The 88Nine Neighborhood Project

APRIL – MAY, 2009

Back in the depths of our beloved Milwaukee winter, we started thinking about what Spring means to the city, and we realized just how different the experience is between how we live here when there’s snow on the ground and how we live here when the sun is still shining on our commutes home.  In the Winter, we move from one indoor space to another: home to car or bus to work, to school, to dinner, to a concert, to the grocery store, to a bar … and back home.  In the Spring, we get back to living in a neighborhood again, and we see neighbors we haven’t seen since early November.

So we wanted to spend the early part of Spring getting to know the neighborhoods and the neighbors that make Milwaukee.  In this city of neighborhoods, maybe the best way to get to know the city was from the inside out.  From the more than 50 distinct neighborhoods to choose from, we chose 4 that we thought would help us understand how diversity, innovation and creative community-building are helping to shape the neighborhoods of Milwaukee’s future.

Johnsons Park, Lincoln Village, Sherman Park and Silver City were chosen because they represented different parts of the city geographically; they each have a unique story to tell about Milwaukee’s diversity; and each of them is involved in either the city of Milwaukee’s Main Street Milwaukee Program or the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Healthy Neighborhood Initiative, two innovative programs helping to revitalize Milwaukee neighborhoods.

Tune in to Jordan at 8am on April 1 and then on Mondays starting April 13 through May 18, as we introduce new, weekly audio snapshots from our 4 focus neighborhoods, and then listen to 88Nine throughout the week to hear them again.

We invite you to get to know a neighborhood you may never have explored, or learn something new about a neighborhood that you thought you knew.  We want to share the tools these neighborhoods are using for successful community-building with the hope that more Milwaukee neighborhoods will put them to use.  And we encourage you to tell us the story of your neighborhood.  E-Mail Us.  We want to hear it, and we want to share it.

Happy Spring!