Growing up outside Cincinnati, Dominique Samari wanted to emulate Clair Huxtable of “The Cosby Show.” “As a young Black girl, watching a professional Black woman on TV for what was maybe the first time in history … she was the ideal of what I thought I wanted to be when I grew up,” Samari says. “I think the idea of being a lawyer was planted in me watching her.” After graduating from Ohio University, Samari applied to law schools across the country. She landed at Marquette and moved to Milwaukee, a city she’d never seen before. The experience wasn’t entirely positive.
“What I found in Milwaukee was that the city is socially and physically dissected into parts, and they look drastically different from each other,” Samari says. “I found that really difficult to navigate because I like to have a lot of different types of people around me, different perspectives, and it was hard to have that in the city.”
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Samari wanted to do what she could to address that segregation. After graduating from law school and spending almost four years in Afghanistan designing criminal justice programs for the U.S. State Department, she decided to move back to Milwaukee in 2011 to start P3 Development Group with a former Marquette Law classmate, Genyne Edwards. P3 designs programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion in nonprofits and other organizations, including the Milwaukee Public Library and the Girl Scouts of Wisconsin. In 2017, she also helped launch Imagine MKE, an organization that supports the arts in Milwaukee.
In 2020, Samari started a new project to help bridge the divide in Milwaukee through conversation. The Belonging Project, which later morphed into an app called Kin, paired Milwaukeeans across different perspectives, often racial, for a series of six conversations, the goal being greater understanding. Kin relaunched in October as Kin Universe, a national program. “At every level, we’re just trying to create impact,” Samari says. “The end goal is to shift the disparities and improve people’s lives.”
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