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
Treasuring guns over people: Only a global pandemic could briefly pause America’s gun epidemic
The ten victims in Boulder and the eight in Atlanta were survivors. They had managed to weather the greatest public health crisis of our lifetime: an insidious and relentless virus, that for twelve months has decimated the planet and taken the lives of our a half a...
For the love of the gun: An irrational American ideology that sees White men as cowboys
Ten more people in Boulder, Colorado, died on March 22, shot by a man with a gun, just days after we lost 8 others in Atlanta, Georgia, shot by a man with a gun. In 2017, after the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas, political personality Bill O’Reilly said that such...
Who God should love: Why churches discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community in the name of religion
The Catholic Church doesn’t need to bless same-gender unions. The Southern Baptist Church doesn’t. The United Methodist Church doesn’t. No church needs to. God already blesses them — that is, if God is love in the way these churches all claim that God is. If God is...
Stop Making Excuses for Racists: What the news coverage of the spa killings in Atlanta can teach us
“He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” – Captain Jay Baker, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office After a gunman in the Atlanta region went on a murderous rampage killing eight...
A Privilege of Silence: White men have not done enough to call out the toxic perpetrators who are White men
America has a white male problem. If you’re living here and you’re not a white male, I likely don’t have to do much to convince you of that fact. You’ve been an eyewitness. You’ve had a front row seat to the horrors. You’ve likely been on the receiving end of the...
Hate crimes against Asian Americans began to rise as Trump politicized the pandemic and attacked China
On March 16 in Georgia, a gunman murdered 1 man and 7 women, at three spas, and wounded another man. All three of the businesses were operating legally, according to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and had not previously come to the attention of the Atlanta Police...
What’s past is prologue: When the rhetoric of hate lives on in the monsters MAGA culture makes
Words are stunningly versatile things. They have the ability to either create or to destroy, to lift us or level us, to give us wings or to crush us beneath their weight, to inspire us to reach the loftiness parts of our nature or to drive us to the depths of our...
Political Misdirection: Why Republican pundits blame Biden for the broken immigration system he inherited
Republican pundits and lawmakers are, once again, warning of an immigration crisis at our southern border. Texas governor Greg Abbott says that if coronavirus spreads further in his state, it will not be because of his order to get rid of masks and business...
Ignoring neighbors in need: When Bible believers claim Christian values but lack any capacity for love
They would not help people. Not one of them. They all voted no on giving aid to Americans during the single greatest health crisis of our lifetimes: one that has taken the lives of over a half a million Americans and left millions more at the precipice of poverty and...
