Chrissy Widmayer, MFA ’13 with a folklore certificate, is the director of Community Powered, a program through the Wisconsin Humanities that helps participating communities to “experience new ways to unearth and tell stories of their communities while taking concrete steps toward making their hometowns better places to live.” Community Powered recently won the Schwartz Prize for Outstanding Public Humanities Programming from the Federation of State Humanities Councils.
As our feature interview below was being conducted, the National Endowment for the Humanities eliminated funding for projects such as Wisconsin Humanities. Widmayer has asked us to share this message on the impact of these grant cuts.
"In early April, Wisconsin Humanities and 55 other state and jurisdictional humanities councils received notice that their general operating grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities had been canceled immediately and in its entirety," said Widmayer. "This loss of NEH funding means Wisconsin Humanities will be closing its doors very soon. The end of NEH funding to Wisconsin Humanities and other state humanities councils will harm communities in every state, in every Congressional district, and contribute to the erasure of our shared humanity and hopes for democracy. If you'd like to help fight for the humanities, please contact your members of congress and consider donating to your state humanities council. Learn more at www.wisconsinhumanities.org."
The Five-Question Interview below reveals more of Widmayer’s passion and drive to foster spaces for creative opportunities and engage her community in the arts.
As the director of Community Powered, you curate a placed-based curriculum to engage students. Community powered intends to give writers an opportunity to “experience new ways to unearth and tell stories of their communities while taking concrete steps towrd making their hometowns better places to live.” What types of stories are being unearthed? What skills does the group provide to communities to find/tell those stories? And what’s been the impact?
First, I want to clarify that Community Powered is broad initiative that seeks to put the tools of the humanities in the hands of Wisconsinites through educational programming. We actually have three projects under the Community Powered flag: the Wisconsin Humanities Fellows program (through which we run that place-based curriculum to train local leaders), Stand Up to Hate (our curriculum on hate and resilience in Wisconsin communities that we run in high school classrooms and community events), and the CP Tribal Health Initiative (which will take the Fellows curriculum and revise it to better serve tribal communities and Native conceptions of health; we’re just getting started with this program, but we hope to train several members of tribal communities around Wisconsin in a culturally relevant humanities toolkit).
Community Powered gives Wisconsinites humanities tools they can use to tell the stories of their community the way the community wants them to be told. Our programs seek to empower Wisconsinites and foreground community needs and voices so they can be highlighted and heard. The stories being told vary in each community—they can be about community history or community life; they can tell the stories of immigrants and refugees, or folks who’ve lived in that place for generations. Through our curriculum, we offer Wisconsinites a toolkit of options they can use to learn new things about their community and share them with the world. We offer workshops in everything from documentation techniques, like oral history interviewing and photography, to place-based approaches, like cultural resource management and asset mapping, to storytelling, project development (including grant writing and evaluation), and dissemination, or how to share the stories they collect with their community. These tools include types of events, methodologies, and concrete approaches to understanding community strengths and challenges. Our fellows can use these tools to find out what matters to their community, or collect those stories so that they can then be shared with the community at large.
In the past, we’ve done projects that revitalize cultural traditions, like lacrosse in the Forest County Potawatomi Community, which hadn’t been played there in 70 years. We’ve helped teens connect to their hometowns so their voices can be heard, like through the Spooner Memorial Library’s Teen Lock-In, which helped teens devise community projects and then helped them execute them in the weeks after the event. In Appleton, we started a series of story circles so that immigrants and refugees could share their stories and practice their English. And today, we have projects in development that are collecting oral histories of rural towns, highlighting historic downtown buildings in bigger cities, creating community cookbooks, or exhibits on music history, and starting community conversations about difficult topics. There are many directions our fellows can take their projects, and they are customized to each fellow’s community and location.
The impacts of these projects may appear small from the outside. We emphasize how the journey of creating new projects should involved the community directly and prioritize creating connections over having a successful event or creating a product to share. Therefore, our fellows have created projects that foster relationships between neighbors, bringing them closer together so they are better prepared to face challenges as they come. This can be as simple as meeting new people at an event and therefore feeling more connected to the others who attended. Or it could include taking pride in your community after uncovering local history. Our impact ripples out from our fellows and the participants in the fellows’ events, allowing them to inspire others to share their stories and come together with their neighbors.
You are a recent winner of the Schwartz prize for Outstanding Public Humanities Programming for Wisconsin. Tell us how this award has helped the organization either through funding or visibility?
The Schwartz Prize was a real honor because it’s only given to three public humanities programs each year. Receiving the Shwartz Prize for Community Powered felt like recognition of the groundbreaking work we’re doing to build resilience in communities around Wisconsin. It’s an award for the whole team that worked with us in the pilot year of the program, including librarians, our fellows, and a whole host of community members.
The award has definitely boosted our visibility. (There is a modest financial award when you win.) Other people have taken notice of our methods, both within and outside of Wisconsin. Being able to call ourselves a “nationally award winning program” has allowed us to promote the humanities in our state—which is always a challenge since not everyone is familiar with the term “humanities.” It has give us a sense of validation for the work our fellows do and will do in the future, and it has given more power to the title of “Wisconsin Humanities Fellow.” We hope it’ll help us continue the program for a long time to come.
What is the most rewarding aspect of focusing on place-based curriculum and how would you encourage other humanities educators to implement this pedagogy into their teaching practice? Has this Wisconsin based program been a model for programs outside of the state?
The most rewarding thing about focusing on place in our curriculum is that it reorients the everyone’s attention on digging deeper into their immediate community. Many of us go through life not noticing the things around us, or not thinking about the history of the places we live. Yet, we inhabit those spaces every day. With our curriculum, we ask you to take a second look. It helps our fellows consider their surroundings in a new way, and it helps them see their neighbors and neighborhoods in a new light. Looking at the places we live and digging deeper into them helps us feel more connected to and invested in the places we live. So much of life today feels disconnected from our immediate surroundings. We find community online (a very validated and necessary space for community!) and don’t always connect to our neighbors. Looking at place requires you connect to your neighbors. And it helps you see both the natural and built environment around you in a new way. I think looking at place helps you feel more rooted and grounded in your local community in a way that many of us need nowadays.
Looking at place also changes the scale of our focus and attention. We’re not trying to change the world—we’re trying to change the right here. And in doing so, we find achievable and real actions. With time and energy, those smaller actions can have big, lasting impact, and may, eventually, change the world.
For humanities practitioners or educators looking to do something similar, I’d encourage you to think about helping your students reorient on what’s around them—the things they never take a second look at. And I’d encourage you to ask them to take a second look. That can help them ask a thousand new questions, and take them in a thousand new directions, all of which can help them better understand themselves, their towns, and their community.
I hope this program will inspire other similar programs in other states. We’re working to make our curriculum more available to others as resources. But honestly, I think if everyone brought a little bit of the care and perspective we teach into what they do, the world would be a better place.
A decade after graduating with your MFA from Mason, what experiences from your time at Mason inform and impact your decisions as a community leader?
The two things that really led me down this path from my time at Mason were my time teaching, and my time in the folklore program. As a nonfiction writer (and I’m sure many writers feel this way in general), I felt like I was always in my head. My personal essays were such an internal conversation between me, myself, and I. My teaching and my folklore work brought me out of myself and into community.
As a folklorist, I learned ethnography, which helped me center other voices in my work. I’ve always appreciated that ethnography offers the opportunity to hear from someone in their own words and offer those words a platform so they can do more in the world. Teaching, on the other hand, helped me foster an understanding of the world in others—I was able to take what I was learning, about writing and sharing one’s voice, and put it into practice. I was able to help others find their voices.
And I still do both of those things today—help offer others a platform to make a difference, and help others find their voice. It is the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t spent those years learning to find my own voice, and in turn, incorporate others’ voices into my practice.
After graduating from Mason, you pursued a PhD in folklore. What brought about your interest to become a folklorist and do you have any advice for MFA students looking to continue their academic career in a new direction?
I first encountered folklore at Mason—my very first class was one of Peggy Yocom’s folklore courses on personal narratives, legend, and more. When I signed up for it, it sounded like a fun way to get my literature credits. But it changed my life. The reality was I’d been a folklorist my whole life—collecting stories from the people around me, and writing them up. But I didn’t know that was a field I could study. Of course, I continued in the MFA and deeply enjoyed working on my creative nonfiction, but I also took every folklore class I could fit into my schedule, even overloading one semester to fit them all in.
When I fell in love with teaching during my MFA, I knew I’d have to pursue a PhD to stay in the classroom long term. It was easy to choose to continue studying folklore. I ended up at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the rest is history.
What I love about folklore is the way folklorists see the world—with curiosity, with interest, and with a genuine desire to listen, support, and care for the people around us. I see it as my job nowadays to cultivate the folklorist’s perspective in everyone I teach (whether they know they’re learning folklore or not). It’s a joy to see how people pick up the mantle of curiosity and care for their communities and nothing I ever do will matter as much as seeing that spark of interest, that spark of understanding, in the eyes of my students and colleagues.
My biggest piece of advice to any MFAs looking to continue their education in a new academic direction is to stay curious. As writers, we cultivate interest in so many things. And we learn what interests us, what helps us stay interested in the world around us, what serves our souls. I often warn people away from PhDs because they can sometimes feel soulless. Unlike an MFA, which focuses on honing a craft and encourages your curiosity about yourself and the world around you, a PhD is often (not always) about honing expertise—becoming very knowledgeable in one defined area. My biggest fear for writers transitioning to a PhD is that they let it limit them—that they let go of their interests, even their writing, to focus on the requirements of a degree. Don’t. Instead, cultivate further curiosity—let knowing more be the motivator to understand how little you actually know. And use your time with all the resources and support you have at your fingertips to seek whatever gives you purpose and sparks your continued interest. In other words, let yourself keep your writer’s motivation in the academic headspace. It can be incredible rewarding if you take that approach; it can be stifling if you don’t.
April 24, 2025