Let’s Talk, Marathon County
Let’s Talk, Marathon County was a multi-year deliberative dialogue program led by the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service (WIPPS) from 2023 to 2025. The initiative brought together nearly 100 politically and demographically diverse residents from across Marathon County to engage in meaningful, small-group conversations on complex public issues. By creating structured spaces for discussion, the program aimed to foster understanding across differences and strengthen civic connection within the community.
Over the course of two years, participants met in moderator-led dialogues to discuss topics such as youth mental health, homelessness, immigration, childcare, voting and U.S. elections, and firearms. Each dialogue encouraged participants to consider trade-offs and differing viewpoints while exploring constructive solutions to local and national challenges.
Are you interested in using the Let’s Talk format to address difficult issues at your organization? Reach out to us at info@wipps.org!
Below you’ll find a video overview, along with reports from each dialogue and the program as a whole.
Let’s Talk, Marathon County Final Report
In October 2025, WIPPS released the final report for Let’s Talk, Marathon County.
How Should We Prevent Gun Deaths in Our Communities?
In Summer 2025, WIPPS held dialogues about gun safety. See below for the reports from this series:
How do we ensure that families in Marathon County have access to safe, quality, affordable child care?
In March 2025, WIPPS held dialogues about child care in the United States. See below for the reports from this series:
- Key Findings
- Executive Summary
- Issue guide – How do we ensure that families in Marathon County have access to safe, quality, affordable child care?
How Do We Manage Immigration In Our Country?
In Winter 2024, WIPPS held dialogues about managing immigration in the United States. See below for the reports from this series:
Voting and the U.S. Presidential Election System
In Fall 2024, dialogues were held about how we conduct elections — including security, integrity, and procedures. See below for the reports from this series.
How Do We Address Homelessness In Our Communities?
In March 2024, WIPPS conducted the second set of dialogues, this time on the topic of homelessness. The reports from this series can be found below.
How Do We Support Youth Mental Health In Our Communities?
The first series of dialogues, held in Fall 2023, focused on the topic of youth mental health. The reports from the first series can be found below.
About the program
Let’s Talk, Marathon County is a program aimed at fostering constructive conversations among residents on a variety of public issues.
Let’s Talk was selected as one of 32 grantees for the Healing Starts Here initiative, a nationwide effort to address and understand divisive forces in communities and promote healing. This initiative was funded by New Pluralists, an organization committed to helping Americans recognize our shared humanity, embrace our differences, and solve challenges together. WIPPS was chosen from a pool of almost 800 applicants.
Like much of America, Central Wisconsin is beset by political division, magnified by digital media, which often portrays citizens in a constant state of disagreement around public issues with a shrinking middle ground. Social and popular media offer podiums to the loudest, most persistent voices, which typically represent the opposite poles of the political spectrum. However, research shows that most Americans do not fall neatly into one political party or the other. A Pew Research poll published in April of 2023 revealed that just 26% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the current Congress.
The Let’s Talk conversations used a deliberative dialogue process to facilitate conversations among community members. Deliberation—sometimes called “choice work”—is a way for the public to weigh together various approaches to solving problems and find courses of action consistent with what communities and individuals hold valuable. Deliberation is more than simply raising and discussing important issues in a public setting. Genuine public deliberation is a thoughtful public process by which communities and stakeholders learn from one another and strive to come to judgment together about real policy matters. This form of public dialogue is not far removed from what citizens, including elected officials, routinely do every day. However, constructive dialogue is frequently drowned out by incivility and hyper-politicization of issues in public spaces.
Advocates of deliberation seek to grow the practice so that public deliberation becomes a healthy and realistic way to create spaces for individuals and communities to work through complex issues and come to common ground on difficult policy choices. Deliberation is, therefore, public work—that is, work by the public, for public purposes. While public deliberation will not address or solve all community problems (nor erase fundamental conflicts in values), it remains an important component of healthy democratic practice and an avenue for residents to become involved in public policy. It also offers a vehicle for individuals to learn more about complex issues and the real tradeoffs that different approaches to community problems entail.
Project Funding
This project was fully funded by New Pluralists and no taxpayer dollars were used for this project.
Project Goals:
- Create spaces for residents of Central Wisconsin to address issues that matter in a civil and constructive manner;
- Build and sustain a community culture of civil dialogue around important issues;
- Improve our feelings of trust for fellow residents despite our different viewpoints;
- Train a local group of skilled facilitators who are prepared to address issues as the need arises.
