Dear C21 Community,
Last February, C21 was thrilled to receive a Major Grant from Wisconsin Humanities to support our May 3rd event, Attention Activism with the Strother School of Radical Attention, and to expand Strother’s attention-focused activities into community sites around the city of Milwaukee. At a time when our increasingly short attention spans push us to distraction and detachment from the people around us and the spaces in which we live, C21 embarked on a partnership with the Strother School and with Milwaukee’s oldest civic organization, the Milwaukee Turners, to offer two participatory workshops aimed at strengthening the sustained focus necessary to build long-term support networks and shared spaces of care across the embodied sites and diverse communities of our city.
On the evening of April 2, 2025, Wisconsin Humanities alerted all their grantees that funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supported our program-specific award as well the organization’s general operating fund, was canceled effective immediately and without prior notice. As Wisconsin Humanities has made clear: the loss of NEH funding to Wisconsin Humanities and other state humanities councils will harm communities in every congressional district and contribute to the erasure of our shared humanity and hopes for democracy. Without NEH support, Wisconsin Humanities, which has supported humanities programming across the state for over 50 years, will likely close.
While C21 has just received a special exemption that momentarily bypasses our university-wide funding freeze so that we can carry on with, and self-fund, our May 3rd attention activism workshops, we ask you to take the following actions against the dismantling of the NEH:
- Fill out this form to send an email directly to your congressional representative.
- Donate to Wisconsin Humanities to help prevent their closure as they await further notice and/or action from Congress.
We also hope that you will join us on May 3 to take part in slowing down and paying attention to each other and our city. Space is for this event is limited, and first-come, first-serve, so please register here.
Thank you for engaging with and supporting us,
Jennifer Johung, C21 Director