8 O'Clock Buzz

Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Dr. Damita Brown, Director of Diversity & Cultural Responsiveness for Iowa City School District, Laura Gray joins us to talk about her work in restorative justice and her book, Seeing Beyond the Behavior, addressing the discipline gap between white and non-white students and other issues in education!

More on Laura, Restorative Community Partners, and Gray Space Thinking: https://www.restorativecp.com/

Follow Laura on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldmcottrell

Listen to Restorative Equity with Laura Gray: https://anchor.fm/laura-gray5/ 

Listen in Madison at 89.9FM or online anywhere at wortfm.org.  Support your community radio with a donation online at wortfm.org!

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Laura Gray is passionate about Restorative Circles, equity and inclusion. She is a product of Chicago Public Schools and has over 16 years experience in education where she has served as teacher, assistant principal, building principal and director. Laura is an experienced executive coach, facilitator, motivational speaker, published author, Restorative Circle Keeper, trainer, curriculum designer, educator and consultant. 

She has a BA in English Education from Loyola University Chicago and a MA in Educational Leadership from Concordia University Chicago. She currently lives on the East Side of Iowa City and serves as the Director of Diversity and Cultural Responsiveness for the Iowa City Community School District, and also is the founder of Gray Space Coaching, Restorative Community Partners, LLC and Captivate Conferences. 

Gray Spaces are those areas that are undiscovered, unwritten, and between the “black and white” rules.  They fortify the endurance and agility of the “out of the box” leader we all must be in order to stand, feet firm, for equity.  Gray spaces embrace flexibility, responsiveness, accountability, and balance! Thrive in the Gray Spaces!

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Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Dr. Damita Brown, Tuesday Buzz host and Native American activist Sikowis joins us to catch up on the work she does at Great Plains Action Society and what is new in her world!

More on Sikowis and Great Plains Action Society, their Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Project, and Protect the Sacred Youth Camp:

Website: https://www.greatplainsaction.org/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/GreatPlainsActionSociety 

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/GreatPlainsActionSociety  

More information on the Set me Free Project: https://www.setmefreeproject.net/ and https://www.facebook.com/setmefreeproject/ 

Listen in Madison at 89.9FM or online anywhere at wortfm.org.  Support your community radio with a donation online at wortfm.org!

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Sikowis Nobiss is Plains Cree/Saulteaux of the George Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan, founder and Executive Director of Great Plains Action Society. She is a speaker, writer, artist, organizer, and movement mentor in Iowa, and across the nation and is focused on dismantling white supremacist, colonial-capitalist institutions, and replacing them with Indigenous ideologies and practices created in synchronicity with the land. Sikowis graduated from the University of Iowa with a Master’s Degree in Religious Studies and a Graduate Minor in American Indian Native Studies. She is a mother of two young children.

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A coalition of activist groups are urging House Democrats to conduct an investigation into the numbers and identities of all people killed by U.S. drones in the past 20 years, lead in part by Kathy Kelly from Voices for Creative Non-Violence. In her interview with Jan Miyasaki, she describes the history of civilian deaths, and how the drone has become a “poor man’s weapon”, as the U.S. leads the way in drone use. She his recently co-authored an exposé on this subject.

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Author and activist (The Garden of Truth Report and member of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Task Force) Chris Stark, talks about her recent book “Carnival Lights” a historical fiction of four stories of Ojibwe families, in different times, of their relocation and dislocation in white society.

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Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Dr. Damita Brown, poet, photographer and violist Katrin Talbot joins us to talk about her poetry, becoming more creative, her work, and involvement in the arts in Madison.

More on Katrin and her art: https://www.katrintalbot.com/

More on Driftless Writing Center: https://www.driftlesswritingcenter.org/

More on Arts + Literature Lab and write-ins: https://artlitlab.org/events/write-ins 

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Australian-born Katrin Talbot is a violist, photographer, and poet, whose collection Wrong Number is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press and she has six other chapbooks, including The Blind Lifeguard and Freeze-Dried Love from Finishing Line Press, Attached—Poetry of Suffix, The Little Red Poem and noun’d, verb, all from dancing girl press, and St. Cecilia’s Daze, published by Parallel Press. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and many anthologies and she was voted Madison Magazine’s Best of Spoken Word Artist/Poet a few years ago. She also has two Pushcart Prize nominations and quite a few chickens.

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Today on the Tuesday 8:00 Buzz with Dr. Damita Brown, social entrepreneur Deneisha Thompson joins us from New York to talk about changing social work and social organizations, her transformational work, what social entrepreneurship is, and how she is using it to make change.

More on Deneisha, her professional work and consulting: https://www.4impactconsulting.com/ and http://www.deneisha.com/ 

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A social worker turned social entrepreneur, Deneisha Thompson is a consultant, facilitator and coach who specializes in change management, leadership development, group facilitation, and building strong teams. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Metropolitan College of NY where she teaches a variety of courses in the School of Human Services. A fierce advocate for oppressed people and their communities, Deneisha helps nonprofits to build strong organizational cultures and partnerships that center diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. Deneisha designs powerful meetings, workshops, retreats and curriculum that have become highly sought after personal and professional development opportunities.

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After a multi-decade career in the criminal justice system in Dane County, Jerry Hancock went from being public defender to Deputy District Attorney, to… Reverend and organizer of the Prison Ministry Program. In the first half of the show, Hancock talks about his transition and his realization that the people in the “justice system” have a serious disconnect with the activities of the “prison system” in Wisconsin, and the lack of a parole system under Walker.

In the second half of the show, they are joined by Peggy West Schroeder, ExPO SE Coordinator, and the discussion moves to “no caps on extended supervision in Wisconsin”, sentence disparities by race, prison gerrymandering, locked up on the outside, and more.

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WORT 89.9FM Madison · Zakher Bouragaoui on The Tunisian Association for Wildlife

The Tunisian Association for Wildlife (ATVS) is a non-governmental and non-profit organization, that aims to study and promote biodiversity on a national and international scale through an ecosystemic approach for conservation, awareness-raising purposes and sustainable development.

The Association’s Co-Founder and Vice-President, Zakher Bouragaoui, joins Friday Buzz host Austin Exum to talk more about the Association and his studies as a Master’s Student at the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology here at UW Madison.

 

 

(Images courtesy of Zakher Bouragaoui and The Tunisian Association for Wildlife)

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It’s the holiday season so it’s a great time to talk about food since it’s so central to all the gatherings we attend at this time of year. Unfortunately, so much of the food we eat now is void of real nutritional value and organic fresh foods are expensive and harder to get. The Great Plains has been vastly colonized in order to produce monocropped, GMO, crops of corn, soy, etc., which are then highly processed. This food is what is most accessible in inner-city and reservation food deserts, leading to huge spikes in diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and more in Indigenous communities. However, many Indigenous folks are making huge changes in this realm by reclaiming and relearning how to grow, process, and cook our first foods, which is a huge step towards true food sovereignty. Sikowis was joined by three Indigenous guests for the Food Sovereignty Episode who are all experts in some way in the food industry and who are making great changes in the food sovereignty realm.

Anthony Warrior is Sicangu, Shawnee, and Mvskoke Creek and creates and cooks traditional Native American fare. He also teaches food preparation, healthy cooking, Traditional and contemporary food preservation classes. He is the owner and chef of Warriors’ Palate Catering and Consultation.  More information on Warriors Palate at https://www.facebook.com/WarriorsTasteBud.

Elena Terry is a Ho-Chunk chef and Indigenous food educator. She is the founder and executive chef of Wild Bearies, a local nonprofit aimed at educating the community about Indigenous food and cooking.  She is also a lead mentor for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, and she frequently collaborates with the Intertribal Agriculture Council, Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative, and UW–Madison’s Department of Horticulture.  More information at http://wildbearies.org. 

Dan Cornelius is a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. He works as an Outreach Specialist and Deputy Director of the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center in the UW Law School. He also assists Native Nations and their members with developing Native agriculture and food systems as the Intertribal Agriculture Council Technical Assistance Specialist for Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa.   More information at http://indianag.org/midwest.

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WORT 89.9FM Madison · UW Madison Cartography Lab’s We Are Here: Local Mapmakers Explore the World That Connects Us Exhibit

We Are Here: Local Mapmakers Explore the World That Connects Us is an exhibit that was developed by the UW Madison Cartography Lab and currently showing at the Overture Center until January 16th. The exhibit features work from both current students and alumni from their current places of employment and aims to let people know that Madison is a hub and important place of cartography training.

Tanya Buckingham Andersen is the Creative Director at the University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab in the Geography Department. She has worked in cartography for more than 20 years, and joins Friday Buzz host, Brian Standing, to talk more about the exhibit.

 

 

(Images courtesy of GeoJango Maps on Unsplash and Tanya Buckingham Andersen)

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