Milwaukee Born and Bred: Meet Common Ground’s Two Newest Organizers

Written by Virginia Chappell

Common Ground’s two newest organizers, Patricia Obluck and Jeremy Jones, are both working to solve problems in their own hometown. They both were born in Milwaukee, graduated from high school here, and after college graduation decided to build careers in the city they know best.

Patricia, an agile Spanish speaker, has been Common Ground’s bilingual Associate Organizer since March 2019. Jeremy joined the staff at the end of this past January, barely six weeks before Wisconsin’s “Safer at Home” order took effect. He’s been working his phone and email steadily all the same, meeting new people, cementing connections and supporting leaders. 

Patricia Obluck

To explain how well the “Milwaukee born and bred” phrase describes her, Patricia describes a 12-square-block, roughly triangle-shaped area overlapping some of Sherman Park and the eastern edge of the Enderis Park neighborhood, where she grew up next door to her grandparents in a house where her parents still live. She and her husband now live exactly 1.3 miles from there, at 50th and Concordia. “Smack in the middle” between the two is Bethel-Bethany UCC, where she was baptized, confirmed, and married.

Patricia’s affinity for the Spanish language goes back to her fourth grade Spanish classes  and led her to study abroad in Chile in 2014. She graduated from Rufus King High School in 2010. After earning her BA at UW Oshkosh, where she majored in education and minored in Spanish, she taught with Milwaukee Public Schools for four years, the last two with fifth and sixth graders at Doerfler Elementary on the South Side’s Silver City neighborhood.

When Patricia’s best friend sent her Common Ground’s job posting for a Spanish-speaking organizer last winter, Patricia felt the job was meant for her. She was ready, she says, to work on a broader scale, beyond the classroom. She knew Common Ground’s reputation because Bethel-Bethany is a member organization, and she had already been asking herself how she could have more impact on the larger community. As she puts it, she was tired of “hear[ing] a lot of promises and get[ting] a lot of nothing.” She was, and is, “ready for some wins.”

Jeremy Jones

Jeremy, also Milwaukee born and bred, grew up not far to the east of Patricia’s childhood stomping grounds. His family moved several times within and between various North Side neighborhoods during his childhood. In 2010, he graduated as valedictorian from Metropolitan High School, a small academically focused school within North Division High School, then headed downtown to college at Marquette University. There, in a summer program before classes formally began, he quickly discovered his interest in Sociology (his eventual major) when, as he walked the mile or so home from campus, he saw the sociological concepts that he was reading about in his textbooks coming alive along the streets he walked.

One major influence on him at Marquette was a Theology class called “Bridging the Racial Divide,” taught by Common Ground leader, Professor Bob Masson. Steeped in Marquette’s slogan urging students to “Be the Difference,” Jeremy looked for work in community service when he graduated in 2014. He began in a desk job at a home health care agency for seniors, but moved quickly to Community Advocates, where he worked for several years on tenant-landlord issues. Next, he moved to Saint Charles Youth and Family Services as a creative job developer.  He has brought all those varieties of experience to his work with Common Ground.