Author: NNS

Marcus Duke, executive director of Club Kids 414, hopes that his appearance on national television will help him find a permanent home for his organization. “It was pure awesomeness,” recalled Marcus Duke, executive director of Club Kids 414, describing the moment he received a national “BET Shine A Light Award” for his work with youth in Milwaukee. Duke hopes the attention that went along with his appearance on national television during the BET Awards Show in Los Angeles will help him find a permanent home for Club Kids, which he’s been working on for years. “I’ll keep on working...

The first residents in the western section began moving out in the spring. Jackie Burrell is looking forward to living in a new apartment after the entire western section of Westlawn, the state’s largest public housing development, is torn down and rebuilt. Burrell said her unit, which was built in the 1950s, sometimes floods when it rains and mold is an ongoing problem. Like the new housing in the eastern section, which was redeveloped and reopened as Westlawn Gardens in 2013, the new structures in the western section will offer many more housing options, including one- and two-bedroom apartments,...

LaShawndra Vernon, the new executive director of Walnut Way Conservation Corp., has hit the ground running. In June, Vernon replaced the retiring Sharon Adams, taking the reins of an organization she and her husband Larry Adams founded in 2000 — one with many moving parts. “This is a well-oiled machine we have here,” said Vernon, referring to the array of programming offered by Walnut Way, including men’s wellness, job training, self-care, urban agriculture and other components. “Then there’s new pieces we have to work to build in and develop,” she added. One of those new pieces is Phase II...

Dasha Kelly, a spoken-word artist, writer and social entrepreneur, says fiction was her first love. Kelly credits her mother for encouraging her to enter a short story contest at their local library when Kelly was 10. She happily got so lost in the writing process that she never turned the story in. “Whatever the word capacity was, I doubled it,” Kelly said. Kelly is full of early memories of tinkering and always needing things to do. From Loom Rugs to Latch Kits, Lite-Brites to Shrinky Dinks, Kelly always felt a need to keep creating. During her early years in...

Della Wells can’t recall her earliest experience doing art. “I really can’t remember when I started making art. I think that means I’ve always just done it,” Wells said as she sat under a shade tree in the yard of her Riverwest apartment. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wells is an artist who gravitates towards several different media, including painting, collages, pastels, quilting, doll making, drawing and playwriting. She is currently contributing to a documentary that focuses on African-Americans in the Milwaukee arts scene from 1967 to 1979. Wells was recently named one of two 2016 Artists of the...

Milwaukee native Tyshun Wardlaw has won a national video competition for rising filmmakers. One of three finalists for the McDonald’s “My Community” award, she was named the winner at the 20th Annual American Black Film Festival held in June in Miami Beach. Wardlaw’s 90-second film “Be the Seed,” partially shot in a Walnut Way community garden, features the urban agriculture work of Hank McGowan and his 7-year-old son Kemari. Wardlaw and McGowan were classmates at Vincent High School. The video, which will be posted on the McDonald’s 365Black website addresses a number of issues, including the influence of fathers...