This post is one in a series on what four community and place-based foundations are learning by funding media projects that help to meet their local information needs. All are funded through the Knight Community Information Challenge.

“‘They’ to ‘Me’ to ‘We.'” Is this the future of informed communities?

This evolution describes how community members in the rural, central Wisconsin community of Wisconsin Rapids, who were once dependent on a Fortune 500 paper company headquarters and a robust local newspaper, have been forced to change and adapt over the last 15 years.

This is how Incourage Community Foundation breaks it down:

• They: When the city was a “company town,” Consolidated Papers, Inc. accounted for the majority of jobs, and dominated local decision-making. Local news was covered with depth by the Daily Tribune. … “They will take care of it.”
• Me: As the old institutions faltered, residents realized that they needed to get involved in community decision-making. … “I have a desire and responsibility to be involved.”
• We: Residents have found their voice, participate in decisions, and connect with others in meaningful ways. … “We have a shared purpose in this place.”

While local employment was a big casualty of those enterprises’ decline, so too were and are community information and news. One of the big lessons coming out of Wisconsin Rapids is how the culture of the city and its residents has begun to change – in part due to encouragement from an Incourage-supported effort – in order to foster an informed community and overcome those setbacks.

Incourage is at the forefront of what is a broad attempt at culture change in the city and surrounding region. As Incourage gets further into the process (since my last report), it continues to understand how residents themselves will improve the local information-needs component as parts of a larger and longer-term movement toward cultural change.

A keystone of Incourage’s work is The Tribune Building, which the foundation purchased from Gannett’s Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune. Via Incourage’s inclusive program of bringing hundreds of community residents together in-person and letting them decide what will be in the remodeled building, the foundation is beginning to see signs not only of participants in the building decision process becoming more-engaged citizens, but those residents now are pulling into the process their friends, family members and others, resulting in a new round of engaged locals, according to Chelsey Mazurek, Tribune Building project manager.

Since I last wrote about the citizen-powered Tribune Building Project, residents who have chosen to get involved have formed groups around specific topic areas that will be included in the new community space (such as a brewpub, culinary kitchen, youth space, and recreational rentals). The pattern, says Incourage resident engagement team member Heather McKellips, is that those with interests in, for example, food or river recreation, convene in separate groups. But recently, those already-involved people are reaching outside of their working groups to inform and engage other residents, including neighbors, friends and colleagues.  

McKellips cites the example of two area farmers who were persuaded to attend the Tribune Building planning meetings. They initially were resistant, thinking that they didn’t really fit into a project about reimagining a building for the community. But, she says, those farmers were surprised at the range of local residents who showed up with interest in seeing a culinary kitchen and brewpub, sourced largely by local foods, become reality. This dynamic resulted in conversations about the local food sector – from growers, to restaurateurs, to brewing enthusiasts, to organic-food advocates – becoming compelling. Food enthusiasts began to connect more, says McKellips. While some may see a new restaurant and kitchen being planned for community enjoyment, diverse people within the local food and farming sector recognize the opportunity for them to play a part.

This is where the Wisconsin Rapids experiment in “getting to ‘we'” turns to creating a better informed community. There are signs of these interest groups beginning to share information across lines, with other interest groups, says McKellips. Most of the residents involved in the Tribune Building planning process are still at the stage of building relationships with fellow residents who have similar interests. But cross-pollination, or sharing community information between disparate interest groups, is just starting to happen. The hope is that growth of this information sharing will take on a ripple effect.

McKellips emphasizes that central Wisconsin needs a strong accompanying local news media and information ecosystem. Incourage’s resident-centered approach aims to “prime the pump” by catalyzing demand for information from all sources about emerging community initiatives and opportunities to link in.

Can a new “we” culture of resident-centric information fill in some of the gaps left by the decline of important institutions such as the city’s newspaper, which long operated in the old ways of top-down news and information? Can the community be well informed with a combination of a weakened “they” and a strengthened “we”?

I’ll continue to follow the Wisconsin Rapids experiment to seek answers.

Steve Outing is a writer and digital media consultant.