Build a page for each category

I’m trying to use WP to create a site for my entire organization. I have found this plugin (https://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/home-page-control/) which allows me to relegate my weblog page to foo.com/blog then use other pages for things like foo.com/about_us and foo.com/contact. That plugin is perfect for my needs.

Now, I need a way to use WP’s categories to create, in essence, different blog pages. For example, I would like all posts in the “news” category to show us on foo.com/news and all posts in the “programs” category to show up on foo.com/programs.

I can do this now using the pages WP auto-builds for each catagory, but those pages contain only excerpts (and I don’t know how to get those pages into my header nav bar).

Is there a way to do what I want?