Ashland County

Ashland County Health and Human Services

7/1/2025-6/30/2026

Funds will be used by Ashland County Human Services - SPARK Program to sustain and evolve IGNITE, a trauma-informed, after-school enrichment program designed to support older youth seeking deeper, more focused engagement. The project will serve high-risk and marginalized teens in Ashland County who have not found belonging in traditional settings. 

IGNITE creates a space where youth can grow into the next phase of support--developing identity, leadership, and creative skills in a culturally grounded environment. Previously limited to a small, school-referred population, IGNITE will now be open to all teens in the region, extending access to hands-on learning, cultural enrichment, peer mentorship, and family-inclusive workshops. This expansion ensures that older youth don't outgrow their support system, but instead grow deeper into it--finding connection, purpose, and opportunity at a critical stage of development. 

Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians

10/1/2024-9/30/2025

Bad River member Joseph Gokee, with UW-EX educator, Joy Schelble, have led baaga'adowewin (native lacrosse) for Bad River for 9 years. It began as a way to bring together a community grieving from a police shooting, and is now a promising movement to bring back the "Creator's Game." The youth who have been playing the medicine game the longest are now in their late teens, taking on leadership roles within the hosting of games and teaching younger players. The project uses funding to assist in this leadership development, family involvement, and juvenile delinquency prevention in rural northern Wisconsin through sport, culture, and mentorship.

Ashland County Health and Human Services 

4/1/2022-6/30/2024

Over the past 3 years, Ashland County has developed and implemented very successful teen mentoring program called SPARK. SPARK served 196 youth from the Ashland School District and the Bad River Ojibwe Reservation in 2021. The program is open to all youth ages 12-18, but primarily serves at-risk youth from Ashland Middle School and High School. This funding will expand the capacity of the SPARK program in several ways: Additional staff capacity to partner with the school district to provide in-school mentoring during the school day; Additional staff capacity to expand programming days and hours. By leveraging the relationships that SPARK staff have built with the district’s students, school behavioral referrals and referrals to law enforcement could be reduced if our mentors were in the schools regularly.