Over the course of the next 12 years, I pretty much devoted my life to the Urban League and the movement and became the late Betty Franklin-Hammonds’ program director/fiscal officer and later vice-president of operations.

One of my duties was to lead hiring panels for new staff and then make hiring recommendations to Betty. One of our hires was Margaret Wamugi, an immigrant from Kenya, I believe. Eventually Margaret encouraged Dzibodi Akyea to apply for a position working with single mothers or high school students, I believe. Dzibodi had recently come to the United States and Madison from Ghana to unite with her husband Aggo. Dzibodi went on to become a stellar counselor at Madison College for many years.

After I left the Urban League in 1994, I became self-employed doing a broad range of work for non-profits, basically doing anything that they needed done. One beautiful thing about working for the Urban League back then was there was so much that needed to be done with so little money. You could say that Betty and the Urban League pulled out all of the talents and skills that I had, from art to accounting to proposal writing and public speaking and everything in between. If there was something that needed to be done, I would jump in and try my hand at it.

One of the things that I was doing was proposal writing, often times for the Madison Metropolitan School District and Howard Landsman. I had extensive connections in Madison by then, particularly in some of Madison’s challenged neighborhoods. I worked on the first Community Schools grant that the district won among others.

I had kept in contact with Aggo over the years and in 1997, I believe, he was doing fundraising for the African Association of Madison, which he headed, to put on a festival about African culture called Africa Fest. I helped Aggo get an understanding of the charitable fundraising environment in Madison and basically acted as a consultant as he raised the money they needed to put on the first Africa Fest in 1998 at Monona Terrace.

It was an awesome affair, a spectacle I had never witnessed before of people dressed in their colorful African best. There was so much music and dance and art and food to take in. I remember going outside and watching as a line of festival goers began their parade around the Capitol Square while the Farmer’s Market was going on. The festivities ended with the African Ball at Monona Terrace that night.

The next year, I attended Africa Fest in another capacity as the editor of The Madison Times. Betty Franklin-Hammonds had passed away in April 1999 and I was asked to continue her newspaper, which I did beginning in June of that year. And so I attended Africa Fest as a journalist that year and almost every year since.

When the African Association of Madison decided to take a year off in 2005 and restructure, Aggo enlisted my help to develop the African Association of Madison as it evolved into a non-profit and by then, I had over 20 years experience working with them. I ended up running for the board of the new non-profit, which had Bill Bosu as the chair and Aggo as the president. Ray Kumapayi was also elected to the board. I, however, did not get elected.

However, a few months in, one of the board members had to leave the board due to work commitments and so I was appointed to the board and served for seven years. One of the people whom I had the pleasure of serving with was Sambah Baldeh who had recently moved to Madison from The Gambia and we became friends.

AAM had decided to move Africa Fest to Warner Park so that it could have an outdoors carnival environment. I ended up serving on the Africa Fest committee with Aggo and Ray, which I have served on ever since as the leadership transferred from Aggo to Ray who chairs AAM and the Africa Fest committee to this day and oversaw Africa Fest’s transition from Warner Park to Central Park which was soon renamed McPike Park after Milt McPike, the late and beloved principal of Madison East High School.

My son Andrew enjoyed going to Africa Fest after he moved back from China where he had lived for 4-5 years. And when the COVID pandemic ended, Andrew became a member of the Africa Fest committee. One could say that we are transitioning from father to son as I reach my golden years.

So life is filled with portals to opportunities if we choose to recognize them and then walk through them. Who would have known that hiring Margaret Wamugi at the Madison Urban League back in the 1980s would lead to decades of involvement with the Madison area’s African community. I am so grateful that I had that sense to walk through that door that enhanced my life forever.