February 27, 2026
WiLEAD labs are now underway, and across Wisconsin, students, professors, community organizers, and local leaders are rolling up their sleeves to bridge divides and co-create solutions to the state’s most pressing environmental challenges. Each lab is a living experiment in how people can come together—across sectors, generations, and differences—to tackle shared problems while strengthening local participation, restoring trust, and shifting narratives about what’s possible when collective action works at the community level.
Environmental challenges like clean water, soil health, and waste have become flashpoints in public life, often dividing neighbors and eroding confidence in public institutions. WiLEAD responds by pairing classroom learning with community partnership, empowering a new generation of leaders to combine civic action with everyday problem-solving. Each lab follows a similar rhythm: identify a shared challenge, listen deeply to those closest to it, co-design small “lean experiments” that can be tested quickly, and reflect together on what was learned. It’s not about perfect solutions, but about asking better questions, learning what works (and what doesn’t), and practicing civic engagement, active listening, and depolarization in real time.
Meet the Labs
1 | The UWO Innovation Lab
The flagship WiLEAD lab is rooted at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and runs across the 2025–2026 academic year. The lab brings together students, local organizations, and community members in the Fox Valley region.
Twenty-four Environmental Studies students spent the fall semester mapping Wisconsin’s environmental landscape around five issues they chose:
- Regenerative agriculture
- Invasive species management
- Food waste
- Drinking water pollution
- Road salt pollution
These students dove deep into the history, policies (or a lack thereof), stakeholders, and narratives surrounding the issues. They grappled with divergence of priorities and perspectives as they unpacked the complexities of the issues at hand. The fall road salt team made it on their local news for their work on this issue.
The fall students also built relationships with community partners who are continuing the work with Sociology students and community members this spring, including campus dining staff, campus grounds crew, a local food co-operative, a road salt non-profit, a campus science lab, and a farmer’s union. The spring cohort of twenty-nine students has divided into teams to work on each of the five topics, and are currently co-designing and testing small-scale experiments addressing perception and behavior change to advance these issues. Some of their early ideas include providing free well water testing kits to households, a “Buckthorn Bash” community event on campus, determining what food is excess in campus dining halls and why, an event with trivia and locally-sourced food, and experimenting with salt alternatives on campus.
2 | The Lakeland Action Lab
The Lakeland Action Lab is also underway this spring at Lakeland University. This lab includes students from both an Environmental Consumption course and a Mis/Dis-information course and brings together students, local organizations, and community members in Sheboygan County.
These seventeen students decided to form teams related to the following five topics:
- Food waste on and off campus
- Overpopulation of deer
- Declining population of pollinators (bats and hummingbirds)
- Examining how native plants improve water quality
- Invasive plant species
Community partners involved with this group of students include campus facilities staff, a local environmental park, a farm-to-community non-profit, and a manufacturing company. Some of their early ideas include composting efforts on and off campus, trapping deer, building bat houses, planting native plants near waterways, and working with local nurseries to not sell invasive plants in the area.
3 | The Indigenous Studies Lab
A third WiLEAD lab is happening at UWO, as part of the Indigenous Studies Program. These students and community partners are exploring environmental challenges through an Indigenous lens with the aim of re-indigenizing campus, especially given the history of the land occupied by the university.
Six total students have divided into two groups:
- Indigenous gardens and medicinal plants
- Accountability and reconciliation
Unlike the other labs, which are tied to specific courses, students in this lab are either doing the work as part of an independent study or volunteering their time. Ideas brewing in this lab are to work with campus facilities to create an indigenous garden on campus, plant sweetgrass (a sacred indigenous plant) in the community, and work with UWO staff to ensure inclusion is felt on campus.
Learning in Motion
The format of the labs really supports action learning:
- Relationship-first design creates opportunities for new partnerships and space for honest dialogue. Students, professors, community partners, university labs, farmers, and others are actively joining in to make progress on the chosen issues. Teams are tasked with outreach and involvement of others beyond their direct teams and partners.
- Allowing participants to choose topics uncovers surprising complexities surrounding environmental issues. The food waste team at UWO discovered broken trust between the University and surrounding businesses due to abruptly shutting down a biodigestor on campus, even though all parties have the same goal of keeping food waste out of landfills.
- Learning by doing allows for adaptations along the way. The regenerative agriculture team in the UWO Innovation Lab started by focusing on agroforestry and, after talking with farmers, realized it’s not a viable solution for most because it’s expensive and requires new machinery.
- Co-design empowers everyone to see themselves as part of the solution. Many people working on WiLEAD are not scientists or environmentalists. They are local non-profits, campus maintenance or dining staff, farmers, sociology students, indigenous studies students, or liberal arts students. The program allows for everyone to get involved and all perspectives to be heard.
As Root Change and the Whitburn Center for Governance and Policy Research at UWO continue to expand WiLEAD, we’re reminded that transformation rarely begins with policy alone, but with people willing to come together, test ideas, and learn out loud. WiLEAD is more than a program, acting instead as a living demonstration that when people learn, act, and lead together, communities thrive and democracy grows stronger.
