I went to UW-Madison for biological systems engineering with a focus in natural resources. That’s just a long way of saying I got an agriculture engineering degree. I actually really enjoyed the program, but I was the one black kid in all of my classes. I was revisiting some things I had experienced in childhood relating to identity. I felt like I didn’t necessarily have the Madison community when I went to UW-Madison. [The city and the university] were very separate cultures. All of that was just to say that I’ve grown up to sculpt my mindset outside of just what engineers typically have a reputation for. I’ve always been a people person. I’ve always tried to understand the deeper picture when it comes to a lot of social issues. So I spent a lot of time focusing on social justice and really trying to understand why these issues still exist because they’ve been occurring for decades and even centuries.

Early Career

Donale: When I was in college, I worked many different types of jobs. I always wanted to work at the PEOPLE Program because they supported me so much. I always thought of myself not necessarily as an employee, but as a mentor for the PEOPLE Program. I wanted to show kids who were going through the program that anything is possible. I held multiple different positions there.

Then I wanted to explore my major a little bit more. I was working for the USDA and the Agriculture Research Service (ARS). I worked with one of the research labs on campus that focused on the dairy industry and the types feed you would be giving to cows to better the end product. That was really cool because I actually got to learn a lot about soil. Having studied natural resources, I really wanted to understand the soil chemistry and the different types of nutrients that ultimately supply the nutrients for the foods that we eat. I spent a lot of time in that lab testing thousands of soil and manure samples. That was a stinky job, but it actually allowed me to understand the social issues. Growing up in an urban city, I had not really thought about what life was like outside of the city, so that was my first time really understanding what rural life looked like.

I left that job after a year and moved on to UW-Extension. There was an open position for a graduate student, but they still allowed me to interview and I got the job. That was with Greg Lawless and Steve Ventura under the Food Systems Development Program. That job was actually probably the most impactful of my entire college career. I really started to understand the buzz around food systems and understanding that there are certain jobs that impact other jobs and understanding the systems approach to addressing issues, specifically around food justice. That ultimately led me to connect to hundreds of people in the Madison area and Dane County to understand what their perspectives of food systems were and what their role was in it. So through that process, I met Will Green of Mentoring Positives and started to understand his program. It was crazy because I spent one year of my childhood in Darbo where Mentoring Positives is housed.