Every year, graduates from the College of Letters & Science enter the workforce and begin to contribute thousands of dollars to their local, state, and national economies. They bring the skills and knowledge they gained at UW-Milwaukee to their jobs, along with their ambitions and fresh perspectives.
In this article series, we highlight some of the recent Letters & Science alumni who have found fulfilling roles in their chosen fields.
Name: Fatima Badwan
Graduation Year: 2023
Major: Economics
Job: Farm manager and educator at Masjid Al Qur’an Mosque
If you visit the Masjid Al-Qur’an Mosque in Brown Deer, Wisconsin, you might hear the call to prayer, the gentle murmur of voices reading the Quran, and the insistent bleating of a herd of goats.
Yes, goats – and sheep, ducks, and chickens besides. The animals are part of the mosque’s community garden and farm managed by UWM economics graduate Fatima Badwan. Not only does she care for the animals, but she and her husband, Ali Shana, also run a shepherd school and 4H classes for the children of the mosque. Classes cover animal husbandry, biology, and the economics of running a farm.
“There’s how much we spend on seed, how we schedule feeding, how we manage grazing,” Badwan said. “There’s economics in that. It plays out every single day.”
For all her agricultural acumen, Badwan doesn’t have a farming background. Instead, she grew up in Brookfield, Wisconsin, and attended UWM because she wanted to remain close to her family. She began college as an actuarial science major, but found that wasn’t the track for her. The economics major offered more flexibility.
She was especially intrigued by one of UWM’s environmental economic courses.
“It talked about externalities when the community pays the cost of others doing business. I never wanted my work to cause harm,” Badwan said. “I don’t want to contribute to pollution just to make an agricultural product. I don’t want to deplete the land just to save some money. I don’t want animals in tight, confined space just to increase my yield. That class was just an eye-opener to the kind of middle ground that’s Earth-friendly.”
Then, Badwan began looking for places to apply those principles. She began volunteering at a farming co-op when she was in school and then worked at the Blakesville Dairy Farm after graduation. Blakesville is a goat farm that makes its own cheese and other dairy products in-house (“That’s when I actually started to see more of my economics courses play out. It was a commercial operation, making specialty cheese at scale, and other dairy products too”).
When a friend and mentor introduced Badwan to the farm at the Masjid Al-Qu’ran Mosque, becoming the farm manager was a natural fit. She had found a religious community and a farming community in one.
Today, Badwan oversees the farm’s livestock as well as its community garden. She and her husband, whom she met at UWM, work closely with the mosque’s youth in their shepherd school and 4-H classes. Classes cover topics like hydroponics, electricity, the development of chicken eggs, and even archery.
“If we can get kids involved less on their screens and more into nature, that would be most ideal,” Badwan said. “It’s not every day where we have farm animals or any animals in the city, and when you’re there, it feels like you’re in the country almost.”
Most importantly, she wants the children – and everyone – to understand the importance of agriculture and community. Members of the mosque harvest the food they work in their portions of the community garden, but they also donate some of their harvest or serve it to guests of the mosque.
“I’m so into the food. It’s a very important thing to me,” Badwan said. “I think that’s it’s not fair that we have such an abundance of food that’s not shared and passed around. I think it’s a human right for everyone to have access to food, and I think it’s very important for people to know where their food comes from.”
That’s a large part of economics, she added. Many people tend to think of economics in terms of finances, the stock market, GDP, inflation, and so on, but at its core, economics is the study of how humans make decisions under scarcity.
“That shows up anywhere resources are limited, including on a farm,” Badwan said. She must think about how to feed the livestock – letting the animals graze costs less than paying for feed, but requires labor costs for a shepherd to watch over the herd. She must think about selling the animals – is there a religious holiday where halal meats will be in demand? After selling animals, will she have enough left for breeding, grazing, and the school programs? She must think about breeding – the farm has to be sustainable, but each new animal consumes more resources.
She loves that she gets to use her economics education to provide food resources for her community. She hopes that other graduates will find creative uses for their degrees, too.
“Don’t assume your degree only applies to one type of career,” she advised. No matter your major, you can find a way to serve your community.
Even so, Badwan added, “I’m so happy that I graduated in economics. It really did wonders for me.”
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science