In a city known for its bridges, this lush 2-acre space in the North Side’s Lindsay Heights neighborhood looks a bit different than the others.
It connects community.
Alice’s Garden Urban Farm contains 100 garden beds brushed with nature’s full hue – rich greens, lavenders, yellow dandelions, orange and red flowers, all lovingly cared for by residents of the neighborhood and beyond. Under a pavilion in the middle of the garden, people gather for nourishment with knowledge – classes, reading circles and markets are just some of the activities shared there.
Just off Fond du Lac Avenue between North 20th and 21st streets, the garden has been a community project since the early 1970s. Formerly identified by just a number, it was named in honor of Alice Meade-Taylor, who was its advocate until her death in 2001. Today, though, it is defined by Venice Williams, who stepped into Meade-Taylor’s legacy two decades ago and has magnified it. Now the garden’s executive director, Williams also describes herself as a lay minister, teacher, healer and facilitator.
When Williams, 61, first stepped into the garden in 2004 as a community partner with Seedfolks Youth Ministry, a gardening program for families, the property badly needed some TLC. She shepherded the construction of new amenities for the garden’s plots – sheds to hold tools, a pavilion with a solar panel roof sheltering picnic tables. She added community events to the schedule – not just classes on gardening, but a weekly artisan market, free yoga classes, prayer and poetry circles, potlucks and more.
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Venice (pronounced “Venus,” not like the city in Italy) helped transform the space into a vibrant community center. One day, about five years into her life at the garden, she was planting seeds and listening to the diverse gardeners around her. In a city notorious for its segregation, she was hearing people speak in Spanish, German, French, Hmong and an African language she wasn’t familiar with as they worked together.
“I heard six different languages being spoken here and I bawled,” Williams says. “I cried like a baby because we had birthed the community I was hoping we would. If the outside of this fence could be like the inside, Milwaukee would be a better, more hopeful, peaceful space.”
The garden and her myriad other projects are all about “building bridges, building bridges, building bridges,” Williams says, repeating the mantra for emphasis. She says it’s part of her DNA – she was raised in the Pittsburgh area, another city famous for its many bridges. In Milwaukee, her community since 1989, Williams not only builds the bridges; she’s the Pittsburgh-forged steel that keeps them together.
“If the outside of this fence could be like the inside, Milwaukee would be a better, more hopeful, peaceful space.”
– Venice Williams
Williams calls her network of bridges – spanning the North Side and beyond – The Table, a ministry and community that includes the garden, as well as a new physical home in what was the Capitol Drive Lutheran Church. She is also the interim director of the Fondy Food Center, which hosts the Fondy Farmers Market, and she operates the Kujichagulia Producers Cooperative market in Sherman Phoenix, which sells products made from Alice’s Garden and her network of artisans.
That network includes Cheryl Robertson, a yoga instructor who met Williams through church about 30 years ago and now works with The Table to teach classes. “The Table is like a ministry without walls, so anybody is invited in. It’s not located just inside the building, it extends into the community,” Robertson explains.
“When I think about the power of sitting at a table with people and sharing your life story, a meal, sharing your concerns and joys – for me, all tables can be really magical, nourishing spaces,” Williams says. “It was an inviting image for me. So much of my life has been shaped by sitting at tables with people breaking bread and telling stories.”
Williams’ approach is an exemplar of the impact “community-driven initiatives” can have on their neighborhoods, says Sup. Sheldon Wasserman, chair of the County Board’s Committee on Parks and Culture. “Alice’s Garden has become a vibrant hub where people come together to cultivate not just the land,” he says, “but also relationships, knowledge and resilience.”
Robertson and many other people who work with Williams around The Table use the same words to describe her: trusted adviser.
“She’s a community pillar, a community mother,” says Vanessa Johnson, who works as a doula and yoga instructor out of The Table Vocational Center. “There’s a saying that we like to sit at the feet of our elders. Just having someone we can learn from as Black women specifically is just invaluable.”
She offers guidance on everything from business startup questions to spiritual matters to recommendations on medicinal herbs.
“Her resources come from her connections in the community,” says Robertson. “If I come to her and say, I need to do X, Y and Z, she’s able to point me in the right direction. Everyone comes to her for advice and she’s able to deliver it.”
The Venice Network
“I don’t even call it ‘busy,’ I say it’s living in abundance,” Venice Williams says of her full schedule. Here’s a list of places related to Williams and The Table.
1. Alice’s Garden Urban Farm
2136 N. 21ST ST.
Williams is the executive director of the garden and leads the herbal apprenticeship and other programming there.
2. The Table Vocational Center
5305 W. CAPITOL DR.
As The Table’s spiritual director, Williams meets clients to counsel in her office and selects the businesses that share the space.
3. Fondy Food Center
2102 W. FOND DU LAC AVE.
Since May 2022, Williams has been interim executive director at this center, which focuses on healthy food access in Milwaukee and especially the Lindsay Heights neighborhood. They also run the Fondy Farmers Market and Milwaukee Winter Farmers Market.
4. Kujichagulia Producers Cooperative
3536 W. FOND DU LAC AVE.
Williams created this market stand inside the Sherman Phoenix, which carries products made from Alice’s Garden and the artisan market centered there. Kujichagulia is a Swahili word for self-determination.
GROWING SEASON HAS JUST BEGUN, and Williams has arrived at Alice’s Garden for her first “Herbal Apprentices” class of the year. Williams greets them all warmly.
A diverse group of about 10 women and a few of their children are in attendance, and water bottles, sippy cups and a colorful array of seed packets are spread across the garden’s picnic tables. It’s a sunny but cool day, everyone is wearing light jackets and sweatshirts. A sign by a nearby garden plot has an old activist saying: “Tried to bury us … we were seeds,” with a flower growing out of a heart.
Someone in attendance asks about her favorite plant. “That’s like asking me my favorite child!” Williams laughs. After thinking about it, she lists calendula, lemon balm and lovage as her top things to grow. She walks over to a lovage plant – a flush green plant with floppy stems – and plucks some of the jagged leaves to let her students taste its celery-like flavor.
One of Williams’ apprentices is Carolyn Bracey. Curious about what the garden was all about, Bracey wandered over one day and attended a makers market and immediately ran into Williams.
“She met me at the front gate and gave me a big hug and invited me in to look around, and that’s how it started,” Bracey says. “I try to participate in a lot of the activities that go on here.” She has her own plot where she grows collard greens, okra, Brussels sprouts, sage, mint and tomatoes. This year Bracey is trying a couple of new things – a yoga class, growing peanuts. (Gardeners pay a yearly fee for their space, and there is always a wait list because, Williams says, few ever give up their plots.)
Williams peers at her students through her glasses in the sunlight as she points out plants that have already sprung up and uses for them – dandelions, she explains, can be made into a skin care ointment. Stinging nettles can help with arthritis and sore muscles. Traffic hums by as she points out a patch of lettuce beginning to sprout. She’s wearing a sweatshirt that reads “I am Black History,” which is fitting as she passes down herbal knowledge she learned from her family.
The Black history of this land is a long one. Williams cites the legacy of the area’s role in the underground railroad. A part of the land that is now Alice’s Garden was once a farm owned by Samuel Brown, who helped former slaves escape into Canada starting in the 1840s. Over the next hundred years, the area became a thriving Black community.
“This land was extremely vibrant with the businesses and the life of those who came up from the South and landed in Milwaukee for those great manufacturing jobs,” Williams says. “They had created a beautiful village here. Many lived in boarding houses, but they found space to grow food. Food has always been central to who we are as Black folk in the city – the cultivation of food, the sharing of food, setting tables of welcome.”
But then, Williams notes, the city came in and much of the neighborhood was vacated and bulldozed for a proposed highway that was never built.
In more recent history, as the pandemic unfolded, Alice’s Garden became an important place for the community to thrive again, to visit and get food and supplies. “We were one of the few spaces open. We made sure this gate was open every day, sunrise to sunset,” Williams says. “I was exhausted.”
One of the garden features is a labyrinth marked with a path of stones and filled with an array of herbs and flowers – lots of healthy greens and purple lavender, with a bench in the center. It’s used as a form of walking meditation and quiet contemplation, or a spot to have a heart-to-heart conversation. Williams says spaces like these are much needed in an urban setting, and several studies back this up: Green spaces can help lower stress, anxiety and depression.
“When I walk in here, I just feel peace wash over me,” Bracey says about visiting her garden plot.
“It’s a place of peace where you are nourished and nurtured. It is home,” Williams explains. “You shouldn’t have to leave the city to find a place of refuge, to find sanctuary, and that’s what this is.”
ON A WALL IN WILLIAMS’ OFFICE, a school photo of a little girl, smiling brightly in a white shirt with dress suspenders, her hair tied with ribbons in pigtails, hangs next to a row of awards and commendations she’s received.
“I bring Little Venice into this space to remind me where I’ve been. I might have all of this,” Williams says, gesturing to the awards, “but this child had to make it out of a small steel town called Homestead, Pennsylvania, where she had to deal with a family that was loving to her and had many, many gifts but was also drowning in alcoholism and domestic violence. I remember the things that she saw that she never should have seen. The same is true for little girls and little boys in this city. People told me that I was possible. And that’s what I need to do every single day.”
In this office, she offers spiritual direction services, and you can see she’s coming from a place of depth in such matters. Williams says it is important to name those abuses she saw as a child. “I learned a lot in that as well. I learned resilience and how important it is to create boundaries. I learned about forgiveness, and that’s woven into everything I do.” Williams says. “Everyone wants to tell the good stories, but those struggles also brought me to this space and are part of who I am.”
Williams’ mother, Geraldine, was a grocer, and her father was a “jack of all trades” who worked as a chef, baker, barber and store manager; Williams says he passed down his energy for multi-tasking to her. Gardening runs in the family, too. Williams says she comes from a “long line of family who grew their own food.”
“Growing up, both sides of my family understood that you were called to serve. They were grounded in faith, going to church, giving back, serving whatever your call was, it was a part of my family ethics,” Williams says. That’s carried over to her own current priorities: “food, family and faith.” Her partner, Demetrius, acts as a gardener and beekeeper at Alice’s Garden. They have three children of their own – Sojourner, Josiah and Demetrius Jr. – and she has “cared for, nurtured and been mama to dozens more.”
Incubating Wellness
“The people who received an invitation to come in here were people I believed could live into this vision,” Williams says. New spaces within The Table Vocational Center are continuing to be developed. Here’s a look at three of the businesses already established there.
1. Yoga Flo Wellness
In a room decorated with stained glass – the church’s former craft and gift shop – Cheryl Robertson teaches yoga classes two to three days a week. Other instructors share the space for tai chi, Zumba and other classes. “It’s like it was made specially to meditate, to have an experience not just with your body moving but also your mind finding some peace,” Robertson says.
2. Mystic Phoenix Art
“A huge part of healing is tapping into your creativity,” Williams explains. Founded by CaBeatrice Hart and her daughters, Mystic Phoenix Art is a studio filled with paintings and other projects in various states of progress. They also offer art classes like a holiday snow globe decoration workshop and an art pen pal club.
3. Sankofa Village: Healing and Wellness Training Center
Registered nurse and yoga instructor Vanessa Johnson offers doula, prenatal and postpartum support to families in her space in The Table. The umbrella name Sankofa Village embodies A Miracle Happened: Wellness and Birth Services, a doula training organization; Yoga with Vanessa; and Birthworkers United, “a nonprofit where the vision is to bridge the gaps between the medical and emotional side of prenatal care using a multidisciplinary approach.”
WHEN WILLIAMS MOVED HERE IN 1989, she was the director of youth ministry for the Milwaukee Lutheran Coalition, a group of 28 ministries around the city. A little under two years ago, the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) decided to gift Williams the Capitol Drive Lutheran Church, which had slowly seen declining membership.
But the relationship between Williams and the church’s leadership was not always harmonious. There was a period around the time she joined the garden where Williams says they didn’t embrace or understand the community programming she was trying to create. One of the church leaders tried to dismantle Williams’ work.
“I said, ‘What you don’t understand is that my call doesn’t come from the larger church. My call comes from a power most higher than all of us. So, you can’t stop my work.’” She admits that those times were rough. “I knew that if I kept at it, we were going to get here,” she says, gesturing to the church’s sanctuary hall, what is now The Table Vocational Center.
Williams says she was reluctant to take on the responsibility of the gifted building at first but realized “the community needs a gathering space” outside the garden’s fences. In her vision, this community center would focus on wellness and giving people opportunities to pursue their vocation, a word she repeats often. Not just a job, but a calling. Offices and rooms that used to house a Head Start preschool program are now occupied by specialists in yoga, art therapy, community theater and other programs. With red tape pending as of midsummer, The Table will convert the church’s kitchen area to a commercial space to help startup food businesses.
The cavernous box of the sanctuary, decorated with stained-glass windows that rise to the ceiling some 30 feet above the floor, hasn’t given up religious services; The Table is an ELCA-authorized worship community. “This is where we have special meetings on grief and sorrow, joy and abundance,” Williams says, her voice – strong, smooth and compassionate – echoing off the walls. But the sanctuary room is also used as a community space – there are theatrical productions, a massage conference coming up in October, and last year the Fondy Food Center moved its Winter Farmers Market from The Domes to The Table. Some people reacted negatively about the move, reluctant to go to the North Side.
“When we announced this location, there was a lot of backlash and racist comments, a lot of stereotypes about coming to 53rd and Capitol. But every person who experienced the market loved it. It was beautiful,” Williams says. “Most important to me, we were able to reach an audience that’s part of the Fondy Food Center mission – healthy food access [and] supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs.”
Williams and her team have made remarkable progress transforming the church into The Table over the last year or two, with still more spaces being renovated for new tenants and projects. A new craft studio is being developed; there are plans to turn a hallway into an art gallery; Williams hopes to turn a glass vestibule into a greenhouse room.
“I don’t want to waste any space,” Williams says.
BEYOND BRIDGE BUILDER, Williams has another metaphorical role she likes to think of for herself: a keymaker, an antithesis to a gatekeeper. The Table has helped her to open doors for a lot of people. “That’s the point, to provide the venue for things to happen,” Williams says. “What do you need? How do I help you to make that happen? How do I get out of your way? I’ll help with what you need, but it’s yours.”
She says there’s still a lot of work to be done and doesn’t show any signs that she’s slowing down. “I could be looking at retiring, but God’s like, ‘I’m not done with you yet. Not in this city. Not yet,” Williams says. “Keep at it.”
Tea Krulos won two 2022 Milwaukee Press Club awards, including gold for last July’s “The Last Frame.”
