An update on AART’s Northwest Side food access campaign
By Ryeshia Farmer
The African American Roundtable (AART) has worked to build relationships and power on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side (NWS) since 2021. Having developed a base of residents who can lead, and being an organization that empowers leaders to share and wield power toward tangible change and Black Liberation, we set a goal to launch our next campaign with Aldermanic District 5 and 9 residents at the helm. As we continue to build our campaign plan, we’ve learned valuable lessons about the skills it takes to develop both a campaign plan and the leadership team that will execute it.
AART’s recent sunset of the LiberateMKE campaign made way for us to activate an underorganized community in zip codes 53223, -224, -225 and parts of -218. After six years, we won our Participatory Budgeting (PB) demand in the form of city budget allocations for $600,000 that residents will decide how to spend. In April, Milwaukee's Common Council voted to use the remaining dollars from the COVID stimulus bill to fund PB and other community based programs. Within our former campaign, AART engaged residents across the city, especially at community events like the annual Juneteenth Festival and including some Northwest Side leaders who are integral member leaders of our base today. We developed a membership program as a political home for Black Milwaukeens to study, transform, build skills and community, and get active together. We’ve developed a field program to spread the good news – via door knocking, phone and textbanks, tabling at events, and street canvassing – of meaningful work that people could join to create the communities they want to see. AART’s proud of our work to this point! We’re monitoring the implementation of the city’s PB process, and we recently released a toolkit so that everyday people have the tools to continue applying pressure on city leadership to meet their needs.
AART and many of our neighbors and members believe one way that PB money could help our communities thrive is through increased access to fresh and healthy foods in neighborhood grocery stores, community gardens, and farmer’s markets. Food access and Milwaukee’s Northwest Side’s food apartheid have been repeatedly named as issues throughout our one-on-one conversations, community meetings, and canvasses in the area. Though the needs of Milwaukeeans, Black people, and Northwest Siders are many (ranging from addressing community violence, providing opportunities for youth, holding landlords and property management groups accountable for inadequate housing, and more), after a recent series of community input sessions, many Northwest Siders and other residents we’ve heard from made it clear that increasing food access was the issue they wanted to galvanize around to improve their safety at this time. So we’re building a food access campaign– a focused, time-bound effort to bring more fresh and healthy foods to Northwest Side neighborhoods by building collective power and applying organized pressure to food access decision makers.
Eleven Northwest Side residents are leading our campaign planning phase. These are residents from the target zipcodes we’d like to launch the campaign in with first-hand knowledge about, and passion for resolving, the issues of food access in their communities. Over the last few months, they’ve trained on relationship building and recruiting to the campaign, how to develop campaigns, and how to understand and wield power. They’ve also canvassed their communities, connected with local businesses and community service stakeholders from the Northwest Side Asset Map that AART launched in 2024, and seized opportunities to learn from community leaders working on food access as well as Milwaukee community garden owners.
From their work, we’ve re-discovered the importance of pacing our community as we learn new concepts around campaigns and food access while putting people skills into practice and being in necessary struggle to work together in synchronicity. Simultaneously, we’ve landed a deeper understanding of the many factors impacting our issue and its various stakeholders, identified decision makers we’ll target, and set a goal for the campaign. We look forward to seizing opportunities to practice skills of conflict transformation and consensus-based decision-making as Northwest Side leaders continue developing the campaign tactics, strategy, timeline, and messaging necessary to win. We’ll present the campaign plan to our members and Northwest Side residents in the fall before announcing campaign details and launching it in 2026.
This campaign is a new venture for AART and NWS residents, so we hope it’s an opportunity to engage Milwaukee-at-large around an issue impacting us all. Two things are certain: we’ll all grow through the experience, and we will win greater food access. AART’s NWS Campaign Cohort Leader, Nicole Crown, has said it best: This campaign is prophetic. There’s been so much alignment between AART’s base, Milwaukee residents, the power(s) that be, local chain grocery store closures, federal attacks on SNAP benefits, previous city investment in fresh food access, and so more. So we believe that we will win. We know that continuing to pressure city leadership to fund community needs through processes like Participatory Budgeting is not only a strategy for winning, but it is also a proactive way to keep us safe, liberate our communities, and bring us closer to the world we want to see.
We’ll need to build power with everyday people to achieve all of this, so I ask: what community project would you spend $600,000 on for your community to achieve greater food access and to thrive?
As you ponder, sign up for our monthly newsletter and keep an eye on AART’s social media accounts for more updates on our campaign build, including another Northwest Side Story, coming in October 2025.
