In 2012, five Metcalfe Park resident leaders formed the Metcalfe Park Community Action Team (MPCAT) to join with neighborhood and citywide partners to consider how resident engagement could improve the Metcalfe Park neighborhood. That same year, they were chosen for the federally funded Building Neighborhood Capacity Program, which provided them the resources to become Metcalfe Park Community Bridges, an organization for the community by the community that exists to support residents and revitalize the neighborhood.
Metcalfe Park is a hypersegregated neighborhood in which decades of poor policy, climate injustice, discrimination, and neglect have resulted in industrial pollution, heat islands, and a lack of access to high-quality greenspaces. Compounding this, in 2022, the murder of a mother and attempted murder of her daughter by her father was witnessed by neighbors, and while MPCB doesn’t wish to spotlight this trauma, residents need a safe healing space for themselves and their kids. They have chosen this site as that safe healing space. On it, they would like to augment an existing plan designed and implemented by Groundworks Milwaukee with plantings, ornamental trees, benches, raised herb beds, art panels along the fencing, and potentially a labyrinth. The site’s name, North Star Park, harkens to the time of Harriet Tubman, who looked to the North Star to guide the way as she was leading enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad. MPCB intends this this park to represent a place of healing, a place of connection, a place to be free, and in particular, will lift up the protection of Black women.
