When Ben Grignon walks into a classroom on the first day of school, he starts with a good story. He is a Traditional Menominee Arts instructor at the Menominee Nation High School and has received numerous awards for his work, including ​​receiving the 2022 First Peoples Fund Education Fellow for the We the Peoples Before Education initiative at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. He was also one of the eight people selected in 2025 as Wisconsin Humanities Fellows. In this episode of Human Powered, co-hosts Jessica Becker and Jen Rubin learn about his work digitizing the Menominee language, hear how he approaches art education, and find out what traditional technique he learned over Zoom during the pandemic. But really, what you don’t want to miss is the story Grignon shares at the end of the episode. Enjoy!

Additional Links to check out:

→  Ben Grignon shares his story and philosophy about teaching here.

→  In early 2025, Ben Grignon was selected to be a Wisconsin Humanities Fellow and receive Community Powered training. The year-long training program was suspended when Wisconsin Humanities’ funding was cut, resulting in program cuts and staff lay-offs. Learn more about the Community Powered training here. 

This episode of Human Powered was produced and edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

Food traditions are core to who we are and how we build community. In this episode, cohosts Jessica Becker and Jen Rubin talk with Qwantese Winters, the founder of A Bowl of Soul. Winter’s has been dubbed the Food Doula and was the host of Wisconsin PBS’s show, “Let’s Grow Stuff.”  Her Love Wisconsin story about learning to farm and cook by connecting with her family heritage was wildly popular, so we wanted to catch up and learn more about how she is showing up in the world today. Winter’s passions have taken root in a program that is both brand new and based on age-old traditions for caring for new mothers. In this episode, we hear how Winters’ blends her particular skills in the kitchen to draw women together, particularly low income and single mothers from the Black community. Through Soul Circles, women learn from their own food stories and cultures to feel empowered as caregivers. If you want some inspiration in the kitchen and in life, this is worth a listen. 

Additional Links to check out:

→  Love Wisconsin: The Food Doula was one of the most popular stories that Wisconsin Humanities ever shared. It was featured as part of Wisconsin Humanities’ 50 year anniversary celebration and can be read here.

→  Let’s Grow Stuff on Wisconsin PBS, a show to help beginning gardeners learn tools and techniques for success, was hosted by Qwantese Winters. Watch some of the segments here. 

→  A Bowl of Soul, in Winter’s own words, is featured in Edible Magazine August 2025. Read the essay here.

This episode of Human Powered was produced and audio edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

It is August of 2025 and record rainfall has caused catastrophic flash flooding in Milwaukee. Hosts Jessica Becker and Jen Rubin sit down with Milwaukee journalist and former Human Powered host Jimmy Gutierrez to talk about the crucial role of the humanities in moments like these. Gutierrez, who joined the Wisconsin Humanities board earlier this year, as the organization planned for survival after devastating cuts to staff and programs in April 2025, suggests that the word humanities is a limiting word for an expansive idea. He believes that collective knowledge and collective history are built on stories, and that stories are fundamental for how we make sense of the world. “The power,” Gutierrez says, “ is to shine a light” in ways that inspire action. He is excited about Wisconsin Humanities’ upcoming Listening Sessions in communities around the state – local convenings to learn what’s happening, what’s working, and what’s needed – and the role the humanities will play in shaping the future.

Additional Links to check out:

→  Human Powered: The Power of Experience (Season 1) shares stories from people who experienced the flooding in Wisconsin’s Driftless region firsthand, from farmers to firefighters, all part of a project organized by the Driftless Writing Center that received WH grant funding.

→  'We're not FEMA, we're just brothers from Milwaukee': Meet the men helping with free flood cleanup”, a story produced by Jimmy Gutierrez for WUWM 89.7, Milwaukee’s NPR station, on August 12, 2025.

This episode of Human Powered was produced and audio edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

Each of us is experiencing a million things on any given day. Alexandria Delcourt believes that how we move from the chaos and overwhelm of life to understand ourselves, and each other, comes down to telling a good story. Alexandria helped to produce some of readers’ favorite Love Wisconsin stories for Wisconsin Humanities, is the current editor of Our Lives magazine, and leads the Isthmus Writing Workshop. Co-hosts Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker sit down to talk with Alexandria about her pivot from science to creative writing, what she has learned as an editor and educator, and how to do the most important stories of our lives justice. 

Additional Links to check out:

Adam Carr is a Milwaukee alchemist. He is an evangelist for his home and an urban explorer who uses storytelling, city walking tours, radio productions, film, journalism, and art to build connections between people and place. Hosts Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker invited former Human Powered co-host into a friendly conversation that got deep, fast. Join us for a discussion about the mystery and magic of doing the good work of the public humanities. We talk about starting collective experiences through the mouth, the superpowers of a city, and how to uplift the work of alchemists who make communities thrive in 2025. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

Additional Links to check out:

“Stories are told for connection,” says Brendon Panke, who has found ways to use stories to build community, entertain audiences, train medical professionals, and help veterans and people who are incarcerated craft their understanding of their place in the world. Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker sit down with Panke to learn more about how the tool of storytelling has applications for breaking through some of the walls and calluses we’ve built. Storytelling is a crucial part of imagining the change we want to see, according to Panke. He believes that narratives are important for deciding where we are going, as individuals and as a society. Listen to hear the story he’s been telling for over ten years, how it has evolved, and how it led him to make a career out of the human inclination to tell stories. By the end, we know you’ll be looking for public spaces where stories are shared. 

Additional Links to check out:

This episode of Human Powered was produced and edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

These days the national news is full of stories about deportations and ICE raids, and the latest legislation that will vastly increase the ICE budget. In Wisconsin, studies by the University of Wisconsin–Madison School for Workers have documented the large portion of farm labor -- estimated at 70% -- done by immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker sat down two weeks ago with Mercedes Falk, the director of Puentes/Bridges, an organization based in Alma that works to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between dairy farmers and their Mexican employees. In this conversation, we hear about the cultural shift that has happened over the past decades as a result of Puentes’ work and learn why Falk applied to take part in Wisconsin Humanities’ Community Powered training program, becoming a Wisconsin Humanities Fellow. The year-long training session was cut short after only a couple of months when WH lost federal funding, but Falk offers her thoughts on what she sees as the value of skills taught in the program, including humanities-based methods of connecting through personal stories. She says that it’s at moments like these that community relationships really matter to help everyone feel safe. We promise you'll find hope in her stories

Additional Links to check out:

This episode of Human Powered was produced and edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

BJ Hollars' energy for making connections in sometimes unexpected places is infectious. He is a writer, a professor, a documentary filmmaker, and a proud resident of Eau Claire. His anthology, "Hope is the Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic" from Wisconsin Historical Society Press inspired a series of Wisconsin Humanities' Love Wisconsin stories. And a film he co-produced called "When Rubber Hit the Road" about the closing of the Uniroyal tire plant received a Wisconsin Humanities grant. Hosts Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker talk with Hollars about the game of Kubb, gathering the Rubberheads, and how to create mechanisms that encourage conversations, build empathy,  and support democracy.

Additional Links to check out:

This episode of Human Powered was produced and edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

Wisconsin Humanities is going into hibernation. What does that mean? And what will happen to Human Powered podcast? Jen Rubin and Jessica Becker have been behind the scenes for past seasons of Human Powered. In this strange moment, after DOGE eliminated federal funding to support humanities councils all over the country, Jen and Jessica are taking the mics to talk with people about what this means in our state and communities. First up, they talk with Dena Wortzel, longtime director of Wisconsin Humanities, about what happened on April 3rd and what comes next.

This episode of Human Powered was produced and audio edited by Chrissy Widmayer. All rights reserved.

An important update about Wisconsin Humanities and its programs, including Human Powered podcast and Love Wisconsin digital stories:  

As a result of the defunding of Wisconsin Humanities and all state councils' operational grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, this will be the last episode of Human Powered. The news of the cut to the WH was abrupt, and so we are still figuring things out.  If you want to know more, we have updates on the Wisconsin Humanities website: wisconsinhumanities.org

In this episode. you'll hear from April Stone, an Ojibwe Black Ash basketmaker from the Bad River Reservation who harvests the black ash logs by hand from the deepest parts of the marshes and swamps near her home in northern Wisconsin. April is a self-taught artist who is sought out by folks throughout the country who want to learn the techniques of a traditional black ash basket weaver. April only works with natural materials that she can gather herself and weaves her baskets by hand – which connects her to the land. She also has a lot to say about how the change to increasingly extreme weather is impacting her work. Yet the work continues to be healing for her and for the many, many people she has been able to teach.

To celebrate ten years of Love Wisconsin stories, we have been reconnecting with some of the people behind the most popular stories. We think April's ideas and work are as relevant today as they were when we first met her and we hope you enjoy the updated ‘Where is she now?” chapter.   

Read April Stone's Love Wisconsin story here: https://www.lovewi.com/april