UBUNTU Helps Provide Opportunities for the Historically Oppressed

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Photo: UBUNTU Research - ubunturesearch.org

Monique Liston - UBUNTU Research

Monique Liston

UBUNTU Research and Evaluation is a consulting firm run by Black women, femmes and non-binary folks whose mission is to help businesses and organizations develop a sustainable and equitable framework. Founded by Dr. Monique Liston in early 2017, UBUNTU’s work consists of evaluating programs in order to provide equitable opportunities for the historically oppressed, designing curriculum to promote critical thinking and analytical skills, facilitating focus groups, and advising organizational leaders and educators to actively work against anti-Blackness and other systemic oppressions. While they are a Milwaukee-based organization, they have contracts everywhere from Nebraska to California to Florida to Washington state.

Liston originally started the organization to house research she had done as a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“I was finishing up my dissertation, and my research was on the dignity of boys and men of color in the city of Milwaukee, so I engaged the community in all kinds of aspects,” she says. “I started hearing of people using my work but not referencing me (laughs). I realized that people respect organizations more than they do people.”

The Meaning of UBUNTU

She shares why she chose to name it UBUNTU Research and Evaluation.

“Because this space was holding my intellectual work, it was really important to me that whatever I manifest into the world is unapologetic about being Black—not hiding it, not covering it up, and not deceive folks,” she replies. “I feel like so often when people want to lean on concepts that are culturally rooted, you look to Ancient Greece or Rome or East Asia, and no one leans into African concepts to define the work that they’re doing. In my research of dignity, I really became attracted to the concept of ubuntu—'I am because we are.’

“It’s this ability to be a mutual sense of worthiness that a person should have with the community that they’re in. The way I was talking about dignity culturally represented the concept of ubuntu, and I wanted to represent the fact that Black folks are displaced Africans, tying our work back into the continent.”

Remote Work

Up until the end of 2021, UBUNTU had a physical space. Now their work is primarily done remotely.

“We started at my dining room table in my upper flat in Riverwest, and we’d sit there on Monday nights and be like, could we do this?’ (laughs). No one was thinking about this being a full-time job, just as some extra income like a side hustle,” she says. “I realized that I needed additional space, and our first real space was in the Center of Youth Engagement in the same building as Urban Underground. We were side-by-side with them, and at the time the folks at UBUNTU had previously worked with Urban Underground so it was a very good relationship.

“Then from there, we had an office on 49th and Good Hope and we really enjoyed that. At the time we only had three full-time staff—and even still it wasn’t totally full-time—but then we got some bigger projects and we moved into the former Reader’s Choice building on MLK Drive, which we were really excited about. That was in 2019 and we got to do some really cool events.

“About two years ago to this day was our last working day in the office and then things shut down. It was a very open space layout so we couldn’t be safely distant, plus people just got really comfortable working at home. Since nobody was coming into the office, we were basically paying rent just to store our printer (laughs). There was a buyer for the building and it worked out for us because we weren’t really using it, and so at the end of 2021 we let go of our lease.”

Successes Continue

Liston shares some of UBUNTU’s biggest successes in the last year.

“For one, being nominated by the Shepherd Express as one of the best places to work for social justice was shocking. It still feels like a little dining room table project to me (laughs) but to have that sort of recognition for the city was like “wow.” That was definitely huge. We also expanded our staff, so right now there’s twelve full-time people with salaries, benefits, 401k, and unlimited PTO. Also in 2021 we secured our largest solo project, which is over a million dollars and it’s outside the state of Wisconsin, and that’s one of our markers of real nationwide growth happening for us. People are seeing us as folks that are bringing this conversation about racial equity, justice and liberation, which is a national conversation. That felt really good. 

“One last thing is that this little boy—the son of someone I know—wanted to interview me, and that was like ‘wait a minute, this young person actually sees me and wants to talk to me about what I do?’ and that was a big moment for me. I have a job that a young person could look at and think ‘that’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ That was like nothing I’d ever imagined for myself, to know that a nine-year-old Black boy was curious about what I do.”

Loan Liberation

Recently, UBUNTU launched their Loan Liberation initiative - Liston explains.

“My student loans are keeping me from being great, yet I did what I was supposed to do as a Black girl growing up in Milwaukee; they tell you not to get pregnant, not to get involved in a gang, and to stay in school. I became an adult and didn’t have access to anything I needed to further my life because of my student loans, and this is coming from somebody who had a full tuition scholarship at each level of her higher education.

“To know that I’m plagued with student loans like this, it has to be plaguing other brilliant Black folks who could be doing so much more but have to give so much money to the government for degrees that might not even be serving them. I’ll be paying these off until I die. I’d get jealous of my counterparts who didn’t work as hard as I did in school but didn’t have loans because someone could afford to pay for their college.

“At this time of understanding mutual aid early in the pandemic, I was sharing whatever I could about giving money to Black women and femmes because they were the ones who were getting money out to the community. Thinking about our partnership with Love on Black Women, every time we’d give money they’re pushing it to other people. Knowing that to be true, why are we carrying around this debt that’s not serving us? Can we create a mechanism where people that want to support us but aren’t in a position to hire us, can? Then there’s people that know they have some restitution to pay—racialized harm debt that they need to address. Creating this fund is a good way to get us to a better place financially and liberate us from the harm that loans continue to do. And if I’m having that conversation for me, then it should happen for our whole team.”

Folks that want to support Loan Liberation may make a one-time donation, a monthly donation, or even pay student loans in their entirety for one UBUNTU team member. “In May we’ll start asking people to collect on pledges and then move on to the next round of the campaign, where we’ll move more into the story of why we’re working the contributions in this way and what our goal is,” she says.

Finally, Liston shares some goals for UBUNTU Research and Evaluation in the coming year.

“At the end of 2021 we launched a hiring campaign and it was a national search; we had over 300 applicants and about 70 of them really fit, and we ended up hiring one person out of that pool and that person is a Black woman from Milwaukee. It wasn’t a plus or minus thing if you were from Milwaukee because of our remote situation, but when it came down to it, that’s the person who was the best fit for the job. As we continue representing Milwaukee across the U.S., we hope to eventually get into some international conversations about racial equity, justice, and liberation.

“We’re also always trying to radicalize our workflow so we’re going to be piloting our four-day work week later this year. Then we hope to get more of our team in front of the camera so that they’re able to talk about all the work that they’ve done over the last few years—what’s challenging about it, what’s amazing about it, and what have they learned.

“I’m feeling less like the scrappy person who’s trying to start a business and more like the person who’s making sure this business survives and outlives her. That’s a shift that allows me to go to sleep at night.”

For more information about UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, visit their website at ubunturesearch.com.