The Public Humanities Exchange program (HEX and HEX-U) at the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities funds innovative public humanities projects that forge partnerships between community organizations and UW-Madison students.
The following blog post, written by past HEX Scholar Kate Westaby (recent PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW-Madison), highlights her HEX project, Building a Foundation for the Young Parent Collective.
The Young Parent Collective is an organization—led by teen and young parents—that aims to improve higher education and well-being disparities, and challenge the historical stigma faced by young parents. This organization emerged from Kate Westaby’s participatory action research dissertation to sustain the community that was built and leverage it to sustain change. The goal of Westaby’s project is for young parents to build a logo and website and conduct focus groups in a collective approach to build a foundation for their work to be recognized, supported, and shared with others.
It was a cold winter day in my rural hometown in central Wisconsin when the nurse at the clinic broke the news. I was sixteen and pregnant, and this wasn’t an MTV show. I felt the blood drain from my face and remember thinking that my life was over and that my dreams of going to college (the first in my family to do so) would not be realized. I was told my life would have a negative and challenging trajectory as a result of becoming a teen parent. In reality, being a young parent introduced delays and challenges, but not because of me or my son. Rather, the societal and community context I was living in introduced challenges that delayed my progress.
This understanding—that our conditions and context influence our outcomes—is foundational to the Young Parent Collective (YPC). This organization emerged from a gathering of people with a shared identity. Teen and young parents were validated in a space where we could feel relief from the stigma surrounding our parenting status. This gathering was a part of my dissertation research that engaged young parents in interpreting higher education inequities. In our conversations, other young parents described wanting to address and challenge these educational inequities, which sparked the creation of the YPC organization.
We are now harnessing the power of young parents to challenge the systems and contexts that make young parenting so challenging. However, we started small. As a new and emerging organization, we needed to be seen as legitimate to receive funding and support. As a doctoral student, I heard about the Center for Humanities’ Public Humanities Exchange (HEX) grant through a Morgridge Center for Public Service Bagels and Research event. With guidance from Danielle Weindling, Assistant Director of the Center for Humanities, we envisioned creating a dynamic platform to host research and system- and narrative-shifting information and where young parents could find resources and access vital information. The HEX grant allowed us to partner with Cassie Griffin, a young parent, on website development who brought our vision to life. Together, we crafted a visually appealing website that serves as the central hub for the Collective. We also engaged young parents in voting on logos and branding, resulting in our “optimistic” logo.
The initial investment of the HEX grant acted as the perfect springboard for additional funding.
In 2024, the Young Parent Collective was awarded two grants totaling $140,000. In the first, an incubator grant from the Healthy Teen Network, three young parents are designing a prototype to address the stigma in healthcare that young parents experience. The second grant is funding from the Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment, with partners in the Madison Metropolitan School District and Public Health Madison & Dane County. We are implementing a school-based support model that integrates health, mental health, and educational services for teen parents while they are in school. These grants are a huge step forward in our vision that all young parents can achieve educational dreams, career goals, and health and well-being for themselves and their children.
This journey, from a simple idea to putting ideas to practice, highlights the power of seed funding. The HEX grant was instrumental in allowing us to build legitimacy for the YPC. It wasn’t just about the money; it was about the belief in our vision and the support to take that first crucial step. To the HEX program, thank you for planting the seed that allowed the Young Parent Collective to bloom. We’re excited to see what the future holds. Sign up for our newsletter to stay tuned for updates about our programming or reach out to me for more information about how you can get involved or donate!