Author: NNS

By Analise Pruni • Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service On any given day at Washington Park Senior Center, community members can be found piecing together a puzzle, dropping in for a quick Zumba exercise class or challenging others to a Wii video game. “I think people really find these places to be of great value,” said Lorrie Pardo, manager at the center. However, the days of large, more traditional senior centers may be dwindling. Officials estimate by 2022, the five county-owned senior center facilities in Milwaukee will need to be replaced for the combined costs of around $24 million. The...

By Andrea Waxman • Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service It is more than a year away, but Milwaukee is preparing for perhaps the biggest party it has ever thrown. More than 50,000 visitors are expected to attend the Democratic National Convention at the Fiserv Forum from July 13 to 16, 2020, bringing with them an estimated $200 million in convention dollars. And Milwaukee’s minority business leaders are making sure their communities will not be left out. Thirty community members attended a workshop this week sponsored jointly by the Hmong Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce and the American Indian Chamber of Commerce...

By Andrea Waxman • Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service When Henry Hopkins was released from prison in October 2017, he returned to his mother’s home on 14th Street in Lindsay Heights. Growing up in the neighborhood, he had been attracted to the fast life, he said. He ran in the streets and sold drugs, sometimes, out of the 17th Street house that would later become Walnut Way Conservation Corp. Now, thanks to Blue Skies Landscaping, a social enterprise initiated by Walnut Way co-founder Larry Adams, Hopkins is employed and has earned a steady income for the last year. Having a...

By Nelson Sederstrom • Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service An estimated 45,000 African Americans die each year from tobacco-related illnesses, according to the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network. While this number is in itself staggering, African American smokers are more than 10 times as likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than their white counterparts. Exploring this and other trends was the goal of the Black Lives / Black Lungs forum, lecture, and screening held on February 21, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Union. “Menthol advertising is disproportionately directed at and placed in black communities,” Lincoln Mondy narrates during his...

By Allison Dikanovic • Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service Welford Sanders was the former executive director of the Martin Luther King Economic Development Corporation, an urban planner and a beloved local leader. He died in 2015, but his vision–and name–lives on through the Welford Sanders Historic Lofts and Enterprise Center. Betty Speed, a 61-year resident of Harambee and president of the Martin Luther King Neighborhood Association, remembers a time when her neighborhood was the place to be. “Third Street used to be a hustling hub where you could buy a fur coat,” she said. “But after the riots in the...

By Analise Pruni • Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service Lorenda Smith has worked at a Burger King in the Harambee neighborhood for five months. On her first day as a cashier, two police officers were on the premises for an “incident,” and after that, she had to clean up after more than a dozen youths left a whirlwind of half-empty soda cups, bags and trash strewn across the tables. “We do more than what we get paid to do,” Smith said. As a mother of three with a baby on the way, she said that $8 per hour simply is...