With a dedicated career helping children and families adversely impacted by immigration, homelessness, abuse, and oppressive systems in South America, Europe, and his native Milwaukee, Luke serves as Director of Program Design and Community Engagement at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children’s Wisconsin.
As an award-winning Senior Columnist for the Milwaukee Independent, Reggie Jackson covers a range of African American issues. He is also a Consultant with Nurturing Diversity Partners, and volunteers as Head Griot for America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Bronzeville.
REGGIE JACKSON: 7x Award Winner in Best Column categories from the Milwaukee Press Club
As a teacher for over twenty years, Dominic Inouye helped students to develop their reading, writing, critical thinking, and, most of all, their voices. He worked as The Pfister Hotel Narrator, a one-year appointment, and currently manages the ZIP MKE project that photo documents the city to promote cultural understanding.
Dominic Inouye: 2x Award Winner in Best Column category from the Milwaukee Press Club
Dr. Kenneth Cole is a Licensed Psychologist who has spent the past two decades helping members of the community in developing the ability to bring about positive change for their lives, and empowering those individuals to advocate for themselves.
Kenneth Cole: 2x Award Winner in Reporting categories from the Milwaukee Press Club
Pardeep Kaleka is the Executive Director of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, published author of The Gifts of Our Wounds, award-winning columnist with Milwaukee Independent, and a clinician specializing in utilizing a trauma-informed approach to treat survivors and perpetrators of assault, abuse, and acts of violence.
PARDEEP KALEKA: Winner in Best Blog category of the 88th Annual Milwaukee Press Club Awards
John Pavlovitz: Winner of Best Blog at the 89th Annual Milwaukee Press Club Awards
Recent Columns
Insight about the abuse of power by MAGA Republicans and their “Three Stooges” antics to avoid governance
The Associated Press ran a story by national political reporter Brian Slodysko on December 14 titled “The Republican leading the probe of Hunter Biden has his own shell company and complicated friends.” It told the story of how Representative James Comer (R-KY), the...
The Pandemic We Wasted: How we could have transcended our self-erected barriers of politics
What do you remember about the first days of the pandemic? I remember going to three grocery stores with a rising sense of dread as the shelves became more and more bare. I remember the disorienting uncertainty as our routines were interrupted and our normal imploded....
Reggie Jackson: My childhood miseducation and the institutional control of Negro thinking
“The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches college, he will naturally...
Thanksgiving Anxiety: The unexpected stress of normal routines that feel anything but normal post-COVID
Much has been written about the holiday season in America, particularly Thanksgiving. And with an induced amnesia only two years after COVID, many people are desperate to cling to their nostalgic memories from before the pandemic in the rush back to...
Thugs and vermin: Political sycophants downplay Trump’s unhinged speech echoing Nazi propaganda
In a speech on November 11 in Claremont, New Hampshire, and then in his Veterans Day greeting the day after on social media, former president Trump echoed German Nazis. “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic] we pledge to you that we will root out the...
Casualty of chaos: Why the Republican Party’s problem continues to be America’s problem as shutdown looms
The Republican-dominated House of Representatives remains unable to agree even to a way forward toward funding the United States government. This is a five-alarm fire. The continuing resolution for funding the government Congress passed in September when then–House...
Our Culture War is actually a conflict between telling the truth or perpetuating the lies about who we are
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled...
Biblical republic: Why adherents of Christian nationalism reject the central premise of democracy
On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. It had been rocked five days before, when heavy trading early in the day drove it down, but leading bankers had seen the mounting crisis and moved in to stabilize the markets before the end of the day. October 24...
Republican’s political image of cowboy individualism continues to play out at the cost of lives
Data from the Commerce Department showed that the U.S. economy grew at an astonishing rate of 4.9% in the third quarter. We also learned that in Lewiston, Maine, a single shooter killed at least 18 people, more people than died by gun homicide in Maine in the whole of...
