This week, Milwaukee Magazine hosted its sixth annual Unity Awards. The awards recognize six honorees for their achievements in making Milwaukee a more equitable and inclusive place for all.
This year’s honorees include Kurt Owens, Element Everest-Blanks, Ken Ginlack, Katie Cummings, Levi Stein and Jack Bolog. All are local leaders who foster connection and strengthen the community through their work.
Jack Bolog is the operations director of People’s Table. The nonprofit helps families find free food, resources and support so they can live with stability and dignity. It’s also not your traditional food pantry — Bolog has helped build a program called The Collective, which empowers families to choose their own groceries while also connecting them with wraparound services.
Bolog is only in his mid-20s, but he's been drawn to service work since grade school after going on service trips throughout the United States. Bolog grew up in Kenosha and went to UW-Whitewater, originally thinking he would get into recruiting after college. But before he would get into his intended career path, Bolog set aside the first year after college for service work.
“I just found the work really meaningful, and I also remember really being inspired by a lot of the community leaders that were doing something about the difficulties that were in people's lives. And I kind of had this sense that I'd love to be like that someday and that's kind of how my life eventually led to me being here,” he says.
One year of service after college turned into two at the Kinship Community Food Center, which then lead Bolog to working at the People's Table. "Working at Kinship definitely inspired me to continue being in the food security space," he notes.
People's Table has been in operation on Milwaukee's south side for over 20 years and serves about 500 families a month. Bolog says a shift at the pantry started about eight years ago to go beyond merely providing groceries to families.
"It doesn't do anything to help anything underlying the issue with hunger, and you know if families are hungry that's a symptom of poverty. So a lot of our volunteers were thinking about ... what can we do differently with the food pantry to really provide more of a holistic approach to address more of the underlying issues?" he explains.
This question would lead them to learning about the food cooperative model, which People's Table adopted and call a food collective. "In a food collective, the program is really ran and owned by the community members which are the recipients of food," says Bolog. "So on a typical food collective day, all of our food collective members show up on site and they bring up the food ... they distribute the food out amongst their families, and then once all the food is given away to the families that are present in that group then we go and we'll have a community meeting."
Community meetings include talking about available resources to families such as employment opportunities, education and health care.
"What this [model] really does [is] it allows people to get their groceries, but it really gives people ownership of the process and that's something that is not innately built into the pantry model," Bolog notes. "It also allows us to really develop a deeper long term relationship with the community members that we're serving... it's just a really transformative model and I believe that this model is going to be a really effective way of addressing poverty in our city."
Currently there are four sites for the People's Table food collective program with just under 100 families in these groups, according to Bolog. If you want to get involved in the food collective, it's a referral process and all you need to do is submit an inquiry on their website. Bolog hopes to expand the model to six or more locations by the end of the year.
On reflecting on his recent Unity Award, Bolog admits that he felt a little intimidated being recognized alongside community leaders who's careers "have been probably as long as I've been alive for some of them,"
"I felt a little bit almost not worthy, like I feel I'm relatively new here. But ... one of my friends said, 'You know it's not about what you've accomplished in what you've been doing, it's the fact that you're doing the work.' And I think that was a really helpful line for me," says Bolog. "All you need to do is really show up and show up for your neighbors and that's what I try to do in my work."
"I may have won the award, but the reality is this is an award that was accomplished by hundreds of people," he adds.
