Listen: At times it's felt like a sprint while at others it's been more like a marathon, but we've arrived at the finish line in one piece (actually, more like 181 audio pieces). On the final day, Day 50 of 50 in our Meet The Need Campaign, we meet the Agape Center, an organization providing a wide range of services oriented towards building community in Northwest Milwaukee's neighborhoods (Thurston Woods, in particular). The Agape Center is a perfect capstone for our Meet The Need campaign, as their work invokes most of the major ideas we tossed around in the planning phase of the campaign. A basic need is what a person requires to survive on a physiological level. Food, shelter, clothing. However, if an individual's basic needs are not met, can they return to self-sufficiency through a series of short-term bandages? If basic needs are primary needs, what can we consider secondary or human needs? What does an individual require so that they can provide for their own basic needs? The Agape Center uses basic needs as a point of entry and extend beyond by building strength in the community and providing a suite of supportive programs. In these three pieces, Al Luzi (perhaps the most distinct and entertaining voice of the entire campaign) paints a picture of how the Agape Center impacts the individuals, families, and communities around them:
-After solving the mystery of a few broken windows on their complex, the challenge then became figuring out how to prevent them from being broken in the future:
-Many families come through Agape's meal program, and then connect with a whole suite of services: