Author: NNS

For six years, the boarded-up house on the corner, part of a seedy enclave created by three vacant houses and an open lot, was a home only for dealers, addicts and other desperate souls. That was until the Rev. Wang Chao Lee of the Grace Hmong Alliance Church and his family gutted and remodeled the two-story structure near Tiefenthaler Park last year. Now it is their home. Lee, his wife Phua, who have five children ages 15, 12, 10, 8 and 2, worked with ACTS Housing to buy the duplex, which the city had foreclosed for back taxes. A...

Nestled between 24th and 25th Streets on North Avenue, St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care appears like any other medical facility or nursing home at first glance. The two-story building boasts a stately design with a cream-colored brick façade, manicured rows of bushes and a circular drive for easy client pick up and drop off. Yet, St. Ann’s newly opened Bucyrus Campus cannot be judged by its exterior alone. Inside, splashes of color and an African-influenced design are in marked contrast to the 80,000-square-foot facility’s outer appearance. The interior is inspired by the landscape and culture of Cameroon, in...

Demond Means, who was recently appointed commissioner of the Opportunity Schools Partnership Program (OSPP), said additional financial investment in education will be necessary to move education forward in Milwaukee and the state. Although he has the authority to do so, Means has said he does not intend to take over any failing MPS schools. Instead, he will work with those schools to make sure they have the resources and support to improve educational outcomes for all students. “We can’t continue to cut our way to excellence. And that’s what we’ve been doing in all of our school districts,” said...

George Brittain didn’t much care for the smoky, poorly ventilated and space-starved apartment on West Highland that he lived in before. “My unit was cramped and the building I lived in was real run down,” said Brittain, a soft-spoken man who stands more than 6-feet tall. Still, he hadn’t put much thought into moving until he overheard a bus conversation in early 2015 about the fancy new digs that had just opened on the northern edge of Clarke Square, a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Milwaukee. The conversation was about the Paper Box Lofts, a brown brick,...

How Walnut Way Changed the Inner City. The quest for community of Walnut Way co-founders Sharon and Larry Adams. In 1997, Sharon Adams moved back into her family home in Lindsay Heights after being away for almost 30 years. She was dismayed by what she saw. “I couldn’t get this voice out of my head, that home wasn’t the place that I left,” she said. She said “the trees were gone” and police sirens were a familiar sound at night. Adams, who describes the call to come back as spiritual, began to walk the street, meet neighbors and listen...

Too Americanized to be accepted by fellow Koreans, and too Korean to be accepted by fellow Americans, Saehee Chang now considers her cultural background an asset in her teaching. Saehee Chang came to the United States in 1981 at 12 years old. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, but lived in Vietnam and Nairobi, Kenya for much of her youth. Chang said that this experience developed her interest in cultural education and led her to start her business, Korea Konnect, in 2009. Chang said that she struggled with her identity as a Korean-American while growing up, finding it hard...