Noor Jawad has been a healer and an integral part of the alternative medicine community in Milwaukee area for over 35 years. As a founding contributor to CORE El Centro, a current member of the Milwaukee-based Share Collaborative, and the owner of her own private practice offering life coaching, she has helped many people discover new methods of healing.
Jilly Gokalgandhi Works for Equity in Education
Newly elected to the Milwaukee Public School Board representing District 5, Jilly Gokalgandhi has big plans for her new role. Committed to following through on her campaign promises, she is determined to make policies centered around equity, which include funding for special education, multilingual education, and working on restorative justice practices. As an immigrant, she brings a unique lived experience to her role and cares deeply about creating an education system that is inclusive for all students.
Rafael Smith is Helping Restore his North Side
“My passion comes from being a Black man born in the city of Milwaukee during a period of time where deindustrialization was destroying all our institutions that we held dear,” says Rafael Smith, the Civic Engagement Program Director at Citizen Action of Wisconsin. Smith is deeply committed to moving Milwaukee forward on climate action and equity by helping his North Side, community understand how climate change impacts their lives.
For Smith, taking action on climate is personal—it’s not just about saving the planet, it’s also about building back an economy and restoring middle class jobs to areas, like the North Side that were left behind when the industrialization boom ended.
Nelson Soler Makes Business Learning Accessible to the Latino Community
For Latino entrepreneurs in Milwaukee and around the state, barriers exist that simply make it harder for them to start a business than it is for their white counterparts. Until Nelson Soler founded his consulting business called the Multicultural Entrepreneurial Institute (MEI), there were no business trainings available in Spanish in the area and no trainings that took into account the cultural values of Latinos.
Devin Anderson Calls for a Liberated Milwaukee
In March of last year, Devin Anderson joined Wisconsin Voices as the Lead Organizer. In that role, he has motivated underrepresented Milwaukee residents to participate in the political system. Wisconsin Voices is an organization dedicated to harnessing the collective voices of citizens by helping them engage in their democracy. When Anderson joined the team, he fit right into a group of strong outspoken individuals. And now Anderson and the team are demanding reform for George Floyd and black lives through their campaign called Liberate MKE.
Community Organizing Through Food
David Boucher and Stephanie Shipley are celebrating 14 years of connecting people through food with Amaranth Bakery and Café. The pair always shared a love for community organizing and knew that food has a way of bringing cultures together. In 2000, they bought the rundown building at 3329 W. Lisbon Ave. with the intention of building a public meeting space in a neighborhood that needed more access to public places.
The bakery was founded on an idea that change can happen in a community if people are given a space that allows them to feel comfortable and interact with one another. From the beginning, the café was meant to help ideas grow. That’s why the seating area consists mostly of large tables which organically allow people to start conversations. Movements and local initiatives happen through relationship building, explains Boucher, and “none of this happens without trust.”
As their budding business developed, so did their food and Shipley’s knowledge of baking. “I feel like this place created me as the baker, as the food person,” she says, as someone who never had experience in baking previous to the café. She was first inspired by the large red plant she saw being grown by her neighboring Hmong gardeners. “The amaranth plants that grew in the community gardens were strong, anchored and unwilted,” says Boucher. Shipley’s research of the plant led her to discover the many cultures that have a history of cultivating it. That helped her realize the importance food and crops hold in different ethnicities and religions.
So, she intentionally built the menu to be inclusive and healthy. Even though Shipley is vegetarian, she makes a point to add meat into their hearty vegetable-filled soups because meat is so valued in the culture of the neighborhood. By simply adding meat to her soups, she gets more people to try something they wouldn’t normally eat.
Their menu has adapted over the years because of the people from various cultures that they’ve invited into their café. Boucher and Shipley have made a point to hire people wanting to learn the trade who bring their own perspectives on food. By being willing to take extra time to teach those with less experience, the couple, in return, learns from their workforce. They also support neighborhood businesses and budding entrepreneurs who help develop new products that the couple otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. The support they’ve offered has not only created an open safe space in the café, it’s also built up the surrounding neighborhood. Boucher and Shipley view the world in very different ways, but their goal has always been the same: Empower the people in the neighborhood so they can improve their community as well as their own well-being.
Learn more at facebook.com/amaranthbakerycafe. Read this article on the Shepherd Express, part of the column “Hero of the Week.”
Nic Mink’s Sitka Salmon Shares Is Changing How We Consume Seafood
“Seafood is a system that has really lost the trust of the American consumer,” says Nicolaas Mink, founder of the seafood company Sitka Salmon Shares that delivers Alaskan seafood to the doorstep of its Midwestern customers.
Mink is from Wisconsin, and while living in Madison for college, he started learning about our broken food system and how industrialized food processing cares more about quantity over quality. But it wasn’t until he moved to Sitka, Ala., for a summer, that he saw firsthand how the commercial fishing industry was crushing small-scale fishermen. Motivated to change the story, he created a community-supported fishery program. Like CSA programs that support local farms, Mink’s “CSF” program supports small Alaskan fishermen by bypassing the supermarkets and bringing high-quality, sustainably caught fish directly to Midwest consumers. Thus, Sitka Salmon Shares was born.
When we buy seafood from a grocery store, about 75% of it is farm-raised and 25% is wild-caught. Some people assume that farm-raised seafood is better than wild-caught because it doesn’t target wild fish stocks, but most farms feed their fish with smaller wild-caught fish, also depleting ocean ecosystems. The vast majority of wild-caught fish in the United States comes from Alaska, which also exports seafood all over the world.
The industrial fishing industry has a history of causing destruction to bodies of water. Like Alaska, the Great Lakes used to have a massive fishing industry in the late-19th and early-20th century with Jones Island being one of the major ports in the region. But pollution, overfishing and an invasive species called the lamprey led to the steep decline of the Great Lakes fisheries and moved most commercial fishing in the U.S. to Alaska. Unfortunately, many of those destructive practices are still used in Alaska, which is what Mink is trying change.
Large-scale commercial fishermen often use hazardous fishing methods which involve massive boats dragging miles-long nets behind them. These nets pull anything and everything out of the water, destroying coral reefs and whole ecosystems. In contrast, Sitka Salmon works with small-scale fishermen who mostly use a hook and line to catch their fish. They keep at least eight out of 10 fish they catch, compared to the large boats that throw away about 50% of their catch because they only get paid for the species they’re actually targeting.
To combat this destructive system, Sitka Salmon has created a model where the consumer’s dollar goes directly to these small fisheries. They no longer have to compete with large fisheries because of this direct income. The small fisherman can now focus on safeguarding fish ecosystems and delivering high-quality product.
Hopeful for the future, Mink has seen growth in the number of small, environmentally conscious fishing businesses that are disrupting the commercial fishing market. “Slowly but surely, the big system is being challenged by a bunch of small guys who are trying to do things correctly,” he says. Mink’s journey into the seafood industry started with his desire to create change, and his ambitions only grow with the support of everyday consumers who join his cause.
Learn more at sitkasalmonshares.com. Read this article on the Shepherd Express, part of the column “Hero of the Week.”
Inspiring the Community Through Harmony
Members of the LGBTQ community have fought for decades for equal rights, and amidst that movement, LGBTQ choral groups developed to support the cause. Six years ago, the Milwaukee gay men’s chorus, Our Voice Milwaukee, has joined that movement to bring positive voices and support to the local community.
The Gay Rights Movement started to gain traction in the 1980s because the LGBTQ community was in crisis. People were dying from AIDS while the public turned a blind eye. People were working to make the LGBTQ culture more widely accepted, and part of that effort was the beginning of the LGBTQ choral movement. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was started in 1978 and is widely recognized for starting the choral movement that brought hope and a public awareness to a group of people who were struggling. It only took a few years before LGBTQ choral groups were popping up around the world; today, Milwaukee carries on that flame.
The LGBTQ choral movement was started in the midst of death and loss, as a way to bring public awareness to the AIDS epidemic, to support those mourning their loved ones. “People’s worlds were falling apart, and it was a way to get out there and say, ‘listen, we’re not just a disease,’” says John Walch, who recently served as president of Our Voice Milwaukee for two years. That message of awareness is still important, but as Walch explains, the choral movement has developed into a celebration of identity and the freedom that LGBTQ people have to express themselves. “We’re proud of who we are, we’re representing who we are, and this is how we do it—through song.”
The official mission statement of Our Voice Milwaukee is “offering harmony in music to help inspire harmony in community.” They are boldly and openly themselves, showing their audiences that it’s okay to be open about your identity. The members of the men’s chorus see it as vital to have a strong public presence, especially in a society where being gay has only recently become widely accepted. More so, the chorus is making a point of creating an environment where their members and audiences can feel safe and meet new people. Walch explains that energy and confidence radiate from participants during their concerts because of the harmonies they create. He has loved singing since he was a child and “it’s the feelings that, for so many years, I didn’t feel like I could express. I can be on stage and express my feelings. It’s who I am. It’s a powerful feeling.” The choral group exists so that others can experience that same feeling.
The chorus has performed all around the city for the last six years, including concerts for PrideFest, Bucks’ Pride and Brewers’ Pride. They have also raised money for causes such as the Gay-Straight Alliance at Watertown High School and the It Gets Better Tour, a project dedicated to suicide prevention in the LGBTQ community. Their next performance will be singing the national anthem at Pride Night for the Milwaukee Admirals on Wednesday, Feb. 5. Our Voice Milwaukee proudly sings for inclusion and acceptance of all cultures. They continue the tradition of LGBTQ choruses around the country who stand as symbols of hope for the community.
Learn more at ourvoicemke.org. Read this article on the Shepherd Express, part of the column “Hero of the Week.”
Joann Henriques’ Beacon of Hope to Single Mothers
At 20 years old, Joann L. Henriques’ life was just starting. On the verge of moving to New York for school, she got pregnant, and the father chose to leave her to raise the baby alone. Unprepared and terrified, she began calling organizations for assistance.
“I remember swallowing my pride and asking for diapers,” she says. When she met with people working at the larger nonprofits in the city, she recalls their insensitivity, making her feel like just another number on a long list. She never wanted to feel that way again and wanted to prevent other single mothers from going through that same experience.
Since she was a teenager, Henriques dreamt of a career in helping women, and after living through the hardships of being a single mother, that dream only grew stronger. She lost motivation in her 20s, but in her early 30s, she was finally back on her feet. One day while listening to a sermon in her church about finding one’s purpose, she decided it was time to pursue the dream she had put on hold.
“‘All This Started With a Dream’”
She didn’t waste time trying to figure out logistics or funding; instead, she went straight to the source to provide single mothers with what they need most: diapers. So, Henriques began walking the streets handing out free diapers, and before long, she was being called “the diaper lady.” When word got out, members of her church began bringing her diapers to distribute, and women in need began contacting her for help. “All this started with a dream,” says Henriques.
She soon realized that these women needed more than diapers; they needed resources and someone who would show them compassion. She thought back to her horrible experiences at large nonprofits and knew she could do better. So in 2005, Henriques rented a small office space with her own money, and JLH Women’s Mentoring Services was born. Fourteen years later, Henriques is still in that space handing out diapers, connecting women to services in the city and crying with them when all they need is someone to listen.
Determined to act and follow her dream, Henriques never felt the need to become a certified counselor, because to her, it didn’t matter: She knew that she could positively impact women’s lives simply by dedicating her time and energy. While working a full-time job, Henriques has showed up at her office space every Friday and Saturday for 14 years, helping more than 3,000 women so far.
Humble and soft-spoken, Henriques puts her heart into her work. When she is with her clients, she is gracious, but when they need her to stand up for them, she is relentless. She has done everything from confronting pimps, to leading prayer sessions in brothels, to fighting for restraining orders in court. She is a beacon of hope for struggling mothers and will stop at nothing to support them.
“I always tell people that babies are not going to stop coming, and girls are not going to stop finding love, so keep the diapers coming.”
JLH Women’s Mentoring Services is located at 3846 W. Wisconsin Ave., Suite 109. For more information, call 414-934-0216, send an e-mail to jlhmentoring@live.com or visit rehobothnewlife.com/jlh-womens-mentoring-services.
Read the article in the Shepherd Express.
Shawna Whitehead Works for Workplace Diversity
Shawna Whitehead has always been an entrepreneur, motivated to make her own path. With a bodacious and outgoing personality, she has a way with people and has dedicated her time to improving the lives of others. In the past, she ran a daycare center, beauty salon, nail salon and recruitment center, but it wasn’t until two years ago that she founded the company that brought all of her passions together. That company is called Destined to Succeed. Her newest business trains people in cultural diversity and job preparation to help them adapt to the workforce. More than that, Whitehead structures the programs to help people find what they are “destined” to do.
The idea to train people in cultural diversity came from Shawna’s personal experience in 2015. When she applied for a human resources job at Northwestern Mutual, Whitehead understood her audience and specifically dressed the part. “My hair was professional, I had my French manicure, short lashes; I had my gold teeth, but I had my suit on,” she explains. The image she put on for the hiring manager was far from how she usually chose to express herself, but she knew she had to appeal to a corporate team. Even with her efforts, her recruiter told her that she likely wouldn’t make it to the second interview because “you have gold teeth. You do not look like our demographic.” Whitehead felt belittled by the situation and chose to pour her frustrations into helping others navigate diversity challenges in the workplace.
After starting Destined to Succeed, she hasn’t looked back. In addition to cultural diversity workshops that teach people how to communicate with others from different backgrounds, she offers certifications for corporate etiquette and customer service. The company also assists people in getting their GED, aids in job placement and hosts mock job interviews. As if that wasn’t enough, Whitehead instituted her Pipeline Program, which helps those coming out of prison to re-enter society and find work.
The Pipeline Program gives previously incarcerated men and women a chance in the job market, especially when there are few resources available for them when they leave prison. Whitehead was tired of seeing these people in her community struggle, so she began enrolling them in a two-week job preparation program. She contacts local employers that are looking for new hires and are willing to hire these potential employees the moment the program is finished.
Whitehead is not only changing the lives of the participants in the program but is encouraging workplaces to hire previously incarcerated people. She is fighting the stigma associated with incarceration by showing companies that these are hardworking people and they just want to get their lives back on track.
These programs barely scratch the surface of what Whitehead has done to effect change in the city. Her other two business ventures called Second Chance Transportation and her Christian talk show “Walking in Your Destiny” contribute to the work she is doing to give the underrepresented an advantage. And she’s not stopping there.
Read the article in the Shepherd Express.