Community Shares of Wisconsin’s The Big Share Is March 3rd: Broad Community Impact (Part 1 of 2)
The Black Mens Coalition’s Sedrick Page (l-r), the Community Immigration Law Center’s Grant Sovern and Community Shares of Wisconsin’s Cheri Dubeil
by Jonathan Gramling
Back in 1971 — 55 years ago — Community Shares of Wisconsin was founded as the Madison Sustaining Fund, an outgrowth of Madison’s antiwar movement. Over those 55 years, Community Shares has grown and evolved, becoming more inclusive as its value of social justice has grown and evolved from its antiwar roots.
In December 2025, Community Shares added 16 new members, a growth of 20 percent. Social justice is often a grassroots-led movement and so Community Shares made adjustments to ensure that these smaller grassroots efforts could receive the support that they needed.
“We realized that a lot of the groups that are the best match to our values were not applying for membership at Community Shares,” said Cheri Dubeil, Community Shares’ executive director. “And so we realized that a lot of the obstacles to membership were based on our requirements including things like you have to have an annual audit, that type of thing. Both of the groups here do annual audits. And so we felt like especially as we were evaluating our organization through an equity lens, we realized our mission, our goal, was justice. And we had fewer groups representing specifically racial justice and equity issues that we wanted. And so, going into the process, our focus was on making sure that rather than looking at the requirements, we were looking at the values of the organization so we could be in mission alignment. And we had some really great applicants. And these two groups are fantastic doing great work that we wanted to be aligned with.”
While workplace giving through the fall employee giving campaign is the major source of funding for its members, Community Shares instituted The Big Share 12 years ago as another method of helping its members do fundraising. The Big Share is a day where the individual fundraising — and friendraising — efforts of all 82 agencies are coordinated and marketed under The Big Share umbrella.
“Last year, we raised the most that we have ever raised,” Dubeil said. “And this will be the first year with 16 new groups. And so we are feeling pretty positively and hopeful that we can keep increasing the impact that we have on the community. Last year, the total was around $820,000. And so we are crossing our fingers that we might reach a million.”
And The Big Share does have an impact.
“A lot of them are smaller,” Dubeil said about their members. “Some of them don’t even have paid staff. And there are groups that don’t have paid staff and are raising $15,000-$20,000 during The Big Share. It’s a great opportunity for us to build the movement overall and to build the community of folks who are supporting these types of issues.”
Two of the 16 organizations that were admitted to Community Shares last December are the Community Immigration Law Center and The Black Men Coalition Foundation. They are deeply purposed in social justice, each with their own mission on seeking social justice.
The efforts of the Community Immigration Law Center, commonly referred to as CILC, focus on protecting the rights of immigrants of all statuses, helping them to obtain justice in America’s immigration legal system.
“We started in 2009, 15 years ago,” said Grant Sovern, CILC’s board president and administrative director. “But for the first 7-8 years, we didn’t have any staff. We just had a free clinic where people could come and get free information about immigration. And then when this guy got elected the first time, we figured out that we needed to do more. And so throughout the first administration, we had three lawyers and one paralegal whose job was to represent people who get picked up by ICE in immigration court, to defend people against deportation or at least to apply the laws. There is this amazing study done around this time in 2017. I feel people think folks whom ICE picks up, they know who is deportable. They just find them, pick them up, detain them, send them to immigration court and they are out of here. And there was a study done in New York that pretty much supported that. It showed that everyone who was in immigration court — ICE doesn’t get to decide who gets deported, only an immigration judge does — there was a 96 percent chance you were going to get deported. So why were we doing this? One of the factors in this study was only 10-20 percent of the people have lawyers. And so the New York city council gave an organization like CILC $10 million. And over two years, everyone got an immigration lawyer. And at the end of those two years, it turned out that only 50 percent of the people were deported.”
CILC runs three programs to assist immigrants.
“One is this free clinic where anyone can come in and get advice every other Friday,” Sovern said. “We probably saw about 500 people through the clinic. Our second program is a clinic for people who are applying for asylum. And over the past 2-3 years, we helped 380 people to file asylum applications. And then so far, since June 2025 up until now, we met with about 300 people who have been picked up by ICE and need a lawyer. That’s probably only 20-30 percent of the people who are picked up. Some of them already have their own lawyers. Some of them just moved out of Wisconsin so fast, we can’t even find them. But the rest of them who can’t afford a lawyer, we represent them. We feel like we are just barely there to have enough lawyers to represent everyone who gets picked up at the rate that they are picking up people right now. But when the Minneapolis thing happens here, it’s going to be a totally different story and we’re training lawyers who are not immigration lawyers how to do some of this work, how regular non-lawyer people can support it. So we’re trying to ramp up and be ready for that.”
The Black Men Coalition Foundation had an equally humble beginning.
“The Coalition has been around since 2022,” said Sedrick Page, the Coalition’s chief operating officer. “It literally started with Michael Johnson believing in what Corey Marionneaux, the coalition’s CEO and founder, did. Corey saw a need during COVID-19 where the elderly members of the community weren’t able to get to the pantries and get the food. So he decided to bring it to them. A van was donated and Black Men Coalition literally started delivering those food items to members of the community who needed it. From there, The River Food Pantry said they needed employees. They asked Corey if he could help them. Corey asked what they were paying. They said $17 per hour. And Corey said, ‘I know why you don’t have any employees. People can’t pay their rent. People need a livable wage.’ And that’s where Supportive Employment started. So all of the programs that we have is because Corey took simple solutions to very basic things that he was hearing that people needed. And he provided a space for it.”
The Coalition’s mission is to serve those with little to no opportunity in the Madison area.
“Our CEO started Black Men Coalition Foundation to change the perceptions of Black men here in Madison and this country,” Page said. “And we do that by building coalitions with other nonprofits and organizations so that we can help anyone underserved in this community, whether you’re Black, white, no matter what your ethnicity is, no matter what your race is, no matter what your gender is. We want to help you get from survival mode to stability.”
Over the course of three years, Marianneaux built the Coalition up into a four-program approach to provide real opportunity to people coming out of incarceration and other underserved people.
The first is Supported Employment.
“We provide free transportation to anyone we work with and get employment through our employment partners,” Page said. “So our employment partners are organizations such as Meriter, UW Health, and Hoffman Manufacturing. Those are the kinds of organizations that partner with us to provide a livable wage for employees whom we run background checks on and we prescreen. We make sure that employee fits the culture of that company or organization that we are recommending them for. And we support them for the entire time that they are working for that organization, mainly transportation, but also teaching them conflict resolution and going in to advocate for that particular employee because they may not have the skills to have a conversation with the manager or even take direction from a manager if they haven’t worked in a while or have been incarcerated for a number of years. So we have a percentage of the people whom we work with who come out of those spaces and our goal is to empower them, not to beat them down. So we like to put them in situations that build their confidence up. And we love to put them in situations that show them what they can be.”
The second program is e-Cornell.
“It’s our partnership with Cornell University, which is an Ivy League college,” Page said. “We provide free professional certificates to anyone in the community who earns under $70,000 per year. That’s the high school graduate who doesn’t know what they want to do. That’s the person who just recently was released from jail or prison who is looking to change their life. That’s the wife or husband who has been married for 20 years, has been at home and feels they don’t have anything to offer the community. They can come in and take a class and find a skill. I call it ‘Adding a Key to Your Tool Belt.’ It will push you forward and help you move forward in your career and towards your goals.”
The third is financial literacy.
“We are teaching anyone we find employment for how to properly manage their money and make good financial decisions,” Page said. “We go into the jails and we teach this as well. Once we teach you how to manage your money — and we also help you get a job — the goal is how do we help you move forward. How do we help you reach all of these goals that we told you you should have and you should set for yourself.”
And the last — and probably the most fun — is youth baseball.
“We’re serving about 400 kids,” Page said. “We provide them free uniforms, shoes and hats. It is held on Saturdays and goes from June 1 to July 31st. We provide all of the trophies and the celebrations of the community. We cook food from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. That’s hamburgers, hot dogs, water and chips. Everything is free all day because we understand that there are some families that come out there and this may be their only meal during the day. So as long as they are out there with us, they can eat as much as they want. The goal is to see smiles and to empower people. We also ask members of the community to come out and volunteer so that those kids can see reflections of themselves. We have young Asian kids who come out. We want them to see reflections of themselves. African American kids, we want you to see young and older Black men in the community coming out telling you that you can be more than the negative things that you see on TV. Young girls need to be empowered and told that they can do whatever they want to do.”
Page emphasized how much The Big Share will mean to The Black Men Coalition Foundation.
“Community Shares means so much to us is because it’s an opportunity to share with the community, for the community to get behind any of the programs that we have to push us forward,” Page said. “We provide these services with very little federal funding. We are blessed to have donors in the community who support us and push us forward like Ms. Diane Ballweg. And we ask the community to join us in our celebration.”