Urban League of Greater Madison, Planet Bike and Sustain Dane’s “Eat Play Bike” project as a part of the larger Imagine South Park Street Project. This project will use “place making” techniques to transform a traditional strip mall of social services and surface parking lot into a permanent public gathering space with community vendors and performance programming for creative experimentation in local foods, bicycles and art in a neighborhood traditionally divided between African-Americans, Caucasians, Latinos and Hmong refugees.

Freedom Inc.’s Madison Freedom School is an intensive leadership development program in which participants develop civic engagement and leadership capacities. Freedom Inc. will hold two Freedom School weekend retreats for 10-15 participants each—one for Freedom Inc. youth and one for Freedom Inc. adult survivors. Freedom School weekends incorporate education-style dialogues for critical consciousness for collective analysis and community building; trainings on skills such as organizing, communications, recruitment, participatory action research, etc.; and exposure to policies and processes that form opportunities for engagement.

The Lussier Community Education Center’s Grassroots Engagement Mentors (GEMs) asset mapping and community engagement project aims to build a stronger community through relationship building and grassroots organizing. GEMs will engage a core of five neighbors in an asset mapping project, with the aim of connecting them long term in the life of the community and the community center. These five GEMs will receive training in neighborhood asset mapping, community mobilization and meeting facilitation.

Mentoring Positives will perform an East Washington Neighborhood Engagement Series. This series of workshops and design charrettes will target three communities in Madison and Sun Prairie along the possible Bus Rapid Transit line running down the East Washington Avenue Corridor. This engagement process will result in the identification of community leadership teams in each community and design ideas for neighborhood improvements such as community gardens and centers and possible bus rapid transit stops.

The Dane County TimeBank (DCTB) and other core partners of the Allied Community Cooperative and residents of all ages will join together to create a project to increase neighborhood capacity and resources while reducing fossil fuel consumption using time banking to pool and exchange resources to reduce residents' energy use, and building toward an energy efficiency and solar installation cooperative that will be an economic development, job creation and readiness engine for turning seed funding into large generators of self-sustaining community capacity.

Youth Services of South Wisconsin’s Gardens for Empowerment (G4E) project proposes to serve residents of two of Madison’s most challenged neighborhoods, the Balsam/Russett area of Meadowood Neighborhood and the blocks immediately south of Warner Park in Brentwood Village Neighborhood. The project with engage youth and adults in the neighborhood to build and maintain several community gardens.

see press release