Community organizers are hosting intergenerational talking circles among Milwaukee’s youth and elders.
The conversations have been happening since January and focus on how specific issues directly impact Black and Brown Milwaukeeans.
A small gym inside Safe & Sound, a Milwaukee nonprofit, was the site of the most recent intergenerational talking circle.
The topic of the night: Another One Gone Too Soon. It’s a reference to loss in Milwaukee’s Black and Brown communities.
JaQai X is an organizer for the Harambee neighborhood at the social services organization WestCare Wisconsin. He says this specific conversation was in honor of the late Keyon Jackson-Malone, who died suddenly in August. Jackson-Malone helped facilitate the talking circles when they first started.
"The brother passed so, you know, abruptly this past summer that it really moved me, you know, in a way where I felt like it was my responsibility to do something," X said.
"Especially with the excessive death that I had seen occurring in the community with people with so much life in them the week before they passed. I saw the brother Keyon probably just a few days before he passed and had no thought in my mind that this was a possibility."
The mission of the intergenerational talking circles is to uplift the voices of the unheard and bridge the gap between generations by engaging in discussions that directly relate to them.
Lashonda Good, an organizer for Metcalf Park at WestCare Wisconsin, says an incident between elders and young people was the catalyst for these talking circles.
Good heard from some senior citizens that when they requested a group of young people riding Lime scooters on the sidewalks to slow down for the seniors’ safety, one of the young folks was disrespectful.
"And that upset me," Good said. "And I was like those type of interactions should not be what’s going on between our seniors and the young people in our city because it’s not right and that’s not a full and accurate representation of all of the relationships between the different generations."
Good says she felt like she needed to do something. The idea for intergenerational talking circles emerged from brainstorming with colleagues. And five talking circles later, here we are.
At this event, Heal the Hood MKE founder Ajamou Butler was the keynote speaker, and community activist Vaun Mayes was the facilitator.
I spoke to a few attendees about what they hoped to learn.
Here’s what 17-year-old Amiyah Graves and 63-year-old Sidney Fumbanks Jr. said.
Seventeen-year-old Amiyah Graves said, "I am gonna feed off a little bit of what everybody else says, but I also wanna talk about the youth as like how we are as a generation and the things that’s been happening lately and it’s a lot."
Sidney Fumbanks Jr., a 63-year-old man, said he was hoping to learn different ways to communicate with young people.
"There is a gap that we need to fill. Myself, I come from an older generation. We had to respect our elders. A lot of these young people, they don’t know how to respect their elders because they haven’t been taught. You have to learn how to respect yourself before you can give respect."
Facilitator Vaun Mayes opened the talking circles with a moment of silence for Jackson-Malone. Then, he read the first of several prompts.
Groups had 15 minutes to discuss the impact the divide between elders and youth has on the excessive, premature, and often preventable deaths in the Black and Brown community.
One group discussed communication barriers and differences between adults and elders. Another talked about how inaccessible elders are to youth.
Organizers JaQui X and Lashonda Good say these intergenerational talking circles have shown them that elders and youth want spaces to connect with and learn from each other. The space just has to be created.
The final intergenerational talking circle of the year is Dec. 10 at Owen’s Place on West Fond du Lac Avenue, focusing on healthy and meaningful relationships.
