Listen: Through week three and into the fourth, for Day 22 of Meet The Need we get to know City Year Milwaukee, an organization allowing young people aged 17-24 to give a year of full time service, acting as tutors, mentors, and role models in schools and the community. Think about that for a moment — with so many teaching programs and fellowships popping up these days, it’s easy to get muddled and lump them all together as a single entity. However, giving young people the opportunity to go into the classroom and build communities is quite novel. And effective. City Year have had a presence in 18 cities in the U.S. and South Africa, expanding into Milwaukee next year. Keep an eye out for young people in City Year’s signature red jackets — they’re story will be interesting to follow.

In these pieces, City Year Milwaukee’s Startup Director Jason Holton and External Project Leader Lindsey Larra detail why the work they’re doing is needed and how their approach has been so successful:

-Why City Year has adopted its mission to attack the high school dropout rate:

-How young people come together and make the City Year program successful:

-Lindsay’s personal account of her path from college to City Year:

For more information on City Year Milwaukee, visit the general website or check out the City Year Milwaukee blog, and if you’d like to join City Year for the upcoming school year, you can apply today! Also, City Year will join Brett Dennen’s Love Speaks Community tonight at his Turner Hall concert. Go check them out!

Produced by: Adam Carr

The City Year gang in their distinctive red coats!

Listen: Day 21 of 50, finishing off our third week of Meet The Need, we revisit the issue of youth homelessness with the Walker’s Point Youth and Family Center, an organization that meets the needs of runaway, homeless, and troubled youth and their families from Milwaukee’s diverse communities by providing help to resolve personal and family problems. While there is certainly an emergency component to youth homelessness, the work that must be done to establish or reestablish a safe and stable home environment is equally important.

In these pieces, Program Director Todd Witt gives very clear explanations of how youth become homeless, what the consequences are, and how they can be reunited with their family effectively:

-Not familiar with youth homelessness? Even if you are, its sources may surprise you:

-The path of a youth and his family from homelessness to a place where they can give back:

-Todd walks us through their emergency shelter, giving a bit more intimate look at the work they do:

For more information on the Walker’s Point Youth and Family Center visit their website, and if you’d like to help the Walker’s Point Center meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can help here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: For Day 20 of 50 in our Meet The Need, we take a look at the Women’s Center in Waukesha and how safety fits into the basic need picture. Usually in a discussion of basic needs, physical basic needs come to mind. When we talk about hunger and homelessness, those sensations are easy imagine. I know what it’s like, if only temporarily, to lack food and shelter. However, imagine how your life would be effected without safety, if rather than hunger or cold gnawing at your mind, it was the fear of physical or emotional abuse.

In these pieces, Mary Hennis, Director of Counseling, Advocacy, and Education Programs at The Women’s Center in Waukesha, makes clear why work supporting women facing domestic and sexual abuse is so important:

-Domestic violence in your community is easy to ignore, but the cost is great:

-The history of The Women’s Center in Waukesha — from humble beginnings to their current day operation:

-Consider safety as a basic need, and what your life would be like without it:

-Almost all of the pieces throughout this campaign have been under two minutes, but sometimes a piece cannot be cut down to that length. This is one of those cases. Here, Mary captures exactly why the work done at the Women’s Center in Waukesha is important through a woman’s story:

For more information on The Women’s Center in Waukesha visit their website, and if you’d like to help The Women’s Center in Waukesha meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can help here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: Meet The Need, Day 19 of 50 gives us Rebuilding Together Milwaukee. Simply because someone owns a house, especially if the homeowner is elderly or disabled, does not mean that house is fit to live in. In these cases, oftentimes an individual can find themselves isolated and unable to provide for themselves. And what happens to a neighborhood if its homeowners, who are the backbone of the community, are unable to meet their needs? This is the problem Rebuilding Together Milwaukee addresses — they use volunteers to preserve and revitalize low-income houses, assuring that low-income homeowners, from the elderly and disabled to families with children, live in warmth, safety, and independence.

Lynnea Katz-Petted, Executive Director of Rebuilding Together Milwaukee, shares how they impact homeowners, and how that impact reverberates throughout the community:

-Volunteers and sponsors renovate a house in a day, making a huge impact on a homeowner’s life:

-Sometimes, owning a home doesn’t mean that home is fit to live in:

-How a man went from being trapped in his own home, to living a full and productive life with the help of Rebuilding Together Milwaukee:

For more information on Rebuilding Together Milwaukee visit their website, and if you’d like to help Rebuilding Together Milwaukee meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can help here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: Pushing on through Thanksgiving Day (because need doesn’t take days off), the 18th of 50 organizations in our Meet The Need campaign is the Alma Center, a group that works with domestic violence in our community from a different angle. When we were first discussing the Alma Center in the planning phases of our campaign, somebody asked, “So what do they do?” and they were answered, “They’re a group that works with domestic violence.” The images that immediately came to mind were from the back end of the domestic violence picture — women, children, victims of domestic violence.

Work being done on this side of the domestic violence picture is clearly important, but work can also be done on the front end. Acts of domestic violence usually come from men who have witnessed or experienced violence in their own life. What if you try to teach them new behaviors? Establish new norms? Give them alternatives? That’s exactly the work the Alma Center is doing.

In these pieces, Executive Director Terri Strodthoff explains how the Alma Center works to end the cycle of violence by changing the way men look at relationships:

-What images come to mind when you think about groups working with domestic violence? The Alma Center approaches the problem from a different and preventative angle:

-Terri on what she calls the myth of masculinity, and how this effects an individual:

-The incredible story of how a young man is scarred by domestic violence, but eventually finds healing:

For more information on the Alma Center visit their website, and if you’d like to help the Alma Center meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can contact them here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Terri and Olusegun teaching

Listen: We spend Day 17 of 50 with a big name in serving basic needs in our community — the Hunger Task Force. For whatever reason, as I grew up in Milwaukee, I was always under the impression that the Hunger Task Force was a national organization like the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Perhaps it’s because their name seems to be ubiquitous, especially around the holiday season. Perhaps it’s because their iconic food bank on Hawley Road had effectively wormed its way into my subconscious after countless passes on the highway. Or perhaps it’s because they do a lot of good work in our city.

They’re much more than a name too. In these pieces Executive Director Sherrie Tessler paints a picture of how the Hunger Task Force works to end hunger in the present and the long run:

-A quick spin through the numbers and operations of the Hunger Task Force:

-In a state that pride itself on farming like Wisconsin, why are people hungry? The Hunger Task Force uses that question to drive its work in policy:

-Challenge your assumptions about who is hungry:

-The Hunger Task Force were there for the workers who were temporarily unemployed after the fire at the Patrick Cudahy Plant:

For more information on the Hunger Task Force visit their website, and if you’d like to help the Hunger Task Force meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can contact them here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: Meet The Need, Day 16 of 50 brings us Grand Avenue Club, an organization that offers a range of services to people who have experienced mental illness, with a focus on employment. In our discussion, Executive Director Rachel Foreman touched on a number of topics, but there was one simple point that stood out in my mind that shed a new light on the basic need picture — individuals who are not able to meet their own basic needs want to provide for themselves. Nobody wants handouts if they can help it, and oftentimes, what is holding an individual back from meeting their basic needs is out of their control.

I saw a living example of this point, as Rachel brought a member of the club to the interview. Earlier this year, after not being able to hold down a job, Greg John found himself homeless. Through a stroke of luck and with the help of a friend, he was diagnosed with major depression. In his piece, Greg’s voice clearly conveys how grateful he is for what Grand Avenue Club has done for him, as well as the acceptance, being somewhere where he feels at home.

In the first three pieces, Rachel gives a picture of who experiences mental illness in Milwaukee and why employment is so important to those individuals. Then, Greg tells his story:

-Employment is a serious problem for those who have experienced mental illness — Grand Avenue Club tries to solve that problem:

-Mental illness may be more widespread in Milwaukee than you think:

-Rachel gets to the heart of the campaign, outlining both how Grand Avenue club meets basic needs and how they enable their members to provide for themselves:

-An amazing story from Greg John, a member of Grand Avenue Club, who was homeless earlier this year and has found himself on his feet with the help of Grand Avenue Club:

For more information on Grand Avenue Club visit their website, and if you’d like to help Grand Avenue Club meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can contact them here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: We hit week three of Meet The Need running, Day 15 of 50, with Neu Life Community Resource Center. Funny thing, I bike/bus by their main building every day, off the corner of North Avenue and Fond Du Lac, and I never noticed the building before (see below). I asked Director of Neu Life why it’s never jumped out at me and she give me a very clear answer — why would she spend money on signs when she could spend it on programming for her kids? Point well taken.

Not only is Neu Life completely focused on programming, but they develop it in a subtly innovative way; they ask kids what they want to do. If kids don’t want to participate in a program, no matter how good that program is for them in theory, it is not a good program. Successful after school programs view themselves as a competitor for the kids’ time. What do youth need? Alternatives to being idle and rudderless. If you manage to structure what they want to do, they’ll be willing and eager.

In these four pieces, Jody gives us an inside perspective on how they shape their work around the kids:

-The need for Neu Life and what they do:

-Jody said to me, “If we’re going to do a youth program for kids, let’s do a good one. Let’s do a high quality one.” Find out what she means by high quality:

-Consider the alternative to what these kids would be doing without Neu LIfe:

-The story of K, a young man that went from having serious anger management issues to a Neu Life leader:

For more information on Neu Life Community Resource Center visit their bustling Facebook page (talk about engaging youth on their own term!), and if you’d like to help New Life meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can contact them here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: For Meet The Need, Day 14 of 50, we head to the South Side and Wisconsin’s first Hmong Charter School, The Hmong American Peace Academy. In the past 10 years, Milwaukee has seen a large influx of Hmong into the city, whether they’re new refuges or moving from other parts of the state. Welcoming this new population into the city provides both exciting opportunities and new challenges — meeting the educational needs of this new community fits under both headers.

For a population of new immigrants and refuges, the need for education is even clearer than it is for the native born population. They find themselves in a new culture with a radically different economy, and neither seem penetrable without a quality education. So what should that education look like? To answer that question, the Hmong American Peace Academy infuses their curriculum with traditional Hmong culture and American values.

Principal and Executive Director Chris Her-Xiong, on how her school meets the needs of the Hmong community:

-To accommodate a growing Hmong population, the Hmong American Peace Academy was formed:

-Chris gives a brief history of how the Hmong came to Milwaukee and the challenges they saw when they got here:

-A student, aged 15, came to their school with a kindergarten reading level:

For more information on The Hmong American Peace Academy visit their website, and if you’d like to help them meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can help here.

Produced by: Adam Carr

Listen: Day 13 of 50 in our Meet The Need campaign goes to Family House, an organization that provides high quality elderly care in a family setting, located in a row of houses between Ring Street and Concordia Avenue on 11th Street in Milwaukee’s Central City. So far in the campaign, we’ve seen a number of cases where an individual’s basic needs changes with their age.

Children, since they are dependent on a guardian for care, have different needs than adults. On the other end of the spectrum, the elderly, while they may have been able to completely care for themselves at some point, develop a new range of needs as they age. If that care is not accessible to an individual, or finding it causes a major upheaval in their living situation, that individual may find themselves isolated. So what does good elderly care look like? And how accessible is it?

Cordelia Taylor, Founder and CEO of Family House, along with Vicki Edwards, Development Coordinator, outline their unique approach to elderly care:

-Family House’s approach to elderly care and investment in the central city:

-The population they serve, and some of the challenges those folks face in finding proper care outside of Family House:

-A man came to family house with just a bag of clothes and a picture of himself, and is in a whole new world today:

For more information on Family House visit their website, and if you’d like to help them meet their needs this holiday season, learn how you can help here.

Produced by: Adam Carr