WALNUT WAY 20-21

About the Walnut Way Community Technology Project

The Walnut Way Community Technology Project is an effort by Walnut Way to help Lindsay Heights residents grow their numerous "side hustles" in profitable and sustainable businesses. To do this, we were tasked with creating an e-commerce website for these small business owners to market and sell their products.

Though the website is not finished, we have taken many steps to ensure its success. We have developed numerous relationships with others in the community in order to get different perspectives on the best way to design the site. We are confident that, when the project is finished, it will provide an excellent resource for entrepreneurs in the Lindsay Heights community, and potentially in other areas of Milwaukee.

Project Timeline

August 2020

We picked up with the initial work from the last group that was working on this project. They had created some initial wireframes for some thoughts of what the website could look like as a finished product with all components. Our first meeting was spent talking with Rusty about the previous work and the next steps of the project moving forward.

September 2020

In the first few weeks of the project, we were discussing with Rusty possible flows for the website, considering the user experience for both businesses and customers. To begin, we were just focusing on the part deemed the most essential to the platform in the e-commerce section of the site. For the components that they were looking to create, we researched examples of similar features that we could find in other sites. We continued having weekly meetings with Rusty to express our findings and thoughts.

December 2020

Our research led us across the pond where we found the site WeAreLocals that offered very similar services to local business in several communities throughout the UK. We reached out to Christian Shanahan who operates the site, and we discussed the possibility of bringing his work to Milwaukee, creating a WeAreMilwaukee branch of the site or possibly several sub-branches.

January 2021

After several meetings with Christian, introducing his work to several others throughout Walnut Way, Christian was very interested in extending his site into Milwaukee on a trial run that would not come to any cost to Walnut Way to begin. He made a concept image of what WeAreMilwaukee could look like. With this great opportunity, we started mapping out how this would be integrated into Milwaukee, and what partners would be necessary to keep everything organized. This lead to several conversations with new partners such as the Zilber Family Foundation, LISC Milwaukee, and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. We eventually decided to explore other avenues, but this was the first step towards finding the right network for this project.

February 2021

Back in Milwaukee, we were also having conversations with the Hispanic Collaborative that developed the site MercadoMKE, which helps connect Latino businesses to customers. This goal of helping small businesses market their products/services was shared between MercadoMKE and the goals of our project, but we differed in the sense that MercadoMKE was creating a network by ethnicity, while Walnut Way wanted to do this geographically. In this meeting, we talked about collaborating with MercadoMKE in some way, hoping to find some consensus about whether to make the site based on ethnic lines or geographic lines.

March-April 2021

In order to connect with residents of the Lindsay Heights neighborhood to understand the stories of the people that the site aims to help, Jonathan took part in the Adams Garden Park Oral History Project coordinated by Raoul Deal at UW Milwaukee. Jonathan and his team of Sam Keyser from MSOE (middle left) and Christiana Mcclurg from UW Milwaukee (middle right) interviewed three Lindsay Heights community members about their experiences in Lindsay Heights, the challenges it faces, and methods for improving the community in terms of service work and community projects that Adams Garden Park will be coordinating. He interviewed Dr. Elizabeth Drame (bottom left) from UW Milwaukee, Danielle Washington (bottom right), who are both residents in the community. Additionally, he interviewed Professor Portia Cobb from UWM Milwaukee who does not live in Lindsay Heights, but gardens at Alice’s Garden and is a part of the community.

April 2021

For our last project in the class, we created an application that would display the ideas of this e-commerce platform and how it relates to tactical urbanism. Normally, tactical urbanism is about making physical changes in the community that make a great impact for a small, but tactical investment. We felt that this e-commerce platform showed that you could develop a community through an online platform by creating a small area that would become a hub for improvements in the community in the real world.

April 2021

The Zilber Family Foundation approved a grant of $25,000 over one year to support the project of building a free online marketplace that would provide the services to the North Side of Milwaukee. Since Walnut Way filed the grant with the Hispanic Collaborative as a partner, it allowed Walnut Way to choose to create the site based on geography/neighborhood.

May 2021

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation additionally approved a grant for the project. After receiving these two grants, we are coming to the beginnings of true implementation of this site where e-commerce will be conducted free of charge for local businesses in Milwaukee. We will begin working to develop for the Lindsay Heights neighborhood and then will expand into the North Side of Milwaukee. After this e-commerce section is completed, the other components that were on the table at the beginning of the year could be retouched on again, but there is a lot of work to do before we get there.

May 2021

We concluded our work by interviewing Rusty Borkin and Emonia Barnett from Walnut Way about the work of the project and the partnership with MSOE. We talked about the goals for the project moving forward, the future of the partnership between MSOE and Walnut Way, and how the partnership affected the work. From our conversation, we created a podcast episode about our conversation.

Our Community Partner

Rusty Borkin

Rusty is an active member of the Lindsay Heights community, devoting much of his time to bringing wealth to the area. His main project is Community Wealth Building, which educates participants on the economy with the goal of growing side hustles into sustainable small businesses. Community Wealth Building offers entrepreneurs resources for their businesses that would not have been available to them otherwise.

Meet our Team

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I'm Jess Oratch, a User Experience Design freshman at MSOE. I decided to work with Walnut Way because I wanted to learn by doing, and I felt that I had a good skillset to offer the team. As one of the few design majors here at MSOE, I knew I could offer a fresh perspective to the project. I was also happy to use this project as a way to get to know and understand the people of Milwaukee, particularly those who live away from the hustle and bustle of downtown.

I am Jonny Keane, a computer science freshman at MSOE. I wanted to work with Walnut Way because it seemed like a large project where we would be learning how to organize our actions over a long period of time. The idea of helping to create an e-commerce platform sounded very interesting to me, and it seemed like the work would do so much good for the Lindsay Heights community, so I was ready for the challenge.

My name is Aaron Close. I’m a freshman at MSOE, and I am majoring in computer science. I chose to work with Walnut Way because the impact of the project would be incredibly beneficial to the community in Lindsay Heights. Alongside that, I felt that creating an e-commerce platform would both test my skills and teach me new things, with the added benefit of creating a place where people can develop their side hustles into legitimate and successful businesses.