Cracks in the Foundation

Author’s Note This book is a testimony to what God can do with broken places, stubborn faith, and a girl who refused to stop showing up. It is not a manual, though you may find strategies here. It is not a policy paper, though systems live in every chapter. It is the record of the first forty-eight years of my life—years that stretched me between classrooms and courtrooms, sanctuaries and group homes, lecture halls and late-night crisis calls. I write as a Black woman, a daughter of Milwaukee’s Sherman Park, a social worker, a professor, a founder, a mother, and a believer who has learned to trust God in data and in tears. I also write as someone who has watched too many children grow up in the shadows of institutions that were never designed with them in mind. If you find your own story between these pages—the tired caregiver, the overextended leader, the young person who survived systems, the mother trying to balance calling and children—know this: you are not alone. These are my first 48. By the grace of God, there is more to come. Chapter 1 – Sherman Park Beginnings The house on 40th Street was not fancy, but it was full. Full of family, noise, The Blues playing on the radio Saturday mornings, and the smell of whatever my mother was stretching to feed more mouths than the budget said it could. Sherman Park, on Milwaukee’s northwest side, was the kind of neighborhood where everybody knew everybody’s business and still brought a plate when trouble came. I did not have the words for “community” yet, but I knew what it felt like. It felt like walking to school and being stopped three times on the way by women who asked, “You alright, baby? You staying out of trouble?” and meant it. It felt like the older men on the block who watched the streets the way some people watch stocks, tracking who came and went, who looked lost, who looked like they might be sliding off the edge. It felt like my father’s voice, low but firm, telling me there was a difference between being smart and being wise—and that this neighborhood would teach me both if I paid attention. We did not call it trauma then. We called it “what it is.” Sirens were part of the soundtrack. Police lights painted our living room walls some nights. There were kids in my classes who did not make it to the end of the school year, and adults whose faces disappeared from stoops and porches without explanation. I learned early that death and prison were not distant possibilities; they were outcomes you could trace on a map, from a certain kind of classroom, to a certain kind of hallway, to a certain kind of corner store at the wrong time of night. Inside our house, though, there was another story running. My parents worked hard, prayed harder, and insisted that education was not optional. Report cards were not just pieces of paper; they were evidence that their sacrifices meant something. If I brought home an A, my mother shouted like I had just won a national championship. If I brought home less than my best, she did not yell; she told me she knew I was capable of more and asked what I needed to get there. That expectation—that I would go further than they had been allowed to go—was both a blessing and a weight. Church stitched the days together. Sunday mornings were non-negotiable, whether I felt like it or not. I learned to sit still in pews that held generations of families, to sing hymns I did not fully understand yet, and to listen to preachers talk about purpose, calling, and the God who saw Hagar in the wilderness. Those stories sank into me long before I knew that my own work would live in modern wildernesses—shelters, courtrooms, detention centers, and the bedrooms of girls who felt thrown away. As a child, I noticed everything. I noticed which kids came to school with the same clothes several days in a row. I noticed the quiet ones who jumped when someone slammed a desk too hard. I noticed the girls who suddenly stopped talking about their fathers. I did not know the words “foster care” or “child welfare system” yet, but I knew the look of a child who was trying to disappear in plain sight. Something in me wanted to sit next to them, to make them laugh, to ask the questions adults pretended not to see. In our living room, the evening news was always on. My father talked back to the television—arguing with politicians, shaking his head at crime reports, pointing out the way stories were told when victims looked like us versus when they did not. He would say, “They don’t know us, Baby Dunk. That’s why they talk about us like that.” I did not realize it then, but those moments were my earliest lessons in media literacy, race, and systemic bias. School became both refuge and proving ground. By the time I reached Milwaukee Lutheran High School, I was used to being one of a few Black girls in certain classes and one of many in others, code-switching so smoothly I barely noticed it. In one hallway, I was the “smart girl,” expected to perform, to speak up, to represent. In another, I was just Lanetta from Sherman Park, trying not to look like I thought I was better than anyone else. That tension—between “getting out” and staying loyal to where I came from—would follow me for decades. At home, college was not a question of if, but where. My parents had not had the chance to go the way they wanted, but they saved, hustled, and prayed over financial aid forms like they were altar calls. When the acceptance letter from Washington University in St. Louis came, it felt like someone had opened a window in a closed room. I was excited, terrified, and determined not to waste the opportunity. Still, even as I prepared to leave, there was a pull I could not name. I walked those Sherman Park blocks with new eyes that summer. I watched younger girls on their bikes, hair braided, laughter loud, completely unaware of how the world would soon start shrinking their possibilities. I watched boys on the corner, already slipping into reputations that would follow them into adulthood. I did not know exactly what I would become, but I knew this: whatever I was going to do in the world, it had to mean something back here. I did not yet imagine that one day this very house—the one with the peeling paint, the crowded bedrooms, the tiny kitchen where my mother worked miracles—would become a licensed group home for girls who had no safe place to land. I did not know that my father’s voice would echo through its walls years after he was gone, that his insistence on both wisdom and book knowledge would become the foundation of my work. Back then, I was just a girl from Sherman Park, standing on a block where the world seemed very small, packing for a life that was about to stretch far beyond what I could see.