Update: African American Roundtable’s $40,000 community initiative focuses on youth and elders | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service
PrincessSafiya Byers
December 29, 2023
The African American Roundtable, or AART, has announced the winners of its participatory budgeting initiative: Youth and elders are at the forefront.
In October, the Roundtable awarded four organizations $10,000 each.
The awards come after years of AART leaders urging the City of Milwaukee to establish a participatory budgeting process that would give residents a say in how city resources are spent.
The Roundtable committed $40,000 to launch the initiative, which is based on the Northwest Side, an area the organization’s leaders say has seen decades of divestment, a lack of leadership and neglect.
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During the process, Northwest Side residents proposed, voted on and executed ideas on community-led projects.
“We invested these dollars to affirm our commitment to the community,” said Devin Anderson, the African American Roundtable’s membership and coalition manager.
The four projects that received the most votes belonged to Building Youth Opportunities Through Creative and Holistic Initiatives, Brentwood Church of Christ, Korey’s Kids and Vaun Mayes of We Locked In MKE.
Hazel Miller of Brentwood Church of Christ has experience working with Milwaukee’s seniors through  her work with the county’s aging and disability services.
“The goal is to create a space for fellowship for our seniors, where they can have a meal, along with some programming and access to resources they may need. A service that focuses strictly on seniors,” she said.
Louise McKenzie, the founder of Korey’s Kids, said the funding came just in time for the group’s biggest annual event. “We host our Christmas event annually but there is always a need to fill,” she said.
Korey’s Kids is hoping to add an emergency hotline for parents in need.
According to Anderson, the community investment initiative received over 30 proposals and over 850 votes from residents ranging from ages 14 to 75.
“We wanted our voting process to reflect the community this program is meant to serve,” he said. “Because this is our program, we get to determine what democracy looks like, so we opened up the voting eligibility.”
Anderson said the African American Roundtable is hopeful this project will spark something on a citywide level.
“I hope this shows that we can trust residents,” he said. “Residents can execute plans that are meaningful to their communities.”
The group plans to measure the success of this initiative by the impact each project has had on the community after a year.
“We will look at how this project built infrastructure and how we as people in community with one another have grown through the process,” Anderson said. “We’ll analyze what we learned and what we can do differently because this is an experiment.”
The African American Roundtable wants the City of Milwaukee to establish a participatory budgeting process to give residents the ability to propose, vote on and implement local budgeting decisions.
Participatory budgeting is a democratic process in which community members decide how public dollars are spent.
Although the organization has created its own program, members said their advocacy for a city-funded program will not stop.
“We’ve been advocating for participatory budgeting since 2019 and the city has been saying no,” said Anderson. “We are hopeful this project will spark something and show we can trust residents to execute plans that are meaningful to their communities.”
You can follow the African American Roundtable on Facebook.
Visit liberatemke.com and aartmke.org to learn more about participatory budgeting and the Roundtable’s work in Milwaukee over the years.