Hello, Milwaukee!

My name is Julius Shieh, and I am so excited to join you all as the new health reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

My background

I’m a recent college graduate, I enjoy biking in my free time, and I always appreciate a good restaurant recommendation. I was born and raised in New Jersey, and I spent some time living in Connecticut and Texas before moving to Wisconsin.

I love photography and worked primarily as a photojournalist for a few years, and I enjoy reading.

What you need to know most about me, however, has less do with those things. Instead, it has everything to do with what I love the most about NNS – our readers and our community.

This community is one of the biggest reasons I joined NNS. One of my favorite things about life is being able to listen and learn from everyone around me, and being a part of somewhere as vibrant as Milwaukee certainly allows for that. This city is so much more than just the Brewers, icy winters and traffic on I-94 – it’s a world of its own that has been shaped by the voices and stories of people like you.

What makes a healthy society?

Health, in the most basic sense, is a fundamental need that forms the core of our communities. In the best of cases, it is a beautifully simple question that should be answered, in whole, by those with the power to support and uplift. But as history and reality have shown, the truth about health is often far more complex.

As many of us know, the world we live in does not always prioritize health. Disparities in access and sky-high medical costs serve as barriers that too often block us from getting the health care that we need.

Medical debt, a concept that hardly exists outside of the United States, threatens working class, uninsured and underinsured people constantly. The lead in the water we drink and the pollutants in the air we breathe loom in the background as we go about life, posing a gradual and growing danger to our safety.

Who creates health?

While politicians and institutions may seem like the only ones with enough power to sway the health of our communities, many of the basic necessities we celebrate in our lives today were pioneered and implemented by those around us.

In a community-led effort to address some of the most urgent health needs around them, the Black Panthers were among the first to provide free breakfast for children beginning as early as 1969. The pioneering program addressed hunger and malnutrition, already proven by studies at the time to have a significant impact on children’s health and learning. It was such a successful program that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, recognizing how widespread its impact was, called it “potentially the greatest threat” to government efforts to dissolve the Black Panther Party, leading to a rapid expansion of federal school breakfast efforts.

As the early years of the AIDS crisis left devastation in its wake, political figures, including then-President Ronald Reagan, found it more convenient to ignore and stigmatize the illness than to address it in any meaningful way. LGBTQ activist groups such as ACT UP took it upon themselves to organize for change, putting together massive demonstrations, including one that shut down the FDA for an entire day.

Actions like this one would later be credited toward helping shift public opinion and forcing the hand of government agencies to pay attention to the crisis and fund medical research.

Why this matters

The health of a community, as history can teach us, is a balancing act. The health resources we need, as a population, don’t always match the resources that we are provided. But what we have today cannot be accepted as a foregone conclusion – the communities and people around us are what can drive health and public needs to grow and flourish like they should.

Today, as much as advancements in medicine and technology have grown significantly, the existence of some of our most fundamental health needs can be traced back to our own communities. Food for children in schools and the development of medications for HIV/AIDS did not come about on their own – they are a product of widespread struggle, organized action and hope for a better future.

For myself, this remains important because it is a reminder of the role and the responsibility that journalists hold. As much as we are here to report on the people and institutions in power, it is even more crucial to listen to our own communities and to hear your stories.

I am so excited for this opportunity to play a role in the health of this city, and most of all, I look forward to hearing from you.

Connect with me

I can’t wait to hear from you and learn about Milwaukee. You can reach me by email by clicking here