Reading Time: 3 minutes

Inside a classroom at Milwaukee Marshall High School, the sound of Lego bricks clicking together filled the room as children leaned over tables covered with colorful pieces and half-finished builds.

As they pieced together their creations, Nealita Nelson, the instructor behind the popular Milwaukee Recreation Lego classes, moved from desk to desk encouraging students to keep building. 

Nelson, a Milwaukee native known online as “Builds by Nene,” began teaching Lego-building classes through MKE Rec after appearing on Season 4 of Fox’s “LEGO Masters” in 2023 alongside her brother, Paul Wellington.

Jeff McAvoy, whose 7-year-old son has been attending Nelson’s classes since they began two years ago, expressed his admiration for her teaching style. 

“It comes down to a simple shared interest in Lego and building, but she approaches it with such care and interest in what each of the kids are doing,” McAvoy said.

Nelson’s classes are typically divided by age groups, welcoming everyone from young children to adult builders:

• LEGO Open Build (Designed for ages 3+): Focuses on beginner basics, open building zones and simple challenges.
• LEGO Adventures: Encourages participants to step outside their comfort zones with complex, guided builds.
• Learning LEGO (Designed for ages 13 to adults): Covers the history of Lego, advanced building techniques and creative design.

For Nelson, Lego-building classes are about much more than play or building toys.

“I see the need for help, and I see the need to get these kids out from in front of screens,” Nelson said. “I feel like it was my duty to give back to my community that helped me when I was younger.”

Raised on Milwaukee’s North Side, Nelson and Wellington spent a lot of their childhood building together, before their almost 10-year age gap inevitably drew them apart.

Their close relationship became an advantage on “LEGO Masters,” where the siblings advanced in the competition, becoming third-place finalists.

“We’re both very different people. It helps bring out our best qualities and we’re able to work together well,” said Wellington, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee alum. “I’m very timid. She pushed me to believe in myself and that led us to succeed.”

The siblings competed again, this time internationally, on “LEGO Masters: Grand Masters of the Galaxy” in Australia in 2025. They also were the first all-Black team in the U.S. version of “LEGO Masters” to win a challenge.

Nelson said they intentionally incorporated a few references to the city and state into their builds throughout the competitions.

“When we were doing the TV shows, we tried to incorporate something from Milwaukee or something that symbolizes Wisconsin as a whole,” Nelson said. “In the first episode, we did the dairy boat.”

While Nelson currently works in health care, she continues to build her public identity through her social media presence and Lego-building classes with MKE Rec.

“I felt like this was my calling, this is my passion. I love Lego,” Nelson said.

Registration for Nelson’s summer Lego-building sessions are open now until the first week of classes on June 22. You can register here.

---

Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Nealita Nelson is building community one Lego brick at a time is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Brenda Hines still likes to refer to her son, Donovan Hines, as her “favorite son,” the same way he liked to refer to himself before he was killed on Nov. 13, 2017. 

Donovan was driving near North 29th Street and West Hampton Avenue in Milwaukee when he was struck by a stray bullet and crashed through a fence and into a home in the 4700 block of North 29th Street.

In the months that followed, Brenda Hines said she sank into such a deep, dark grief that she cried daily, unable to eat or work. She even contemplated taking her own life. 

“It took me a while to get out of the state of shock,” Hines said. “It was very difficult, spiritually, for me to come back.”

Now, almost a decade later, she has turned that pain into hope by building The Donovan Hines Foundation of Exuberance Co., a Milwaukee nonprofit that offers consistent, community-based support for families grieving violent loss.

“Exuberance means vibrant. And that’s what Donovan was. He always came out with a smile on his face,” Hines said.

After the unexpected loss of her son, Hines connected with the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Project UJIMA, a collaborative, multidisciplinary program geared to stop violent behavior patterns and reduce the number of children hurt by violence. Meeting with Project UJIMA once a month was helpful and inspired Hines to begin her own grief group that met more frequently. 

“Being a person of color, we don’t seek therapy, and we have so much trauma, so much violence going on,” Hines said.

Hines hosted her grief group weekly for about a year, with the support of the late Bishop Sedgwick Daniels of Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ.

“That was the beginning of my healing process,” Hines said. “Not only listening to someone else, but being there for myself.”

Seven months after her loss, Hines was asked to continue her work with The Salvation Army Chaplaincy Program, in partnership with the Milwaukee Police Department. She was asked to serve as a chaplain on a case that hit close to home, helping a family who had just lost their son, who was the same age as Donovan, to suicide. 

“It gave me something to hope for,” Hines said. “That’s when I started coming back out and decided to start having empowerment groups and transformation stuff for grief.”

Ever since then, she’s kept going, growing her nonprofit in any way she can, whether it be through the Summer Meal Program for children, the emergency food pantry or stockboxes for older adults.

“I just kept going and going. I was like, ‘OK, I’m still not doing enough,” Hines said. “The more I help others, it seems like, the more it helps me.”

Hines, along with several other Milwaukee nonprofits, hosted a survivor-led candlelight vigil to join a National Moment of Remembrance in December. The vigil centered on healing and the belief that everyone deserves the freedom to live.

On the hardest days, what keeps Hines going is “God first, my family and the foundation.”

---

Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Turning pain into purpose: How Brenda Hines works through her grief by supporting Milwaukee families is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Click here to read highlights from the story

• Decades of repression and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar have driven most Rohingya from their western Myanmar homeland. 

• Several forms of written Rohingya have emerged in the diaspora, but none has reached widespread use among a scattered population. 

• A small group in Milwaukee, home to what may be the country’s latest Rohingya population, is testing whether teaching a written form of Rohingya can help preserve the language.

• Advocates face a major hurdle: persuading families to prioritize learning Rohingya alongside work, school and resettlement.

• Similar efforts among Hmong refugees in the Midwest suggest a written language can take hold — but only with sustained community buy-in.

A dozen fasting teenagers filed into the basement of a community center on Milwaukee’s South Side in mid-February to mark the first night of Ramadan around folding tables. The building belongs to the Burmese Rohingya Community of Wisconsin (BRCW), a bare-bones nonprofit serving hundreds of local Rohingya refugee families. Brand-new carpets muffled the sounds of worshippers in the mosque one floor up.

Nearly everyone in the nonprofit’s Clarke Square community center spoke Rohingya, but not a single printed word in the language appeared on the whiteboards in the center’s classrooms where recent arrivals study English and prepare for citizenship exams. Flyers advertising a food giveaway were in English, as were posters listing prayer times and an illuminated sign over the center’s front entrance.

Printed Rohingya words could be found only in a small stack of children’s books and loose-leaf dictionaries in an office just off the prayer hall — raw materials for an experiment in cultural preservation. 

Hardly anyone passing through the community center can easily read a sentence in Rohingya. 

Decades of state-sanctioned repression and ethnic cleansing have driven most Rohingya from their western Myanmar homeland. Several forms of written Rohingya have emerged in the diaspora, but none has reached widespread use among the scattered diaspora. Without an agreed-upon alphabet or enough people literate in Rohingya to teach it, community leaders worry the language will wither, taking with it a core part of a culture already frayed by displacement and state-sanctioned violence.

Milwaukee is now a proving ground for Rohingya literacy. If this community center with a tiny volunteer staff can build an audience for Rohingya language education — in the city likely home to the country’s largest Rohingya population — momentum could spread, boosting the language’s chances of surviving in exile.

It’s a big if.

What does it take to preserve a language that’s rarely written down? The center’s indefatigable co-founders, a Dallas-based linguist and an international network of Rohingya scholars are trying to figure it out.

From Myanmar to Milwaukee

Mohamed Anwar is always on the move. Even while juggling a half-dozen jobs, the BRCW co-founder leaves a few gaps in his schedule to help refugee families navigate their new country.

He, too, came to Milwaukee as a refugee. 

Anwar grew up on a knife’s edge. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar’s government has chipped away at the rights of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group in a majority-Buddhist nation. In 1982, when Anwar was 7, the Myanmar government stripped the Rohingya and other disfavored groups of citizenship, leaving millions stateless.

Anwar managed to secure a high school diploma and an undergraduate degree — the latter a rare accomplishment for a Rohingya student of his generation. But with prospects dimming and the threat of state-sponsored violence mounting, Anwar set aside his graduate studies and fled, joining thousands of other Rohingya refugees risking death and enslavement to reach Malaysia.

He remained in Kuala Lumpur for over a decade, initially surviving on low-wage jobs until he eventually crossed paths with  United Nations outreach workers.Recognizing his talents, the U.N. brought him on as a translator.  

When the State Department approved his family for resettlement in the U.S. as refugees in 2015, Anwar landed in Milwaukee, where a few friends had already begun putting down roots.

Even a decade ago, the city’s Rohingya community was large enough for Aurora Health Care to require interpreters. Anwar was a natural fit for the job. 

Like other specialists, health care interpreters must pass a certification course. “They had no one to test me in Rohingya,” Anwar recalled. Without an agreed-upon alphabet, a written test was also off the table. His examiners took his time with the U.N. as proof of his fluency, and he has since taken charge of  recruiting and training new Rohingya interpreters for the hospital system.

Milwaukee becomes a magnet

BRCW estimates more than 4,000 Rohingya live in the Milwaukee area — an educated guess, but a difficult one to confirm. Roughly half of the more than 13,000 refugees resettled in Wisconsin since 2012 came from Myanmar, but the State Department resettlement statistics do not distinguish between Rohingya and other refugees from the country. 

The city has become a magnet for Rohingya refugees who first settled elsewhere in the United States, drawn by cheaper housing, abundant jobs for immigrants with limited English, a strong support network and private Islamic schools. That pattern shows up in BRCW outreach data: 17% of phone numbers collected by 2020 had out-of-state area codes — some belonging to families whom the nonprofit helped relocate from as far away as New Hampshire.

Most Rohingya families have settled on Milwaukee’s South Side and southern suburbs, with a growing number purchasing homes within walking distance of BRCW’s community center. Anwar himself owns a few nearby properties, renting them to Rohingya newcomers finding their footing in the city.

The city’s public institutions are trying to keep pace with the community’s growth. Milwaukee Public Schools began translating notices for parents into one version of written Rohingya at least five years ago and has published a Rohingya translation of this year’s parent handbook. In mid-January, a Milwaukee Health Department official called BRCW to ask whether the agency should offer Rohingya translations using a Latin script, a script derived from Arabic and Urdu or audio recordings.

BRCW co-founder Andrew Trumbull says audio recordings are the only viable means of reaching most new arrivals, at least for now. 

The nonprofit offers English classes, but many Rohingya adults have little free time between long shifts and family responsibilities. Parents often rely on their children as interpreters, but translating technical terms into Rohingya is a stretch for children who have never formally studied the language. 

A volunteer effort takes shape

Trumbull sticks out in the halls of the BRCW community center. He doesn’t speak Rohingya, doesn’t pray in the center’s mosque and has no family ties to Rohingya Milwaukee, but he’s been there from the start. A decade after helping get the nonprofit off the ground, the self-described weekend warrior spends much of his scarce free time applying for grants and managing English-language communications in the cluttered office he shares with Anwar.

The pair met through Anwar’s brother, for whom Trumbull acted as a tutor and Milwaukee tour guide as the former settled into his new city. They soon launched BRCW, with Anwar managing community affairs and Trumbull managing relationships with government agencies and nonprofit peers — both as volunteers.

Trumbull’s enthusiasm for Rohingya language preservation is partially motivated by his own feelings of cultural loss. He spent most of his childhood in Germany, but after moving to the U.S. at age 11, he refused to speak his grandparents’ language. “I wanted not to be different, so I did not speak German,” he said. While he doesn’t compare his experience to those of refugees, he’s watched similar assimilatory pressures play out among Rohingya children in Milwaukee. 

“All of the Rohingya parents know that the Rohingya language is dying,” he said. “The question is what they can do about it.”

For now, a small selection of children’s books and a Rohingya-to-English dictionary offer the closest thing to a Rohingya literacy curriculum in the U.S. Trumbull hosts a digital version of the dictionary on the center’s website; the physical copies in his office are the leftovers from a pile passed out to families. Without a grant to support a more structured distribution program, Anwar and Trumbull are “field-testing” the materials by handing them out whenever they can and seeking feedback.

Another source of Rohingya-language learning aids: “Sesame Street.”A series of episodes starring puppet siblings Noor and Aziz — characters introduced in 2022 for refugee children in Bangladesh  — also went through field-testing in Milwaukee with the help of Anwar, Trumbull and BRCW. 

Searching for a written form

The written Rohingya materials on display at BRCW are the product of decades of work by Rohingya linguists.

An earlier form of written Rohingya died out roughly 200 years ago, said Dallas-based linguist Miranda Kuykendall; the reasons for its extinction remain unclear. Revival efforts took off in the 1980s, when a Rohingya academic in Bangladesh developed the Hanifi script by adapting the alphabet family used to write Arabic and Urdu.

By the turn of the century, a Rohingya engineer in Saudi Arabia introduced a Latin alphabet alternative — a more straightforward option for standard keyboards.

“Different pockets of the Rohingya population prefer different scripts for different reasons,” Kuykendall said. For Rohingya students familiar with Arabic through religious education, the Hanifi script may be more approachable, and pilot programs in Bangladesh teach the script to some refugee children. The Latin-based script is familiar to the growing Rohingya diaspora in North America, the United Kingdom and Malaysia, where the primary languages rely on the Latin alphabet. 

Kuykendall, the Rohingya language program manager for Texas nonprofit International Literacy and Development, helped roll out the Rohingya-to-English dictionary and partnered with nonprofit publisher Books Unbound to release a picture dictionary for younger audiences. The same network of collaborators is now developing a Rohingya translation app.

Though her team included multiple Rohingya scripts in the dictionary, Kuykendall noted that children of Rohingya parents born or raised in the U.S. typically find the Latin script version of the language, also called “Rohingyalish,” far easier to pick up.

That isn’t necessarily the case for Rohingya-speaking adults — even those already literate in several other languages. “It’s difficult for me to read,” said Anwar, squinting at a page of a picture dictionary. “I never got a chance to learn.” 

Kuykendall and BRCW say boosting adult literacy could be transformative for Rohingya refugee communities, with written Rohingya serving as a useful counterpart for teaching English. 

But in Anwar and Trumbull’s view, children and young adults are more likely to have time for the Rohingya literacy materials now in the informal testing process in Milwaukee.

For some young people, the pitch might be practical: Learning written Rohingya could help teenagers translate technical language and complicated documents for their parents. For others, the draw could be more existential. “When they become preteens and teenagers,” Trumbull said, they might “grasp the importance of what it means to have lost their language.” 

Even if the nonprofit can muster a critical mass of interested young people interested in Rohingya literacy, Trumbull noted, BRCW lacks money and bandwidth to organize formal classes.

The nonprofit seeks grants to support structured outreach, including its earlier work with “Sesame Street.” If all goes well, Anwar and Trumbull hope to offer Rohingya language lessons through BRCW’s after-school religious classes. Aside from Kuykendall’s smaller-scale work with students in Dallas, a BRCW Rohingya language class would be the first of its kind in the country.

‘I am concerned that my kids will never learn’ 

Those offerings would need buy-in from Rohingya parents like Umi Salmah and Mohammed Rafik, a couple raising three children in Milwaukee.

Rafik, 43, still thinks of Anwar as his teacher. Back in Myanmar, Anwar offered English lessons to young people in his home village — Rafik included.

After fleeing to Malaysia as a young man, Rafik spent early adulthood as a landscaper in Kuala Lumpur. Many of his relatives stayed behind long enough to witness a 2017 ethnic cleansing campaign that killed thousands and drove more than half of Myanmar’s remaining Rohingya into crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh, where Rohingya children are barred from attending public schools. U.S. State Department officials later described the attacks as acts of genocide.Those who remain in Myanmar are now caught in the crossfire of the country’s civil war, and the country’s military has begun conscripting Rohingya men even while denying them citizenship.

More than a dozen members of Rafik’s immediate family drowned while en route to Bangladesh in 2024, as have hundreds of other refugees fleeing Myanmar by boat. 

“Everything’s lost,” he said, clasping his hands together. “Language lost. Culture lost. People lost. Village lost.”

Rafik’s formal education ended after seventh grade. Salmah, on the other hand, completed high school in Myanmar before leaving for Malaysia, where the couple married. The military has since burned her home village.

They relocated to Milwaukee after six years in Dallas, where they initially settled after securing refugee status. Both are naturalized citizens; their children were born in the U.S.

Though the couple speaks Rohingya at home, their children “can’t speak back,” Salmah said. “Now I am concerned that my kids will never learn.”

Salmah is unusually well-positioned to teach her children to read Rohingya. She completed a degree in early childhood education at Milwaukee Area Technical College, and she has a knack for languages. Aside from English and Rohingya, Salmah can also speak and read in Burmese and Malay.

But even if she had the time to teach her children to read Rohingya — she’s currently working on a degree in phlebotomy — Salmah would first need to teach herself. Flipping to a page of a children’s book in the BRCW office, Salmah sounded out a passage letter by letter. “I have to pay so much attention to read that,” she said.

Rohingya literacy education “is not going to work at home” for most Rohingya families, Rafik said. Most parents have little to no formal education of their own, so many would need to learn to read as adults before they could teach their children.

People fluent in both Rohingya and English are often already busy providing translation services, and asking those ideal candidates to volunteer their time is a tall order. Like Salmah, any teaching candidate must also learn the Rohingya script alongside students. “I (need to) start from the beginning,” Anwar said. “From the ABCs.”

Precedent in Hmong experience

If BRCW’s efforts gain traction, Milwaukee’s Rohingya community would not be the first group of refugees in the Midwest to give a struggling written language a new lease on life.

The century-old church that now houses BRCW previously belonged to a Hmong Christian congregation — the last community to pull off this feat. 

Thousands of Hmong refugees settled in the upper Midwest beginning in the late 1970s, when the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam made allies, including many Hmong working alongside American forces in Laos, targets for retaliation. Fifty years later, Hmong refugees still outnumber any other refugee group in Wisconsin. More than 60,000 Wisconsinites identified as Hmong in 2020 — the third-largest Hmong population in the country behind Minnesota and California.

Like more recent Rohingya arrivals, Hmong refugees arrived in the U.S. without a widely used written language. Christian missionaries in Laos developed a version of Hmong in the Latin script in the 1950s, but that system “did not stick,” said Bee Vang-Moua, the director of the Hmong language program at the University of Minnesota.

The mass displacement of thousands of Hmong in the 1970s became a catalyst for Hmong literacy’s rise, Vang-Moua explained. Hmong refugees in the U.S. and in refugee camps in Thailand initially communicated by recording messages on cassette tapes, but that system was difficult to sustain. “It was very expensive,” she said, “so everyone that could learn (to write) tried to learn.”

The introduction of cellphones slowed the uptake of Hmong writing, but only briefly. “Social media has boosted the need to read and write Hmong,” Vang-Moua said, because online networks connected Hmong speakers in the U.S. with Hmong speakers in Southeast Asia or Europe — primarily on text-based platforms like Facebook. The Latin-based script used by American Hmong speakers is now replacing versions of written Hmong developed independently in China and Vietnam, she added, because of the cultural influence of the diaspora in the U.S.

The emergence of Hmong language immersion schools further boosted the written language, Vang-Moua added. Milwaukee’s Hmong American Peace Academy, the first of its kind in Wisconsin, opened in 2004 with 200 students; Appleton’s Hmong American Immersion School opened last year. 

Meanwhile, some Hmong groups have begun using the script to preserve community elders’ oral traditions in written form. 

Given the unpredictable trajectory of Hmong literacy, Vang-Moua noted that the project underway in Milwaukee’s Rohingya community still has time to find its footing. “I’ve often wondered how it all felt” in the early stages of Hmong language education,” she said. “Here we are, talking about the same things, just with a different community.”

Can the effort last?

A Rohingya charter school is a distant goal for Anwar and Trumbull. An after-school Rohingya class would serve as a trial run, and it could give teenagers a chance to test using written Rohingya in their everyday lives.

But BRCW must also contend with parents’ priorities. Rafik and Salmah, for instance, say Rohingya language education can’t distract from other classes, including religious education. 

They aren’t alone. Mohamed Ibrahim, owner of a Rohingya restaurant and grocery store on Milwaukee’s South Side, sees a practical use for written Rohingya. Though he is Rohingya by ancestry, he grew up speaking Burmese in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital. Rohingya-language educational materials could help him communicate more easily with his Rohingya-speaking customers, Ibrahim said, but he doesn’t have time to study it.

Ibrahim has similar reservations about adding Rohingya language lessons to his children’s routines. “They live in the United States now,” he said. “We have to support our kids in English.”

Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s Rohingya face a new set of hurdles.

The Trump administration’s January 2025 decision to largely end refugee resettlement halted Salmah’s efforts to bring several family members from refugee camps in Bangladesh to Milwaukee. Last year, Anwar sent voice notes to the nonprofit’s WhatsApp group reminding refugees of their rights during run-ins with federal immigration authorities.  And last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began reopening the cases of thousands of refugees admitted under the Biden administration — a policy that could impact many in Milwaukee’s Rohingya community.

Under the circumstances, Anwar and Trumbull aren’t bullish on their project’s short-term prospects. “But when you make things, sometimes they don’t go away,” Trumbull said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated from its original version to add clarifying details.

‘Language lost. Culture lost’: In Milwaukee, a race to keep Rohingya language alive in exile is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Aside from about 15 people who faithfully attend each Sunday morning service, Dodgeville’s Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ used to sit empty most of the week. 

No one filled the rows of wooden pews, gazed at the ornate stained glass windows or found community in the basement fellowship hall and kitchen.

All that empty space reflected a common set of challenges facing communities across America, particularly in rural areas: shrinking church membership, growing loneliness and isolation, and a lack of third spaces to gather.

But in summer 2023, the congregation joined local residents to open Merrimac and Main, a nonprofit community center aiming to directly address those issues. 

How Merrimac and Main began

Rachel Peller and her wife Rebecca Krausert Sykalski had just moved into a housing cooperative east of Dodgeville and were looking for a place with internet access to work remotely. Peller is  the director of Wisconsin Partners, a coalition of local and statewide groups collaborating across sectors, perspectives and communities.

She soon met Shirley Barnes, a longtime Dodgeville resident who chaired Plymouth Congregational’s board of trustees. Barnes had been racking her brain on what to do with her church’s history-rich but mostly vacant building, built in 1907, as its congregation aged and dwindled. 

Within a month, Peller and Barnes joined about two dozen people in the church basement to brainstorm ways to use the space to serve the community. 

“The timing was incredible,” Peller said.

One person suggested a makerspace to foster innovation. Another suggested a program for older adults. After a few more conversations that summer, the group decided on a catchall that enveloped many ideas for the space: a community center. 

“There isn’t one in Dodgeville or anywhere nearby where people can come and just be, come and just exist,” Peller said.

By fall 2023, Merrimac and Main’s organizers held an open house to publicly seek feedback and share their vision — maybe a yoga room, a gallery space with art classes, a lecture hall and live music.

Aided by a grant in 2024, Merrimac and Main, an independent nonprofit that rents the church’s space, launched a four-lecture series and pop-up youth classes.

A space for just about everything 

Merrimac and Main has since tried a bit of everything: sewing classes, cooking classes, a workshop on starting your own cottage food business. 

“Since then, it’s just grown,” Peller said. “It’s been such an amazing project. So many people just show up and they have an idea and they make it happen.”

One of the center’s most successful recurring events, an international potluck, drew a crowd of 75 people who brought dishes representing about 20 countries. 

In addition to one-off events open to anyone, the community center hosts a weekly senior program, a youth program and a recovery meeting, alongside a monthly Spanish conversation group.

Independent of the community center, Plymouth Congregational still holds service every Sunday, but the community center is more frequently in the building, Peller said. 

“Basically our church was empty except on Sundays,” said Jan Helmich, a longtime congregation member and active participant in Merrimac and Main’s senior program. “There weren’t many places in town where people could rent space for a party or something, so we decided to see what we could do about it.”

Retirees find connection  

While the church’s doors have always remained open to anyone on Sundays, Merrimac and Main’s programming has kept people coming through the building throughout the week. 

On a Tuesday morning in January, Helmich sat at a table in the church’s basement rec room joined by nearly a dozen fellow retirees. 

The day’s event featured a visit from the Iowa County Humane Society, whose volunteers brought in two kittens.

Tom DeVoss, who previously served as Iowa County sheriff, was on a walk around the neighborhood when he dropped in and found his wife, Kathy, conversing with the group. It’s good to see what’s going on in the community, to stop in and chitchat, Tom DeVoss said. “It’s kind of a come and go place.” 

Kathy DeVoss, who has lived in Dodgeville for 21 years but still considers herself a newcomer, mentioned a Merrimac and Main event she attended last April where she learned to graft fruit trees. “It was so much fun,” she said. 

Many of the attendees said they enjoyed the new opportunities for socialization.

“I’m not one to sit home,” said Lenore White, a first-time visitor who learned about Merrimac and Main at a local morning exercise class. “I want to get out and meet people.” 

After school, a different kind of space

On a Tuesday afternoon in February, excited screams from children in an after-school program filled a room that on other days hosts the more reserved senior program.  

Fifth graders Arlo Lockard and Henry Wepking shared a chair in a connecting room playing games on a smartphone. Arlo’s sister and another middle school girl sat at a table in the main room talking to one another.

Krausert Sykalski, Merrimac and Main’s building coordinator and Peller’s wife, rallied the day’s four children to make blankets for the humane society out of donated materials. Eight children usually attend each week, but half that day were instead participating in a school play, Krausert Sykalski said.

Sitting on the checkered floor, Arlo and Henry got to work. They took turns wielding a measuring tape and scissors, deftly cutting a blanket down to size. The friends began attending Merrimac and Main last September as soon as they were old enough for the program. They learned about it at Dodgeville Middle School from a cafeteria television that displays announcements.

On a typical day after school, the boys would play video games, participate in seasonal team sports, go fishing, ride their bikes or do chores. Now, they can walk a few blocks from the school to the church for the Tuesday programs. 

“We’re not from here and we don’t have the social network that people who grew up here and went to school here, and either left or never did,” Halee Wepking, Henry’s mother, said while picking him up at the end of the program. “It’s really nice to have things like this for our kids.” 

Originally from Arizona, Wepking and her husband, who is from southwest Wisconsin, moved to Ridgeway in 2016. There, they founded Meadowlark Organics, a farm and flour mill. Wepking said she learned about Merrimac and Main through her friendship with Peller and Sykalski.

Wepking said while there are traditional channels for socialization like sports that her kids participate in, “to have things that are community-oriented and creative and stuff is a real gift, especially for middle school aged kids.” The Wepkings noticed a gap in activities for middle schoolers in Dodgeville, making Merrimac and Main all the more meaningful. 

“I’ve been trying to convince my friends to come, because it would be more fun, and I bet they would enjoy it,” Henry said. 

‘It wasn’t just our church’

Helmich, who was working on another volunteer-based project at the nonprofit while the middle schoolers made blankets, reflected on conversations predating Merrimac and Main about selling the church. After some hesitation initially, Helmich said, the congregation acknowledged the community center as good for everybody.

“We got the community involved, it wasn’t just our church,” Helmich said. 

Merrimac and Main has only grown since opening its doors. The same Tuesday Wisconsin Watch visited its youth program the nonprofit received a United Fund of Iowa County grant to support the free fruits and vegetables it offers during programs. 

Peller and Krausert Sykalski continue to handle center operations, but they attribute much of  Merrimac and Main’s success to engaging so many people to contribute in their own way. 

How to get involved 

Find Merrimac and Main’s calendar of events on its website, and learn more about how to volunteer to lead an activity, host a pop-up event, get the word out or donate.

Merrimac and Main organizers shared this advice for others looking to start community centers:

• Don’t just send an open invitation; personalize your message by directly asking people for what you need. 
• Don’t get stuck trying to make everything perfect; treat early, low-risk events as opportunities to gather information and feedback. 
• Engage people by helping bring their ideas to life. 
• Lean on partnerships with other community organizations.

From empty pews to packed programs: A Driftless area church becomes a multigenerational community hub is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Applause, laughter and cheering reverberated in a Madison auditorium on Thursday as students raced to answer questions during the African American History Academic Challenge. The annual event, a partnership between the Madison Metropolitan School District and the nonprofit 100 Black Men of Madison, Inc., seeks to enhance appreciation and knowledge of Black history and bolster pride and self-worth.

Student teams representing two high schools and a half-dozen middle schools demonstrated knowledge through challenges focused on key events, figures and themes in African American history. McFarland and Verona middle schools also hold the event, with winners advancing to a regional competition on March 14. That contest determines who represents Madison’s 100 Black Men chapter on a national stage in New York City. 

As the middle school competition unfolded in the Doyle Administration Building, Sennett Middle School teacher Johnny Kennedy pumped her fist as she cheered on the students she coached. 

“I’m so proud of them,” Kennedy said. 

Her group of seventh and eighth graders had practiced since November. Some had competed last year without advancing, but they immediately knew they wanted to try again this year. James C. Wright Middle School ultimately advanced. 

During the separate high school contest that Robert M. La Follette High School won, “Coach O” Anderson, a Madison West High School student engagement specialist, said she learned about the event when her son Micah advanced to the national finals in Las Vegas during his eighth grade year in 2018. 

High schoolers tend to lag behind middle schoolers in participation. Anderson aimed to ramp up the same level of excitement among high schoolers that younger students display. She aims to engage more than just the “usual kids who get the opportunities” — like those already earning A’s in history and taking AP courses. 

“I wanted the regular kids who don’t necessarily see themselves involved like this to have an opportunity,” she said. Her main motivation is watching her students put themselves in “transformational situations,” she added.

African American History Academic Challenge encourages pride, learning among Madison students is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.