News

Feeding families, supporting volunteers

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the St. Vincent De Paul Food Pantry on Fish Hatchery Road in Madison will be extra busy. The pantry will be bustling with families picking out items for their Thanksgiving meals. Ernie Stetenfeld, Associate Executive Director of St. Vincent De Paul of Madison, expects it to be the busiest day …

Farley Center goes above and beyond to serve student volunteers

UW–Madison senior Haley Spranger is a team leader with the Badger Volunteers program through the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her team serves weekly at the Linda and Gene Farley Center for Peace, Justice and Sustainability just outside of Madison. Haley explains why the Farley Center has meant so much to her and her volunteer team. The …

Journalism for Racial Justice joins Service Learning courses for Spring 2016

A new course will be offered next semester that will encourage students to develop an appreciation for the grassroots connection between journalism, local community and democracy. This Service Learning course is titled Journalism for Racial Justice: Amplifying Voices in our Communities and will be taught by Professor Sue Robinson of the School of Journalism and …

New UW-Madison collaboration in Green Bay inspires young writers

On a warm August afternoon this summer, a group a nervously excited young writers took to a small stage at one of Wisconsin’s largest arts festival. Never mind that most of them had never performed their own work before, or that most had never been published just three months earlier. Some read fantastic tales of …

WISC Channel 3 lauds Badger Volunteers in television editorial

Local news station WISC-TV Channel 3 produced an editorial Oct. 22 lauding the Badger Volunteers program as “the Wisconsin Idea in action.” Editorial Director Neil Heinen delivered the 90-second editorial saying “There are a lot of contributions to our world for which the University of Wisconsin–Madison is responsible for that tend to get lost in the political …

Morgridge Center, Morgridge Institute expand science outreach in South Madison

Afterschool Expeditions, a program in which elementary and middle school students engage in structured, hands-on science activities at the Discovery Building, has become an integral part of the outreach programming produced by WARF and the Morgridge Institute for Research in partnership with Science Alliance and numerous UW–Madison groups. Now, with the help of the Morgridge Center …

Kathy Cramer to speak at first ever Crossroads of Ideas

Morgridge Center for Public Service Director and political science professor Kathy Cramer will deliver the inaugural talk of the new Crossroads of Ideas speaker series on Oct. 6. This public lecture series, held at 7 p.m. on the first Tuesday of most months at the Discovery Building, addresses challenging and engaging social science topics such as politics, …

Wisconsin Idea: Bringing environmental education to rural Ecuador

Before they even left for their study abroad program in Ecuador last spring, UW–Madison students Brenna O’Halloran and Lauren Feierstein had already decided they wanted to stay for the summer as well. In a pre-study abroad meeting, Catherine Woodward, a faculty associate in the Nelson Institute as well as president of the Ceiba Foundation for …

Tribal Youth Media connects Bad River Reservation to UW-Madison

Each year, tribal teens on the Bad River (Ojibwe) Reservation in northern Wisconsin learn digital storytelling skills from UW–Madison faculty and students. “Tribal Youth Media” is designed as a knowledge transfer by which UW–Madison students learn about Native American environmental health issues from Bad River elders and culture-keepers and, in turn, share technology skills with Bad …

Record number of UW-Madison students join Badger Volunteers

Fall 2015 will see more UW–Madison students making a difference in their community through volunteering than ever before. Over 780 students registered for Badger Volunteers, UW–Madison’s largest student volunteer program, for the fall 2015 semester. This is the program’s largest-ever cohort. These volunteers will serve in teams of fellow students at the same community partner site …