MEET MORE 2026 UNITY AWARD WINNERS
JACK BOLOG IS A THINKER. He’s rethinking how food pantries do – and don’t – meet their neighborhoods’ needs.
When this 26-year-old was growing up in Kenosha, he was always the classmate off on some mission trip or doing service work. Back then, it was often because Bolog’s parents “volun-told” him, hoping to instill a sense of service in their boy. The habit stuck, and it’s his whole life now.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
He planned to do a year of service after graduating from UW-Whitewater and then go get “a real job,” he says, his index fingers appending air quotes. He ended up spending two years with Kinship Community Food Center on MLK Drive. Then, after a two-week moped journey from Virginia back to Wisconsin in 2023, he became the first-ever full-time staffer at People’s Table, a food pantry on the South Side that’s becoming much, much more.
Enter the concept called food collectives. People’s Table has launched three of them since 2022, inspired by a successful model pioneered in Atlanta, even before Bolog came into the picture. Bolog plans to have six collectives up and running in MKE by the end of 2026.
Each collective is comprised of member-households who share food and resources. Collective members often gather their own food from partner organizations – like Pete’s Fruit Market and Ebenezer Stone Ministries – and additionally come together in groups to facilitate resource-sharing. This all congeals into a framework that naturally strengthens connectivity within neighborhoods and housing projects while meeting basic needs.
Bolog knows that the food pantry infrastructure in Milwaukee (and basically everywhere in America) “serves a vital need” – primarily making sure people don’t go hungry. But food pantries alone “are not innately designed to address underlying issues people are facing or cultivating community,” Bolog says. Collectives, he believes, can be part of “the solution to ending poverty in our city.”
How can we create more unity in Milwaukee?
“Invite your neighbors over for dinner. Unity is when you have a culture of receptivity to all the people around you. Your neighbors are the people who are closest to you, but they are also the people who are given to you.”
