Before last year, Stephanie Baerwolf, an integrative biology major, had never designed a website. Now, the Friends of Koshkonong Creek has a functional and appealing webpage that she created. Through the UniverCity Alliance, an organization that allows UW students, including many in the College of Letters & Science, to use their classroom experiences to help local governments in Wisconsin cities address issues such as economic development, youth justice, and sustainability, Baerwolf was able to not only learn new skills, but use them to benefit real communities.

Baerwolf, 40, was a student in Geography 309; People, Land and Food: Comparative Study of Agriculture Systems last spring — her first semester at UW. For her final project, she worked with Friends of Koshkonong Creek, an alliance of farmers “striving for a healthier and more functional creek,” to create a website that would share their message and goals for the future. The website and a long-term engineering plan she and the farmers collaborated to produce that addressed environmental, structural and geotechnical concerns, were included in her final grade for the class. Baerwolf says the opportunity to learn new skills in a professional environment was impactful.
“It's helpful to learn how to professionally navigate a collaboration,” Baerwolf says. “Doing something new that you've never done before, like web page design, I think is really a good thing. I definitely think it was informative, and I can use those skills in the future.”
Baerwolf is one of more than 300 students across 25 academic courses at UW-Madison who have participated in the UniverCity Alliance in 2022. While all involved courses offer hands-on experiences for students, the community projects go deeper. Classes offered by the Department of Psychology, taught by faculty associate Patricia Coffey, worked with Brown County to enact ways for inmates to re-enter society after being released from jail, and helped youth correctional facilities establish more culturally responsive business practices. Students within the School of Journalism and Mass Communications worked with Evjue Centennial Professor Doug Mcleod to rethink tourism brochures and marketing campaigns for Pepin County.
Gavin Luter, the managing director for the UniverCity Alliance, says that the program helps students embrace education and real-world opportunities by going back to the roots of the Wisconsin Idea.
“When you really look at the history of the Wisconsin idea and why it was created, it was the idea of “How can the University of Wisconsin help localities be able to manage their own affairs?”” says Luter. “We have a lot of students who are wanting to get real experiences. We have faculty who want to make their work impactful, and we have communities who have a lot of wisdom to offer, and also could benefit from student work and research.”
That last part is true even in Madison. This coming semester, students in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture are set to help the City of Madison research the factors that are driving a recent crunch in the student rental housing market.
UniverCity Alliance was recently named a regional winner of the 2022 W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. Luter says he hopes the award will help bring awareness and interest to the program in the future.
“We're hoping to be able to leverage this to get more faculty engaged, get a little bit more attention from the university to give us a bigger platform to get out there and do meaningful work,” he says. “We hope to continue to have more people who wake up and realize that their content could actually help meet community needs.”