Our contract work

Engage Winona’s contract services are a one-stop-shop for engagement solutions. We connect organizations with the communities, markets, and clients they serve to take on challenges, get honest feedback on strategic initiatives and projects, communicate information to create shared understanding, and co-create ideas and solutions. We bring communities together in innovative, creative and productive ways, reaching far beyond the usual suspects to gather honest input from a wide array of diverse voices.

Our work is specific to the Winona area. Engage Winona’s deep roots mean we understand the networks, politics, histories, relationships, and other factors that influence community change work like no outside consultant could.

Double the benefit for your organization. You get the engagement work and outcomes you need — while directly supporting community transformation. Engage Winona, as a mission-driven nonprofit, relies on contract projects to support its work of leading civic engagement and community-problem solving initiatives and providing backbone support to changemaking individuals, groups and organizations transforming our community, with programs that are free and open to all. We promote our contract partners as major donors!

We also offer a range of facilitation and workshop services. We can assist you with strategic planning and visioning, board and leadership development, design of programs and services, conflict management and mediation, community organizing workshops, and more. Our work and process is co-created by the communities and organizations we collaborate with.

Consulting services

  • Connect with communities or markets you serve to get honest input and ideas on strategic changes, projects, and initiatives

  • Identify community capacity, need, and opportunity for programs or projects

  • Strategies to help you better serve and engage your communities, audiences or clients

  • Build and sustain high-functioning networks within the communities you serve

  • Collaborate with your communities to work together to take on complex challenges

  • Facilitate productive, futures-oriented community conversations on any topic

  • Co-create products, programs, and projects in collaboration with communities

  • Hosting interactive events to launch projects or initiatives with energy, enthusiasm, and investment from your communities

  • Integrating community input, buy-in and ideas into all stages of project management and planning

  • Helping your organization become community-engaged by facilitating connections to critical resources (ideas, people, organizations) and relationships

  • Strategies to address conflict, and facilitated healing processes with groups

  • Building and executing community-focused communication plans to ensure the necessary stakeholders and communities are in the loop at every stage of a project



Selected clients

Engagement solutions

  • Minnesota Marine Art Museum — Art is For Everyone: Welcoming local audiences into the museum by addressing barriers and co-creating special events and activities

  • Winona State University — Community outreach and visioning for a proposed athletic and regional events center

  • Saint Mary’s University Page Theatre — Strengthening campus and community audiences, creating local collaborations for arts programming

  • Winona County Historical Society — Collaborating with the community to co-create stories, exhibits, and interactive features for a reimagined main exhibit hall

Facilitation and project management solutions

  • City of Winona Alternative Response Group – Facilitating a stakeholder group through conflict to develop a shared vision and consensus around creating a crisis response team to provide a complement to policing.

  • Minnesota Presenters Network – Building collaborative networks, defining strategic advocacy roles in state policymaking for a statewide group of arts and culture presenters

  • City of Winona – Self-Change For Collective Transformation, an immersive inner work and inclusive civic engagement program for a cohort of emerging leaders

  • Women’s Resource Center – Building board capacity, visioning collaborative programming to meet changing needs

  • Home and Community Options – Interactive workshop to create collective leadership and self-healing skills for full-time staff amid organizational change

  • Winona Fine Arts Commission – Reimagining and visioning roles and capacities in championing arts and culture initiatives



Testimonials

“(Engage Winona) has forever changed the way I will think about community engagement. We learned so much through working with EW that I am still digesting it all. The final report was so beautiful, comprehensive, and useful that we will refer to it for years to come.” — Heather Casper, Minnesota Marine Art Museum

“Working with Engage Winona helped us to reach more people throughout the community. Instead of our typical participants or demographic, the project went beyond our ‘same old, same old.’” — Malia Fox, Winona Friendship Center

“Our work with Engage Winona dramatically impacted our ability to incorporate community needs and interests into our programming process. Because we have a very small staff and limited capacity, Engage Winona was instrumental in gathering the information we never would have been able to gather on our own.” — Theresa Remick, Saint Mary’s University Page Theatre



Contact

Our work and services are limited only by creative thinking; we’re always happy to sit down for a free consultation and talk through how we may be able to help.

Contact: engage@engagewinona.org | 507-312-9133