A red barn in rural Wisconsin. (Greg Conniff | For the Wisconsin Examiner)

In a purple corner of Wisconsin that reflects both the struggles and the promise of the state’s rural communities, a nonprofit group is trying to forge a path beyond isolation and political polarization.

River Valley Commons began six years ago with a lecture series to help residents of the village of Spring Green and the surrounding towns build community, expand critical thinking and foster hope and a sense of agency.

Today the organization connects disparate groups to address the concerns and needs of residents across a three-county area.

Stephanie “Stef” Morrill-Kerckhoff launched both the lecture series and River Valley Commons in 2019 after asking herself, “what can we do to increase the well-being of our area and the people who live in it?” she says. “And how can we do that collaboratively and in a way that brings in as many people, as many organizations, as we can?”

Stef and Joshua Morrill moved to the Wisconsin River valley area near Spring Green in 2013. Both were natives of western New York where the Chautauqua Institution, a nonprofit learning community and educational center, was founded 150 years ago and still operates.

The couple “felt like we would love to do something similar, where we could bring people together in a lovely natural space to learn and share information,” Stef Morrill-Kerckhoff says. They began organizing the first lecture series, working with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Continuing Studies program, when Joshua Morrill died suddenly in February 2019.

The lecture program, usually held at the Octagon Barn, a distinctive rustic-looking venue northwest of Spring Green, became a memorial to Josh Morrill. His widow decided not to stop there. Since they had first moved to the region, the couple perceived a gap between the interest of local residents in addressing community needs and the wherewithal to reach their goals.

“One of the things that we had always wanted to do is to help with that …  just getting people together to talk about things, trying to move forward with solving problems, whatever they were,” says Morrill-Kerckhoff, who has since remarried.

The organization set its boundaries as the River Valley School District, with 11,000 residents and covering more than 400 square miles. Within the district are four villages and portions of nearly a dozen towns.

“The communities are different, but if you look at the broader picture, we all need broadband, we all need housing, we all need child care,” says Joy Kirkpatrick, the board chair of River Valley Commons who works for the University of Wisconsin Extension.

The organization’s work is informed by a desire to address the general problem  social scientist Robert Putnam diagnosed in “Bowling Alone.” The book, first published in the year 2000, analyzes the erosion of communal and civic life as engagement has declined among neighbors and with public institutions over the last half-century, fraying the social fabric.

“Whatever the reason, the civic groups and the clubs and the bowling league and the churches, indeed, dwindled, and we’re more alone in our houses,” said the author Sarah Smarsh, citing Putnam’s book when she spoke in August as part of the Morrill Lecture Series.

In early November, the series showed the documentary “Join or Die,” based on Putnam’s work, about the importance of participating in clubs and organizations as a component of healthier living for individuals as well as communities.

The goal of River Valley Commons isn’t to replace existing civic organizations but to help connect them with one another and “lift them up,” Kirkpatrick adds, whether they’re service clubs, local libraries, individual local government bodies or other groups.

Pandemic launch

By the time River Valley Commons officially got off the ground, the COVID-19 pandemic was just setting in. That redirected the organization’s initial mission toward fundraising for food pantries, including from people who were donating their federal pandemic relief checks.

“That wasn’t how I expected to start, but it was a way that we were able to provide some value very quickly, in an unexpected thing we were able to help with,” Morrill-Kerckhoff says.

Since then, the organization has focused on “helping people and organizations with ideas they have that they want to implement, or problems that they perceive in the community that they want to work on.”

One such project started in Spring Green. The Sauk County village has grown into one of Wisconsin’s prime tourist destinations on the strength of the nationally renowned American Players Theatre along with the quirky House on the Rock and the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin studio.

When some visitors in 2021 stopped Spring Green resident Patti Peltier on the street and asked about a place to eat, “I couldn’t think of any place that was open to direct tourists too,” Peltier says. “I took this concern to Stef, and we started looking for what sort of things could serve as an economic engine for our community.”

The result was Savor the River Valley, bringing together restaurants, shops, small farmers and food processors to help support and promote each other.

Peltier, a retired corporate marketing professional, says that there are many such food entrepreneurs in the area. Savor the River Valley aims to connect tourists with those businesses, but also “to connect all those food businesses so they could help support each other, help solve common problems,” she says.

Savor the River Valley has grown to 40 members. Membership is free, Peltier says, and open to all food-related businesses in the region.

In the winter, a slow time for the industry, the group sponsors food classes and pop-up dinners to draw in off-season visitors. A farm-and-food tour in April brings in some shoulder-season traffic, and the network publishes a local food guide for the tourist season.

“We’ve got a very collaborative model,” Peltier says. “We’re trying to see how much we can do by working together.”

Community catalyst

Peltier sees Morrill-Kerckhoff and River Valley Commons as a community catalyst. “It created a focal point for gathering up ideas and concerns about what we need in our community, looking for ways to solve those problems and looking for people who are willing to work together on those problems,” she says.

River Valley Commons also offers practical support, providing administrative assistance and serving as the fiscal agent for Savor the River Valley. It has done the same for other local projects and institutions.

Stacey Feiner and her husband, Bill Meyer, operate My Fine Homestead, a small organic farming operation about a half-hour west of Spring Green. They distribute produce, eggs, meat and other wares using the community supported agriculture model — CSA for short — with consumers paying an annual subscription fee and receiving deliveries every week or every other week.

A community farmer’s market in Spring Green led by My Fine Homestead and other providers is now part of River Valley Commons, providing a legal structure and acting as the market’s fiscal agent. Savor the River Valley helps “bring people to the area and creates a buzz,” Feiner says.

She and her husband were both raised on Wisconsin dairy farms. At a Morrill Lecture event in October, Feiner told the audience the story of how the couple navigated the shift from the farm life they’d grown up in to the small-scale organic farming that they practice now.

The couple’s business model thrives on forging personal relationships with customers. After Feiner shared their story that evening, “people have come up to me who saw it or watched it on YouTube and said, ‘I just feel more connected to you,’” she says.

“There’s all these little community projects that are happening, and sometimes couldn’t get a foot off the ground to get going,” Feiner says. “River Valley Commons has provided an umbrella, a safety-net organizational structure,” bringing together people with diverse skills “to piggyback off each other.”

Broadband access and affordable housing

River Valley Commons has helped convene a broadband coalition of local governments and others interested in upgrading internet service in the area. That work was made easier as state and federal funds for broadband expansion became available, Morrill-Kerckhoff says. The coalition has sponsored regular monthly technology help sessions at area libraries.

The lack of affordable housing has been another issue for the region, one that it has in common with the rest of Wisconsin. The organization has assembled a group including architects, lenders, local government officials and employers, but housing has presented bigger challenges not so easily resolved.

In the meantime, the organization is continually evolving.

Morrill-Kerckhoff envisions convening what she has been calling “common ground tables” — “where we can bring together groups of people to talk about different issues from any perspective, all perspectives, to try to find some common ground within some of the bigger issues that maybe we are always talking about.”

As for the lecture series itself, Morrill-Kerckhoff says, “I’d like to try to find ways to engage different communities than we have so far.”

River Valley Commons is also working to ensure its stability for the long term. To that end, it recently joined Wisconsin Partners — a confederation of  nonprofits.

Wisconsin Partners’ executive director, Rachel Peller, says that organization also arose from the concerns highlighted in “Bowling Alone” — “the reality and the idea that membership in associations has declined, so we’re all more isolated than we were before.”

Isolation and polarization

Peller traces the heightened polarization of these times to that isolation as well. It’s not just political polarization, but a divide that is represented in the media people consume and in their social contexts. Those divisions can obscure the potential for common ground, she says.

“Our policy differences are actually not that sharp,” Peller contends. “If you look at what people want to happen, what people believe in and what some of those core values are, there’s actually more overlap than we think there is, and the big issue is the social perception of that divide.”

Rural voters and their discontents

That perception is made worse by the retreat from community life that “Bowling Alone” describes, she says, which also leaves people feeling powerless. “So the more isolated we are, the less we feel like we can make an impact in our communities.”

Wisconsin Partners’ member groups include AARP, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, organizations of public health workers and child care educators, and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority.

Part of what animates the organization is “recognizing the connection between all these different sectors,” Peller says. “If we don’t have child care, then we don’t have health care, and if we don’t have health care, our seniors are struggling, and if our seniors are struggling, then so are our churches.”

Wisconsin Partners has started up local groups in Southwest Wisconsin, the Kickapoo Valley and the Fox Valley. River Valley Commons is the first such group to join after launching on its own.

Peller credits River Valley Commons with being “really creative and nimble and adaptive” in its efforts.

“The work that Stephanie and River Valley Commons does almost just speaks for itself,” Peller says. “It’s just very powerful to know that everyday people are working together to make a difference in their own community, and trying and trying and trying again because it matters to them.”

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