NWS Asset Map Highlight: Nigerian Community Conference Center in Milwaukee
In 2024, The African American Roundtable (AART) and UBUNTU Research and Evaluation published a Northwest Side Asset Map of over 150 businesses, groups, and service providers, whose work residents believed kept them safe. These included educational institutions/youth learning programs, transportation services, and much more! That same year, we activated more residents, who added 30 more assets to the map and began editing existing map entries. Check this video for more thoughts from community members.
AART is committed to sustaining the map and its utility. Honoring this commitment, AART will occasionally highlight assets, and this time, we’re highlighting the Nigerian Community Conference Center in Milwaukee, a large event space that welcomes many other African communities across the diaspora, including Black Americans! This gathering space can be rented for community gatherings, repasses, and other events up to 250 people.
The Nigerian Community Conference Center is a home base for the African Community in Milwaukee, or AiM, which is an umbrella organization for Nigerian, Ghanaian, Sierra Leonian, Liberian, and many other ethnic groups. AiM organizes and coordinates cultural festivals and picnics, which are often held in local parks like Brown Deer Park and Village Park, and are predominantly attended by Black Americans. The center is also home for the Nigerian Community in Milwaukee (NCIM). The NCIM is a nonprofit community based organization which has been in existence for over 23 years.
AiM and NCIM offer memberships, host monthly meetings where they invite elected officials and other speakers, and coordinate digital community forums to share immigration resources and other information that members and residents need, including an annual calendar of cultural events.
AiM’s President, Pastor Ebenezor, and Vice President, Olubunmi Olapo, would like to see African cultures in Milwaukee working together to understand each other. They asserted that because Black Americans and Africans have been brainwashed to think negatively about one another, and even about people in their own ethnic groups, our diaspora in Milwaukee needs to network and work together to understand each other. They hope that their festivals, picnics, and other events open the door to doing so, and AART is excited to build our relationship with AiM to this end.
Check out the African Cultural Festival in Milwaukee on Facebook and the Nigerian Community in Milwaukee's Website. Then, consider these reflection questions:
How could you, or someone you know, support or use this asset? When will you check them out?
How does this asset contribute to community safety? AART refers to “community safety” as community members keeping each other safe through building and maintaining relationships and helping to meet one another’s needs in order to prevent harm, exist among each other, solve problems, and thrive.
