About
Gathering places, by design.
The Wisconsin Foundation builds community gathering places - parks, town squares, trails and civic buildings - and it builds them to be catalysts. A square draws events; events draw people; people draw investment. The goal is never the ribbon-cutting. It is what the place sets in motion afterward.
How the Foundation works
The Foundation funds, builds and donates public space. Some projects it developed and gave outright - it assembled the land, cleared it, built or organized the building of what stands there, and handed it to the public. Others it supported as a donor, paying for a playground, a gymnasium or a classroom inside someone else’s project.
This site says which is which, on every project. Where the record is thin, the entry says less. That distinction matters to the Foundation and it should matter to you: it is the difference between a builder and a checkbook, and the Foundation has been both, deliberately, depending on what a place needed.
The thesis
Why catalysts
The Foundation looks for catalyst developments: projects that will draw other capital in and lead to further improvements in a neighborhood. A gift that ends when the check clears is a smaller thing than a gift that makes the next ten possible. So the test is not what a place costs. It is what the place starts.
That is the whole rationale, and the record bears it out. What follows is not what the Foundation built; it is what others went on to build afterward.
The children’s zoo
Donations the founder raised, and a good deal of his own time, produced the Carousel Building. The building then became the catalyst for the redevelopment of the entire zoo.
Tenney Park
After the John Wall Family Pavilion was built, the city invested millions more to rebuild the park’s road system, its paths and its tennis courts, and to add new bike paths. None of that would have happened without the new pavilion.
The parks
Each one serves thousands of community members, and each has prompted its city, and other donors, to put further money into the ground around it.
The founder
Terrence R. Wall is a Madison developer and an Eagle Scout, and has taught real estate at the Wisconsin School of Business. The projects on this site are the record; it speaks for itself.
Board and leadership
Terrence R. Wall
Founder