A different mission this Juneteenth

By Devin Anderson

Juneteenth has been the relaunch of our LiberateMKE campaign for the past six years. But this year will be different. In 2024, we announced that we would be sunsetting LiberateMKE at the end of 2025, to run the LiberateMKE campaign one more time during the upcoming budget cycle. However, conditions change, and new opportunities emerge, so we will not be relaunching LiberateMKE this year. Today, we’re announcing that 2024 was the final year of an AART-led LiberateMKE campaign.

According to adrienne maree brown, “If you try to maintain something, but it’s no longer energized and no longer vibrant, it’s okay to let it go. We call it ‘sunsetting’ in movement work. It’s like sunset, that organization. Just let it come to a close. Focus on maintaining the things that are vibrant and alive and that are still ready to offer things. But be also willing to let go.”

LiberateMKE radicalized me over the years. It showed me the power of organizing everyday people. It challenged me to expand my imagination around what is possible with policy solutions, and it illuminated the challenges we are up against.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in Let This Radicalize You said, “The end of one project can mean the beginning of new dreams and schemes about how to remake the world. We have said many goodbyes in our work, yet the work goes on, and so do we, building, hoping, and creating in concert with other human beings.”

That is exactly what we are doing. This Juneteenth, we will be talking about the MKE Community Impact Fund, the city’s participatory budgeting fund that we helped win through our years of organizing and gathering information for the new campaign we are building with our Northwest side leaders. Both of these ideas, along with our Northwest Side Asset Map–which has nearly 150 resources existing on the city's far Northwest side–evolved from our work with LiberateMKE.

Our demand for participatory budgeting came after we launched LiberateMKE in 2019. During that first summer, we, along with Black Leaders Organizing Communities and other organizations, surveyed over 1,000 people to see what they wanted to see Milwaukee invest in. Those conversations led us to the conclusion that participatory budgeting would be a great way to allow residents to decide how they would like to reallocate money in the city budget. Since then, there have been many stops and starts and disappointments along the way. But earlier this year, the Milwaukee Common Council established the MKE Community Impact Fund, which will allow residents the opportunity to propose, vote on, and implement community projects totaling $600,000. 

The Northwest Side campaign comes years after deciding to build a base in Aldermanic Districts 5 and 9. This decision, again, was based around LiberateMKE and the realization that Black people live on the Northwest Side, and there was no organization supporting any year-long organizing work. In 2021 we brought on Ryeshia Farmer, who is now the community program manager, to lead our base-building efforts on the Northwest Side and build many new leaders and members. We listened to residents and learned Northwest Side residents believe a thriving community is one where they have access to outdoor spaces to walk, bike, and play in. 

During our strategic planning session in 2023, we decided it was time to build a campaign on the Northwest Side based on what the residents said they wanted to see. Over the next year, we hosted multiple listening sessions and heard that an issue they wanted to address was food access. So far this year, we’ve been building with 11 member leaders on the Northwest Side and laying the groundwork to launch a campaign later this year.

These changes are exciting! So we won’t be running LiberateMKE this year, but we are passing the torch to the community. We've done a lot of work over the last six years to educate, civically engage, and drive work to get investments into our communities and neighborhoods, and now it's Northwest Side residents’ turn.

We’ll still be here doing other powerful work and supporting residents on this journey. In fact, be on the lookout for a toolkit to support community engagement around this year’s budget process. 

Although LiberateMKE is sunsetting, our work, and the legacy we made together, will not be forgotten. It will always be a critical part of the African American Roundtable’s–and Milwaukee’s–story.