Category: Milwaukee Magazine

Goodwill’s Good Deal

This was an Insider piece I worked on for our January 2014 issue.

Leading a tour on an early morning in November, Molly Gilgenbach – director of the “work services program” at Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin – strolls through the various learning labs and classes meeting at the James O. Wright Center for Work and Training, a branching, low-slung building on North 91st Street that looks a bit like a high school. She’s warm, almost heartbreakingly upbeat.

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20 of the Most Creative Milwaukeeans: Brad Pruitt

For Emmy-winning filmmaker Brad Pruitt, it’s function over form. Although his past few projects have been documentaries – Bending Toward the Light about education and Mark My Words about spoken-word poets – Pruitt is returning to narrative for his upcoming film, Behind Closed Doors. Narrative just makes sense for this story, he says. The film follows five neighbors who live in the same apartment building in Milwaukee. It’s a film about connections and community, race and economics. The story had been developing in his mind for years.

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20 of the Most Creative Milwaukeeans: Ken Leinbach

We’re on the top level of the tower at the Urban Ecology Center’s Riverside Park branch, clear views of Downtown to the south and the new Rotary Centennial Arboretum to the west. Ken Leinbach, the center’s executive director, has just shoveled in his lunch. “When you’re up here, you get a different perspective,” he says.
He points to the northeast, to the park he built when he first started out. (“Just me and a toad in a trailer,” he jokes.) To encourage children to come from that park to the Urban Ecology building, a series of three sculptures dubbed Walk Like a River was installed.
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