Several dozen community, business and nonprofit leaders from gathered on the near North Side yesterday to welcome Madison-based community development organization Forward Community Investments to Milwaukee.
Forward Community Investments has had the office on the second floor of the historic Wally Schmidt Tavern building since November, and has had full-time staff housed there for the last month.
“I think it’s really being part of the community,” said FCI Regional Director Sarah Greenberg, who joined FCI in March as its first full-time employee based outside of Madison. “Being able to be in the day to day, you know, walk the streets. Meet with our borrowers more frequently. If they have events we can be there, if they are having issues, financial difficulties we can help support them much more quickly, much more face to face than having folks have to drive all the way from Madison.”
“I think it’s exciting,” said Joaquín Altoro, vice president of commercial lending at Town Bank and an FCI board member. “The impact that FCI has had already in Milwaukee is absolutely significant. But Milwaukee is a community where people are somewhat skeptical if you’re not part of what they’re doing. If they can’t see you, touch and feel you. Are you real? And people can see feel and touch the projects that we’ve been invested in. Like to have someone like Sarah and have her here be actively engaged to say hey, we are here and we want to be the part of this, that’s the next level in this game, so it’s exciting.”
“I’m glad to see that the office is here in Milwaukee because when you have a presence especially when you’re working community development, that speaks volumes for the commitment to the area,” said Gwen Washington, the Community Reinvestment Act officer at Associated Bank. “I want to say that first. And then secondly, just the physical preservation of such a nice building, a historic building in the community also can serve as an additional catalyst to spurring other developments within the area.”
The choice of location and the building was key, said FCI president Salli Martyniak.
“It used to be the old Wally Schmidt Tavern. It was an unloved building,” she said. “And Juli Kaufmann purchased it and saw a lot more than just a shell of a building. And so really she had the vision for developing it into a restaurant space that is for the community again and owned by the community. As well as to make it beautiful. The community deserves beautiful. It deserves nothing less.”
The building has won multiple Milwaukee Awards for Neighborhood Development Innovation — MANDIs — for its innovative reclaiming of an old structure into a new a vibrant office space, which houses the restaurant Tandem on the ground floor and several community-oriented businesses and organizations on the upper floors.
FCI also hopes the Milwaukee office facilitates a two-way exchange between the state’s two largest cities.
“The entire Board is 100% on board of having a Milwaukee office and having sort of this rooted space here,” said board chair and longtime Madisonian Ananda Mirilli. “But I have to show my biases about Madison. What I’ve learned coming to Milwaukee and seeing more projects in Milwaukee is the creative, collaborative innovation happening here that we will certainly bring to Madison. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t be doing more collaborative work to build parts of town that are completely run down or not walkable or not beautified. Things from Madison we will bring here, things from Milwaukee move there.”
From the Milwaukee office, Greenberg also intends to work more closely with organizations in Kenosha and Racine.
