About the Milwaukee’s Promise project
Reporter James E. Causey spent the 2019-20 academic year as an O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University, where he was assisted by student researchers Abby Ng, Donna Sarkar and Sebastian Becerra.
Photojournalist Angela Peterson’s work was supported by a public service journalism fellowship from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, which aims to inform and foster civic engagement and rising together to eradicate systemic racism that withholds our region and all people from truly thriving.
All work on the project was done under the guidance of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors. Neither Marquette nor the foundation had involvement in decisions about the content or presentation of the work.
James E. Causey started reporting on life in his city while still at Marshall High School through a Milwaukee Sentinel high school internship. He’s been covering his hometown ever since, writing and editing news stories, projects and opinion pieces on urban youth, mental health, employment, housing and incarceration. Most recently, he wrote “What happened to us?” which tracked the lives of his third-grade classmates, and “Cultivating a community,” about the bonding that takes place around a neighborhood garden. Causey was a health fellow at the University of Southern California in 2018 and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2007.