The annual Thanks for Giving Dinner, which will be held tonight from 5:30-7 p.m., is a chance for the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center to give thanks to the community and sponsors who give their time, talent and money to help its programming throughout the year.
“What I really love about this dinner is seeing people get together, people singing, dancing, coming together. The topic of the conversation is often about how we can support each other,” Hedi Rudd, the director of the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center, tells Madison365. “It’s a really good vibe. This event is all about camaraderie, but you’re also learning something and meeting new people and eating some really good food.”
The Badger Rock Neighborhood Center hosts community events, workshops, a free monthly dinner and seasonal market, and provides a space for the community to gather for meetings or programs. It is co-located with Badger Rock Middle School and Lori Mann Carey Elementary School (formerly Southside) on Madison’s South Side.
“We host CommUNITY Dinners every month throughout the school year when school is in session, and then in the summer, we host markets instead,” Rudd says. “The annual Thanks for Giving Dinner is where we thank all of our community, our sponsors, donors, and the people who spent time with us during our Heritage Month Series … all of the community members who lend their expertise and knowledge.”
Tonight’s annual Thanks for Giving Dinner will honor Native American Heritage Month with food, fun activities and guests.
“We’ll have some music at the kickoff, and then there’ll be some workshops,” Rudd says. “Lillian White Eagle and Jennifer White Eagle are going to do Ho-Chunk beading and finger weaving, and then Dylan Prescott is going to do the moccasin game.”
“We will be doing a food drive, too, during Friday’s dinner for our food pantry,” she adds. Badger Rock Neighborhood Center offers a bi-weekly food pantry for over 100 families in partnership with Badger Rock Middle School and Second Harvest Food Bank. 
The Dan Walkner Band will provide music at the event and the work of Badger Rock Middle School students will be on display for everybody to see. The free dinner will be prepared by Chef Kipp Thomas, Kim Crowley and Rooted youth employees.
“Kim Crowley will be doing a wild rice casserole and we will also have some Indian tacos,” Rudd says. “[Chef] Kipp [Thomas] will, of course, be there doing his thing.
“The youth will be doing a collard green tasting,” Rudd adds. “They grow different collard greens throughout the year, and then they do a tasting so that we can figure out which ones people want us to continue to grow.”
Badger Rock is also home to the Badger Rock Community Gardens and Badger Rock Urban Farm green spaces, which have become a cornerstone for neighborhood connection and self-reliance. Badger Rock offers seasonal, summer youth, and special activities programming, often in collaboration with local partners, that helps neighbors enrich their lives through the pursuit of new skills and interests, as well as form connections within the neighborhood.
“We’re just trying to get the community to see it as a place where they can have events and come and use the space,” Rudd says. “So if there are other community groups or people who want to hold meetings or have workshops and things like that, we’re there for them to do that.”
(Photo by Hedi Rudd)
Rudd says to make sure that you come hungry to tonight’s Thanks for Giving Dinner because “there’s going to be lots of food.”
“This is just such a great opportunity for people to come together and break bread with each other and to support each other,” she says. “It’s funny because some years when we hold this event, it is right after the election … so it’s kind of like a healing space and a place to come together and talk.
“Although we don’t have that this year, we do have a lot that the community is going through and thinking about and this is an opportunity to transcend political lines and just come together and be in community together. One of our core parts of our mission is creating a space for the community to come and collaborate and be together.”
