2025-26 Leadership Chippewa Falls Community Impact Projects

Chippewa Falls has a long tradition of strong leadership across its businesses and community. As our region continues to grow and evolve, the need for informed, engaged, and forward-thinking leaders is more important than ever. The Leadership Chippewa Falls Program is designed to cultivate those leaders through immersive, hands-on experiences, to gain a deeper understanding of the key issues, industries, and opportunities shaping the Chippewa Valley.

Each session highlights a different sector of the community, while providing direct access to influential leaders and decision-makers. Sectors include healthcare, government, infrastructure, education, community service and more. Graduates leave the program with expanded networks, increased confidence, and a broader perspective, equipping them to take on leadership roles within their organizations to make meaningful impacts in the community.

    
    

While the program acquaints participants with a broad understanding of issues and civic challenges facing our community, those in the class are given the opportunity to dig deeper to identify and tackle one issue, working in small groups to come up with a solution. Community Impact Projects presented by this year’s class brought a variety of needs to the table with potential solutions, some brought to life right here in our community.

Chippewa Champions
Reece Kellnhofer, Sarah Gordee, Jamey Stueber, Nevada Hanson

Chippewa Champions focuses on building awareness and engagement for the Chippewa Area History Center, working alongside their marketing team. This project helped the History Center build an online presence, develop potential partnerships to aid event promotion, and focused on efforts to target families in Chippewa Falls. Overall, the goal is to maintain community interest through repeat visitors and diversifying efforts to help build a sustainable future for Chippewa Area History Center.

Chippewa Connect
Christa Draeger, Melissa Hester, Kalib Hebert, Cody Monson

Chippewa Connect is a concept proposal of a centralized community resource hub for residents. This digital platform would provide resources for food assistance, housing & utilities, healthcare and mental healthcare, and transportation. With the need to have a central location for various resources, Chippewa Connect would help provide access to trusted information. With this information currently offered through various agencies in the community, the goal would be to join bring these resources together to one platform, Chippewa Connect.

Meaningful Metrics
Sara Denure, Anastasia Stueber, Mike Severson, Seth Sundeen

With the need for community engagement in surveys to help improve quality of life for residents, Meaningful Metrics is a community engagement playbook for the Chippewa Valley. The playbook equips Chippewa Valley leaders with actionable strategies to capture the voices of underrepresented groups and move beyond date collection to build a stronger community. With intentional efforts on audience, strategies include meeting target audiences where they are (physically and digitally), survey designs that gain desired data, and pairing survey locations with human interaction for higher engagement. This playbook can be used by various employers, industries, and user groups, and modified to fit their parameters.

 


Nexus 360
Kendall Baumgartner, Paul Jerrett, Shannon Beranek, Anthony Janicki

Nexus 360 is a concept community recreation center that could offer shared facilities and resources for current businesses and organizations, to promote healthy living, collaboration, and community engagement. With the goal of reducing operating costs for multiple entities, this would enable more affordable, accessible services for the community. This project looked at current facilities in Chippewa Falls, another similar size community in Wisconsin that offers such facility, and what the future could look like in making Nexus 360 a part of the community.

 


Play It Forward: Sports Box
Liz Seubert, Collin Danielson, Adam Berg, Jessie Peterson

Play It Forward Sports Box took conversation to concept, to real community impact. Working alongside the Village of Lake Hallie, this group’s project sparked from a Leadership session where a need for access to outdoor play for kids was identified. Sports Boxes will be placed in four Lake Hallie park locations for public use and continued request for equipment donations. Various local business are continuing to support the construction and maintenance of these boxes, that help Play It Forward for local families.

 


Seed Program
Brandon Cesafsky, Sondra Knapcik, Tammy Stone

The Seed Program is a youth service and leadership pathway for local clubs, to help cultivate the next generation of service. This program encourages youth volunteerism, recognizes service contributions, and creates a leadership pathway for young people ages 6-18 throughout the Chippewa Valley. It also creates an opportunity to re-engage inactive members while introducing younger families to local clubs, helping build long-term participation and growth. This concept welcomes local clubs or organizations to pilot the program to start engaging local youth with their current members, focusing on the impacts of community service, planting the seeds of service.