Milwaukee Water Commons: Water Connects Us

Meet Milwaukee Water Commons. The nonprofit describes itself as “a cross-city network that fosters connection, collaboration, and broad community leadership on behalf of our common waters.” Milwaukee Water Commons is interested not only in the literal water’s edge at the harbor and shoreline, but also in how we connect to water in our lives. Their team is working to make sure that there is “stewardship of, equitable access to, and shared decision-making for our common waters.”

To remind us all that we all do share our common waters, Milwaukee Water Commons has sponsored an annual open-water swim event called the Cream City Classic, typically held in August. Swimmers jump right in the refreshingly chilly public waters of Milwaukee’s Inner Harbor less than a mile north of Harbor View Plaza. With bodies like playful otters, bobbing heads topped by bright caps, feet flashing white wakes as arms scissor through the deep blue, they swim. Public onlookers and would-be paparazzi observe from riverwalk and bridges over the Milwaukee River. The event is a celebratory affirmation of our connection to water and evidence of a willingness to immerse human bodies within our water—not in a chlorinated rectangular pool beneath a humidified hotel dome—but here in the silent river surging sometimes unnoticed through the very heart of our city, swollen with inflows from as far up in the watershed as farmland in Fond Du Lac County. While it is a bona fide U.S. Masters race for those hardy souls fit to swim over a mile in the open water, for the rest of us it also represents an act of faith, a sort of cultural baptism by proxy. Without words, the Cream City Classic expresses a narrative of how far we’ve come in cleaning up rivers that very few would have wanted to swim in the 20th century—before the Deep Tunnel reduced sewer overflows, before removing the North Avenue Dam restored a more natural flow, before we collectively decided to turn back to the water.

“While we've come a long way, there is still work to be done,” says Anne Bohl, Milwaukee Water Commons' communications & administrative manager. “We must continue improving water quality, removing barriers to access, and creating pathways to our communities of color who have been disconnected from the water due to a history of cultural, systemic racism and segregation. In solidarity with people of color and Indigenous people we can do better and we will. The Cream City Classic is an opportunity to celebrate progress made in water quality and welcome our entire Milwaukee community back to the water as we all lift our expectations of what our waters can be.”

But as an annual event (currently postponed due to COVID-19), the Cream City Classic is perhaps just cream floating atop the deeper well of Milwaukee Water Commons’ long-running equity and engagement efforts. You don’t have to jump into the river to play a role in what the group has described as our “Water City,” an inclusive process of shared decision-making that widens the conversation about water with more than the usual suspects at the table. This Water City Agenda, determined through an extensive process of community engagement, includes six initiatives: Water Quality, Drinking Water, Arts & Culture, Education & Recreation, Green Infrastructure, and Blue/Green Jobs.

As Brenda Coley, co-executive director of Milwaukee Water Commons notes, water is something that connects us in both intimate and taken-for-granted ways: we wash our hands with it to protect from sickness, we drink it to rejuvenate our bodies, we water our gardens so we have fresh food to eat.

“Water soothes me, water calms me, and it beautifies my thoughts and imaginations. Water brings me back to the moment where I am safe and my rage subsides,” Brenda says in a personal reflection as part of Milwaukee Water Commons’ 2020 digital series, Water Connects Us, which invites people to share how water connects to our lives. Brenda concludes: “Water is my friend, water is sacred, and water is my life.”

You can listen to over twenty speakers through Milwaukee Water Commons’ Water Connects Us YouTube video playlist. They share short, personal reflections that provide an opportunity for your own meditation on water.

How do you connect with water? Contact Milwaukee Water Commons to share your voice.