, very practical questions.
Like, the Wausau Police Department said, “We know that we need to keep the public safe at our public events.”
I mean, everything from, you know, their outdoor arts festivals to, you know, the Hmong Heritage Festival, to major festivals that are bringing in 10,000-plus people.
“But we wanna make sure “that we’re staffing these at the appropriate level.
What is the appropriate level?”
And they just don’t have the time to kind of do the research to figure that out.
So our students in engineering actually put together an optimization spreadsheet to understand all the different factors that you need to keep in mind when you’re staffing an– or, sorry, an actual event in the community.
So our students have worked on that.
Also, emergency preparation.
EMS is struggling in Wausau, as well, and Marathon County in particular, to find people.
So they were looking for ideas for innovative ways to attract young people into the EMS profession.
So our students found kind of a framework for a partnership with local school systems that are operating in other parts of the state.
And they said, “Wow, how come… We should be doing that!”
They just, you know, think of this as a short-term research think tank available for local governments at the drop of a hat.
Instead of them having to go out and find consultants just for one project, we can kind of blitz and do a bunch of projects at the same time.
And again, when you look here, Public Health, Law, Psychology, Human and Family Studies, Public Affairs, and, you know, would you guess it, Civil and Environmental Engineering, helping with public safety kinds of questions.
This also might be, “We wanna build a new public safety building “and we’re not sure how much it’ll cost and is it worth the cost.”
Those are things that civil and environmental engineering has also helped with.
Again, I mean, come on, who hasn’t seen the show Parks and Rec?
We know that parks and recreation is a big part of what local governments do.
And it’s pretty fun work, but it takes a lot of planning to make sure that parks and recreation can be enjoyed by all.
So people have questions from, what kinds of seeds should we use for this baseball diamond?
How should we mow the yard in a way that’s economically efficient?
How do we connect trails that currently aren’t connected right now?
So, you know, Soil Sciences, Urban Planning, Landscape Architecture are really great in this arena.
We actually had a pretty cool project pop up in the newspaper recently about Cottage Grove, and our student produced a bark park for them, you know, this kind of new dog park that was part of a new development.
And it’s actually coming to realization.
It’s actually being built.
And I think it’s either opening or it has opened recently.
But yeah, I mean, people are looking for cool ideas for designs for that kind of stuff, and our students want to work on those projects as well.
Planning and placemaking.
This is kind of overall, how do we plan our community?
What direction do we want to go?
How do we make places downtown feel special?
We just worked in a project in Stoughton to look at their new innovation center in Stoughton.
So, they’re trying to build an innovation center, but they need to figure out exactly what that means.
They wanna make sure they’re not overlapping with other people and what they’re doing.
And there was an opportunity to kind of catalyze the redevelopment of their railyard area.
I don’t know if y’all been down to Stoughton, but they have a railyard district, and, you know, they were trying to figure out how do we make this a cool place instead of just, well, it’s around a bunch of train tracks.
How do we make that a special place?
And our students offered design recommendations.
And what I thought was cool about that project is it actually got the community to bring together three different groups that were not really talking to each other: the Innovation Center of Stoughton, the Redevelopment Authority, and the Sustainability Committee to think about how do we plan together as a community, in a way that we maybe haven’t done it.
And, you know, I mean, it’s kind of non-threatening when students show up and they’re like, “Hey, “I’m doing a class project, and I wanna make sure I don’t overlook anything.”
It’s not like the mayor coming and telling people you got to get together, or the village administrator.
It’s, we like to think that, and what we’ve found is that students can be kind of a non-threatening third party.
I did want to just be clear here about how do we get our money.
We charge communities fees.
We actually do charge communities fees.
We do not get any state money right now to operate this project.
In the future, that may change.
We don’t know.
I don’t wanna make any political statements.
Of course, the budgeting process is a very political process.
And so, we’ve made the governor’s budget twice, but we didn’t get through that.
So maybe that’ll change in the future.
We also have a lot of investors and alumni who care deeply about the Wisconsin Idea.
So American Family Insurance, Epic Systems, the Epic Systems, the actual technology company.
Alliant Energy Foundation have invested in us.
But then also we’ve had very, very generous alumni led by John Holton and Pat Thiele, who grew up in Wisconsin, and they’re worried about people moving away from Wisconsin, and they’re worried about the standing of UW-Madison decreasing in the state of Wisconsin.
I don’t know if you all have seen the recent research on the Pew Charitable Trusts, but confidence, public confidence in higher education is at an all-time low right now.
It’s about 22% of the population who have a favorable opinion of higher education.
That’s regardless of Republicans or Democrats.
It’s going down in all sectors of ideology.
We’ve also gotten some internal funding.
There’s an internal endowment called the Wisconsin Idea, Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment.
And we’ve gotten some small amounts of money through the Kemper Knapp Bequest, which was somebody who had left some money after their passing.
We also do get some in-kind support from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the High Road Strategy Center, the Global Health Institute, the 4W Initiative, and we’re really, really glad that they are willing to provide that.
And like I said, maybe one day we’ll get some state funding, but that’s not how it is right now.
I did want to highlight we are an award-winning program, and actually one of the people that we got an award with, you’re gonna hear from, which is why we wanted to highlight them.
We got the 2022 Salute to Local Government Award for Advancing Racial Equity from the Wisconsin Policy Forum for the work that we empowered the village of Waunakee to continue with, because they were already starting down that.
The Association of Public and Land Grant Universities is kind of a big national professional association for universities and colleges, we were the Midwest Regional winner of their Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award.
We got a grant– or sorry, a finalist nod from WHEDA for an economic development initiative that we did with Green County, and we also won our Campus Community-University Partnership Award in 2019.
So, don’t trust us.
Trust these outside organizations that we’re doing something good.
Before I hand it over to Todd, I’ll just mention a couple of things that we’ve learned.
We have scoped a lot of projects, almost 350 of them, to be exact.
If you don’t scope projects with a lot of different people in the community, you’re probably not gonna be as successful.
So if you– this is one thing that I loved about working with the village of Waunakee, they’re like, “Oh, “and we have this engaged citizen over here “and a teacher over there, “and you know, this other person, you know, “a business owner in our community over there, “or even another village or town administrator for another place that lives here,” got him involved.
So I thought that was pretty cool.
That just means that more people are helping shape what projects to do.
If you’re not discussing projects and how you’re going to use projects, how they’re gonna be implemented up front, you’re probably not gonna be as happy with these projects.
The structure really helps, having a structure that you can apply through, and there’s a three-year thing, and there’s, you know, scoping documents, and we have agreements and a contract.
The structure really helps these to be, you know, to be really successful.
Willing partners only.
I put that up there as kind of like a “no duh,” but sometimes people are like, “Hey, you should do this program,” and then they begrudgingly get involved, and it’s not really great.
When we have partners that are excited about moving forward their projects, these projects work really well.
And then also, sometimes we’ve gotten just staff from local governments to express interest, but they haven’t brought their elected officials on board.
And so maybe there’s a turnover in elected officials, and then people are like, “What is this UniverCity thing?
“We didn’t agree to this.
We didn’t know about it at city council.”
So, if the elected officials are not involved up front, that is really not a great idea.
So you have to kind of respect the local context there.
So, the summary from my angle, I’ve had a lot of people push back on me.
“Can students actually do something “useful for communities?
“I mean, what do they know?
“They’re only students.
They don’t have a lot of experience.”
I say yes.
We have 350-plus examples of this happening.
Can these activities actually help communities make progress on their goals?
Absolutely.
But I think what’s needed for this kind of productive engagement is the structure of something like UniverCity Year.
There’s really nothing stopping all these local governments from contacting the University of Wisconsin-Madison on their own, saying, “Hey, could you do this?”
That can be a frustrating process.
It can take– feel like a fishing expedition.
You know, who’s there?
I remember one time we went to a center on campus that directly their name would have told me, oh, they wanna work on those projects.
I’m not gona mention the name ’cause I don’t wanna make anybody feel bad.
And I went to them and they’re like, “No, why would you think we did that?
“We work directly with training people to become that.
We don’t work on the policy environment around it.”
“Oh, okay.”
So it took us to learn that lesson, and we basically prevented the community partner from having to go down a frustrating path of finding who would be there to help them.
So we have a whole Rolodex of people on campus, faculty, staff, and students, who are really the exemplars of the Wisconsin Idea.
And we’re trying to find even more people on campus to come join us.
And we hope that this is super easy for local governments to tap into this amazing network through the structure of UniverCity Year.
So, at this point, I want to turn it over to the wonderful village administrator Todd Schmidt.
He is an award-winning village administrator himself by the Wisconsin City/County Managers Association, and he’s an overall great human being.
And I’m really, really glad that I got to know him through this process.
He, as kind of a personal aside, I don’t know if he’ll tell us as part of the story, but we kind of kept talking to him about our program, like, “Could it be right?”
“No, no, no.”
“Okay, no.”
It was kind of “no” for a while.
And then he was like, “Yes.”
Like, when it was right, the right time, he called me and he was like, “I think we have a moment to capitalize on.”
And that’s what Todd’s gonna talk about.
So, without further ado, Todd Schmidt.
– Nice job, wow.
Welcome to the PBS listeners and viewers, to the village of Waunakee.
Quick introduction about our little village.
We are a small community just north of Madison.
And when I say just north, I mean it.
You can literally see the Capitol dome from portions of our village.
Our population is about 16,000 people.
We’ve been growing steadily, but in a controlled way that makes sense to the village leaders.
So, welcome.
And what the heck is a village administrator?
Quick commercial on that.
The village is run by a seven-member village board who are elected by the citizens of our community.
They hire one person.
That’s the village administrator.
The village administrator then has the various department heads who are hired, reports to that person, and the magic happens from there with all of our wonderful departments and our staff who bring good things to the community.
So, I believe my role here today is to dovetail from Gavin’s presentation about UniverCity Year and show you how practically, that program can have outcomes in the local community.
That’s what I’m going to attempt to do.
So, you may not know that Wisconsin is chock full of many different versions of local governments, and I’m not even counting school districts here, but there are 72 counties, 190 cities, 407 villages, and over 1,200 towns, all with their own version of government.
Now, of the 190 cities and 407 villages, the average population of those communities are 1,500 people.
Waunakee’s bread and butter is the small rural community.
Wisconsin– or Waunakee, to be blunt, is a pretty big community when you consider the average community around the state, and as we benefited as a small community from the support that a UniverCity Year program can offer, that is multiplied for the smaller communities who have even a smaller government.
For example, Waunakee has about 80 to 90 regular full employees in our organization.
We have a few hundred seasonal hires, but we’re a really small organization when it comes down to that.
There’s about nine or ten departments and about 90 employees.
That’s a small organization.
And the average Wisconsin community has even fewer.
So I’d like to touch a bit on some of my past experiences professionally with the UW system and its programs.
I’ve been in municipal management in Wisconsin for about 27 years now in multiple different cities and villages.
So I’ve engaged with the UW in a variety of ways.
I’ve definitely come to learn that it is a big animal.
Let’s start with UW-Madison.
Here’s their campus map.
That place is probably the size of Waunakee, just that single campus.
Many programs, many buildings, many facilities.
And widening that out to the UW system, there’s multiple schools throughout the state.
Now, I’ve personally had the experience to work with several.
UW-Oshkosh has an MPA program.
UW-Milwaukee supplies internships to local government.
There’s a La Follette school at UW-Madison, planning and landscape capstone programs, and even UW-River Falls has a survey research center that supplies community research tools to local governments and other organizations.
So, as I’m trying to run a small local government, and there’s also smaller local governments trying to do the same, the effort to incorporate all of these resources into trying to solve the various day-to-day issues or complex problems that we encounter is really tough to do without a connector, without somebody to lay out the road map for us to the UW system in a really easy way.
Now, that’s exactly where UniverCity Year comes into play, in support for communities like Waunakee and communities larger and smaller.
And it is, it really becomes pure magic when that starts to click.
Things start to fall into place and you start to see, you start to see the way towards solutions.
So, before we dive into this slide, I just want to talk about how, you know, Gavin… Gavin mentioned that Todd was eluding him for a couple of years.
And, and eluding, no.
Having the perfect project to which UniverCity Year could really shine and work with Waunakee to a solution.
We weren’t quite there yet, but that moment came together, and I want to share with you kind of the, what that moment was.
Back in 2020 or ’21…
Someone else can probably help me with the exact date, but a few things happened in coincidence together.
One was the significant murder of George Floyd, which brought to the very forefront in social discussion the issue of race relations in our country.
Now, let’s bring that hyperlocal.
Shortly thereafter, I think within weeks, one side or another of the George Floyd murder, there was a video that arose on social media in the village of Waunakee, where a number of Waunakee students were driving around the village with the windows rolled down in their car, yelling the N-word out the window, filming it, recording it, and having a good time doing it.
Now, you know, you take the larger global issue and then you bring it hyperlocal.
And what we felt here in Waunakee were a lot of questions being asked about what’s at stake here in our own community.
What are we doing?
What are the issues that we’re facing?
What are the next steps?
And how do we kind of grapple and reckon with this stuff?
It’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s tricky issues.
So I remember when I called Gavin and said, “Gavin, I think I have, “I have an issue I think we should look at, and it’s a tricky one.”
He said, “All right, lay it on me, Todd.”
And I’m like, “We really need to understand where the village sits “and what we’re doing in relation to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and civility in our community.”
And it’s not just the race relations piece.
I’ll get into other elements.
But, you know, I think really, when it comes down to my core as a municipal manager, it’s to reason and understand the fact that every single person is different than every other.
And for us to be a really good local government for our local citizens, we need to understand, appreciate, care for, and engage those differences so every resident in our community can be cared for fairly and equally.
Without understanding the differences, we’re gonna have trouble doing that.
So we kind of worked with the UniverCity Year system to lay out a number of different projects where we can start to sort of peel away the onion layers of our organization to understand as best possible.
Here are some examples of the work that we undertook.
We had a group from the UW students review our HR, our human resources processes.
They laid out our handbook and shared with us where we might have been missing the mark in relation to different populations.
We reviewed our policing policy and practices and reviewed those.
We looked at our municipal code, which is a giant book this thick that is barely ever… a book where you take a lens to it.
Well, we took a DEI lens to that book, and that taught us a few things about our own codes.
Our communications processes and systems.
How do we communicate with our residents?
How do we communicate with people who maybe don’t hear very well or don’t have English as a primary language.
Those are questions we grappled with.
We had a campaign that we kicked off called Waunakee is Home, and we wanted to help… We wanted help marketing that project to people in our community so nobody would miss it.
And Waunakee Home was a video series where we shared with our fellow residents stories about people who might be different than you or their neighbors in our community.
And there was about a dozen different videos that told that story, by basically people telling one another who they are and where they came from in a way to get to know your neighbors.
Now, in addition to all that, there’s another element to diversity that really garnered some good work in our community, and that relates to mental health and the population in our community who struggle with mental health.
And frankly, that’s… That’s a very large population in the world, and right here in Waunakee, too.
We took a very close look at the seniors in our community and the youth in our community.
We work directly with our senior center to devise programs, and we worked with the high school to develop programs to work to demystify mental health so it is an easier conversation for people.
Finally, we worked on Ho-Chunk Nation cultural awareness.
This is a project specifically insisted upon by then-village president Chris Zellner.
And what I’m going– I could go into a deep dive on all of these different project areas, but I’m just gonna deep dive into one so you get a sense for how these projects can truly create a product or create impact in the local community.
Let’s talk about the Ho-Chunk Nation.
We wanted to understand the partnership.
We wanted to develop a partnership with the nation.
This began by first establishing connections.
And that’s where UniverCity Year was spectacularly instrumental to afford the linkage between Waunakee, who had never before established an interaction with the Ho-Chunk Nation.
They had already paved trails for those with those networks, and we simply were able to step onto them.
And UW and the UniverCity Year had a level of trust with the nation that they were able to broker.
So then the nation was willing to engage the village.
So, one of the first things the village board did on this work, with the help of the Nelson Institute at the UW and their students, is lay out a land acknowledgment.
Never had been done before in the past, but truly important.
Truly critical, I would say, because the land that we stand on was not first the village of Waunakee.
I don’t– I didn’t put the language up here, but I actually would like to read it to you.
If you don’t mind, I’m gonna read you Waunakee’s land acknowledgment that was passed unanimously by the village board in September of 2021.
“The village of Waunakee acknowledges that “the land we occupy is Teejop, ancestral territory “of the Ho-Chunk Nation, People of the Sacred Voice.
“Ho-Chunk people are stewards of these lands and waters “since time immemorial.
“Settlers attempted to forcibly remove them from their homelands “by exploiting a series of land cessions and treaties, “including the Treaty of 1832.
“However, the Ho-Chunk people resisted these conquests “and asserted their sovereignty as a nation.
“We address this trend of dispossession “by upholding Ho-Chunk woosgara– way of life, “sovereignty, culture, language, and environmental practices.
“Acknowledging these atrocities “is only the first step towards reconciliation.
“Through relationship building, education, and action, “the village will advocate for a shared future with the Ho-Chunk Nation.”
That’s our land acknowledgment.
It’s really important to us.
It’s on every one of the village board’s agendas.
It’s posted in our public buildings.
It’s on our website.
And the act of relationship building, education, and action, UniverCity Year and their programs and their students helped us journey through for… Well, actually, to this very day.
Here are some examples of work product that we enjoyed.
One of the classes focused on information gathering and information sharing.
One approach is to produce informational kiosks through research that the UW and its students did, together with Ho-Chunk experts.
They produced three different kiosks that are going to be in production and placed along the Six Mile Creek Path, which is just outside of this building.
We’re hoping those will be installed by next year.
Similarly, we have a production right here, which is a plaque that describes the Ho-Chunk and its history in the Teejop region.
One of these plaques has been donated to the village or the town of Westport, and is now hanging in their town hall.
This one is gonna be donated to the Ho-Chunk Nation for their use as they see fit.
We really enjoyed learning about some of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s history.
A recent discovery by the nation was actually in one of the lakes here in the chain of lakes, a ancient dugout canoe.
And I understand now they’ve found more than one.
The Ho-Chunk Nation took that experience and actually decided to build a brand-new canoe out of a fallen cottonwood tree, I believe is what it was.
Bill Quackenbush and other members of the nation built this canoe, and we were so fortunate, because of the relationship that we had built, that they agreed to launch a week-long journey through the chain of lakes from Village Park right here in Waunakee, and we celebrated that in a big way, with municipal officials together with high-level Ho-Chunk officials.
We exchanged gifts, which is an important cultural belief and tradition of the Ho-Chunk people, and from here, they headed on to the rivers and the lakes and the streams and journeyed through this area.
Further, we work to recognize the nation in a couple of ways.
One, by recognizing November as Native Nations History Month in the village of Waunakee.
A couple things we did at that time.
One is, for the first time in Waunakee’s history, along with the regular flags that fly above our municipal buildings, we flew the flag of the Ho-Chunk Nation.
Here, the image on your right is that flag being raised by a Ho-Chunk official and the village president, together, literally together, pulling the rope to raise that flag with a Ho-Chunk Native drummer playing and singing as part of that experience.
From there, on that same day, we walked down to signs that many of you have probably seen that proclaim Waunakee as the only Waunakee in the world.
It’s correct.
But it’s also Ho-Chunk ancestral land.
So, in addition to all the other insignia that you see on that welcome sign, we added the Great Seal of the Ho-Chunk Nation to that sign.
I mentioned the commemorative gift-giving.
We took that a step further and commissioned a local artist, stained glass artist to manufacture a light box that depicts various scenes of the village, the best scene being using wood from the actual tree by which they made that canoe.
That wood was incorporated as a scene of the canoe floating through the chain of lakes flowage.
We presented that gift as a token of our friendship and a relationship that we wish to have lasting.
A recent effort of ours has been to prepare a traveling exhibit that the Ho-Chunk Nation can use to educate others in the whole state about the nation’s history.
We’re gonna start by displaying that exhibit right here at the Waunakee Library.
But first we have to make it.
We have to build it, we have to research it.
So we were well past our two years of engagement with UniverCity Year.
But just because you end those two years doesn’t mean that the UniverCity Year program and the UW disappear.
We called out to Gavin, and Gavin assisted us with a group of students in a class that jumped into that project and is now researching and putting together those materials for that traveling exhibit.
Here are some photos from our trip to the Ho-Chunk Museum in Tomah.
Our next project that’s in production now is going to be a permanent installation at Village Hall.
That’s gonna include our land acknowledgment and other gifts that we have received from the Ho-Chunk nation, and recognizing some of our work we’ve done together.
So, this learning experience… Only one more story I’m gonna share, and then we’re gonna turn it over to questions.
This experience, and it’s the ability for students to learn, is not about the successes you’ve seen here.
It’s also about some failures.
We had a couple projects that we undertook with this work.
We started to work on a project, the students were excited about it, but it hit a roadblock, and we literally decided that in the best interest of all parties, we had to abandon that specific project.
I remember seeing those students the next time we connected, and they were pretty low.
They’re like, “We screwed this thing up, didn’t we?”
I’m like, “Hey, welcome to the real world.”
[chuckles] We screw– I’ll talk about myself.
I screw up things on a pretty regular basis.
The best thing to do when that happens is to learn from it and do something better the next day.
And I think that was an incredible lesson for these students.
And they turned that day from being pretty discouraged to being pretty encouraged by the story they’re gonna be able to take to a future employer about how something didn’t work and what they learned from it.
So, I hope that what a little community like Waunakee is able to offer to UCY is the opportunity for students to learn and be better contributors when they leave the university system.
So, we as a village really are thankful for what UniverCity Year has brought to our community and is continuing to bring to the state, and we’re privileged and thankful to be able to share our little story from Waunakee.
[audience applauds]