Capturing real conversation in Wisconsin

The Local Voices Network welcomes all of Wisconsin to listen, learn, speak and be heard. More than fifty Conversation Corps hosts are organizing and guiding hundreds of small-group conversations throughout the city. Join us and share your thoughts and stories about life in Wisconsin.

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There are many ways that you can get involved with the Local Voices Network!

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LVN Wisconsin Background

Our goal is to bring the perspectives and concerns of ordinary citizens to light, as a way to connect members of a community to one another; to promote civic engagement; and to encourage journalism that reflects and responds to local issues.

LVN Wisconsin is a collaboration between the non-profit Cortico, Madison Public Library and a growing number of individuals and institutions in the greater Madison area. While some parts of LVN have been piloted in other parts of the country, this is the first implementation of the full public conversation network.

Several Madison media outlets, including the Cap Times as an LVN Wisconsin partner, plan to employ conversation content in their local reporting -- with our goal being to fuel stories that are truer reflections of life on the ground throughout all Wisconsin communities. See below for links to some of the stories they've written.

Dozens of conversation hosts have stepped forward to form our LVN Wisconsin Conversation Corps. Corps members have volunteered to be trained on LVN, to recruit participants from their respective communities and to organize and host multiple group conversations.

We invite local policy-makers to listen to LVN Wisconsin conversations and incorporate (often under-heard) community voices and concerns into their policy and budget priorities -- with our goal being to surface relevant new issues onto the public agenda.