[This is the second editorial of a two-part series. Read part one here. —Ed.]
Right now, somewhere in Dane County, a mother is sitting on the edge of her bed doing math that won’t come out right. Rent’s due. The school called twice about her kid. There’s a name saved in her phone, somebody gave it to her right when she needed it. Not a hotline. Not a case number. A name.
She doesn’t know EPA funding disappeared, then USDA, HUD, Public Health, the City of Madison. She doesn’t know Dane County is proposing cuts to what remains. None of that is her job to know. She only knows somebody told her to call Urban Triage.
She’s about to find out.
What responsibility does the person holding the spreadsheet have to the person holding our phone number?
Next week, the phone will ring again and again. A nonprofit executive has called us in crisis. County Board supervisors have called for themselves and constituents. Alders call. Representative Sheila Stubbs’ office refers people almost every week. Teenagers, parents, elders, new arrivals, and people sleeping outside call. Judges call asking, can you help. So does the DA’s office. Police have brought people to us for support and navigation.
People with the authority to arrest, prosecute, sentence, fund, and set policy call us when that authority runs out. Authority was never the same thing as what a person actually needs. Madison built systems with power and still needed something else, so it built Urban Triage, whether it meant to or not.
I can walk through a Madison park and get stopped by kids, parents, and people we’ve housed. When people have a couch or truckload of food they want to reach the community, they call us. You cannot write an RFP for that. That’s relationship. Community memory. Five years of showing up without ever getting funded like the door mattered. How much does a community have to depend on Black infrastructure before it decides Black infrastructure deserves permanence?
While the calls keep coming, the money keeps leaving. EPA. USDA. HUD. Public Health. The City of Madison. Private donors. Now Dane County’s departmental budget proposes eliminating our youth work and Housing Navigation. Our agriculture program has no dedicated funding now. We’ve kept food in the ground on reserves, faith and staff stretching too thin. Different decisions. Different institutions. The same organization absorbing the loss while people keep walking through the door.
In Quarter 2 alone, we housed seventeen people other providers had given up on. Our contract funds navigation, not putting a key in someone’s hand, and it hasn’t funded us to house people in two years. Previous providers housed people when funding was available. Urban Triage kept housing people without it because a referral can be complete while a human being is still sleeping outside. We’re running out of reserves to keep being the difference between a policy and a person. Navigation is not the outcome. Housing is.
I think about Michael Johnson more than I let on. I won’t turn his life into a metaphor for mine. His weight was his own, and his story belongs to the people who loved him. But his death taught me what it can cost a body to be needed, criticized, celebrated, resisted and depended on, and still expected to carry. I refuse to wait for another body to teach me that lesson twice. People have limits. Bodies have limits. Institutions made of people have limits.
This isn’t only about intent. Other organizations are being hurt in this budget. But equality on a spreadsheet does not erase the inequality underneath it. Some institutions absorbing these cuts have had generations to build endowments, donor networks, reserves, property, and institutional credibility. Urban Triage has had five years. Equal cuts on a spreadsheet are not equal cuts on the ground.
We are Black-led and Black-centered. We built from where the data says systems fail people most, and something happened: everybody started coming. Housing. Agriculture. Outreach. Education. Black-centered was never Black-only. It started with people other models had written off, and maybe that’s the part worth funding.
Madison already knows this. We have the reports and dashboards. We’ve studied our racial disparities for decades. So why weaken one of the places actually working to interrupt what we already know is happening?
A grant has an end date. Need doesn’t. Cut Housing Navigation and homelessness doesn’t go down. Cut youth funding, and teenagers don’t stop needing support. Leave agriculture unfunded, and hunger doesn’t check the budget calendar. You are not cutting the need. You are cutting one of the places that need already knows how to find.
Sometimes elimination means the money moves to a bigger, more established provider. But people already pass other doors to get to ours. You can transfer a contract. You cannot transfer what took years of relationship to build. Technical availability is not meaningful access. A budget can preserve a service on paper while weakening the conditions that made people willing to use it.
If Urban Triage isn’t there, the need doesn’t evaporate. It goes back to the street, a shelter waitlist, an unsafe house, an emergency room, police who already call us, or a courtroom where judges already call us. The systems expected to absorb this are already handing us the overflow. If Urban Triage isn’t the answer, who exactly do you think is?
This is Raised by Survival inside a budget document. Create conditions requiring extraordinary survival. Praise people for surviving them. Remove more because survival made deprivation look sustainable. Then act surprised when the person, family, community, or organization reaches its limit.
We have cushioned Madison from that impact. Unrestricted dollars housed people beyond what our contract requires. Reserves kept the fields alive. Staff stretched so the phone got answered. Madison has been able to withdraw and not feel the withdrawal because we kept paying the difference.
There’s something dangerous about the way this country loves Black resilience. We get praised for surviving what we should never have had to survive, and survival becomes proof the deprivation was tolerable. It wasn’t. It isn’t.
Our resilience is not a funding model. Black women building under impossible conditions is not a public subsidy. Surviving the last cut doesn’t mean we can absorb the next. It means we already paid for the last one.
The seed doesn’t know the grant ended. The family eating from that harvest doesn’t know either. We know. We’re paying it, and reserves run out. I need Madison to sit in that sentence a little longer than it takes to read it.
I am not asking Madison to rescue Urban Triage because we worked hard or because I deserve it. Not Urban Triage as a brand. Not me as its CEO. I’m asking Madison to recognize itself inside this. Every eliminated line item previews who falls through and whether anyone is standing there when they land.
There is still time to change this. These cuts are proposed, not final. If they stay in the County Executive’s proposed budget, the County Board can amend it. Find your County Board supervisor. Show up during the County budget process. Ask them to protect funding for Housing Navigation and youth services. Give once or monthly. Volunteer. Sponsor housing, youth, agriculture, or the program that means the most to you. Bring your business, a board seat, a bulk donation, or your relationships. Invest in our endowment through Madison Community Foundation. Our Leadership Circle, co-facilitated with Catherine Orr, launches this fall for deeper systems analysis and sustained action. For the Circle, giving or our endowment, contact Development Manager Alex Lindenmeyer at [email protected].
Somewhere in Madison, somebody has never heard of Urban Triage. I hope it stays that way. I hope their job stays stable, their kid stays safe, their housing stays theirs, nobody they love gets arrested or has to run from violence, and their body stays well. I hope they never learn how fast stability can become asking strangers for help.
But some of them will. That’s not pessimism, that’s just Tuesday in Dane County.
This is for the teenager who knows us, the family sleeping outside, the nonprofit executive whose life changed overnight, the county supervisor who needed help too, the parent who got the second call from school. It’s for whoever answers when the phone rings next.
Part One asked whether Madison knows how to love Black people when we need something back. Maybe this is what the answer requires.
The mother on the edge of the bed will make that call. Somebody gave her the number, and people don’t hand out numbers that don’t work. What this budget is actually deciding is whether anyone answers.
Fund the living. Don’t wait for an empty field to remember the food, a closed program to remember the kids, or someone back outside to remember the housing.
The phone is about to ring. I want somebody there to pick it up.
