Once a month throughout the 2025-26 academic year, Slow Digest will feature an episode of C21’s 6.5 Minutes With…C21 podcast series, produced by C21 Graduate Fellows Jamee N. Pritchard and Yuchen Zhao.
In this episode of 6.5 Minutes with C21, Jamee Pritchard speaks with Dr. Kitonga Alexander, a Milwaukee-based historian, educator, and community organizer. Dr. Alexander discusses his community-centered work to reduce recidivism and promote holistic, slow care, including founding United for Progress and Productivity and coordinating Milwaukee’s Welcome Home Project, which focuses on high-risk probationers aged 14–24. The project offers trauma-informed care, employment opportunities, housing support, and life skills development. As he explains, “Slow care is the long-lasting process of providing support for individuals through a holistic approach of multiple needs… the community becomes the largest and strongest member of that care.”
Dr. Alexander also turns to history as a form of care, reminding us that healing requires understanding the forces that shaped our present. “Remembering is a very important task. It is necessary for true healing… the events of the past are not long-lost memories; they still have an impact on people in the present day,” he notes. By grounding the work of reentry in collective memory, he invites listeners to see slow care not only as support for individuals but as an ongoing practice of acknowledging history, strengthening community ties, and building a future rooted in dignity.
Notes:
Guest: Kitonga Alexander — Milwaukee native, educator, community organizer, Executive Director of the Bronzeville Histories Institute, and a Positively Milwaukee Inspiring Teacher Award recipient.
Host: Jamee Pritchard, Graduate Fellow, Center for 21st Century Studies (C21)