Celebrating and Appreciating the Epitome of a Community Activistmy, my Good Friend/Mentor/Spiritual Guide..... The Peddling Flanuer....James Godsil!!!

#Godsil #Aquaponics #SweetWaterFoundation #HarvestingOrganicConceptsAndIndividuals #Love&Light




The Navigator Award

Honors an outstanding individual that has provided leadership and collaboration for change

Finalist: James Godsil

James Godsil is a Milwaukee renaissance man.

After working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a civil rights organizer, a bodyguard for Martin Luther King, a Fulbright Scholar in Tunis, and a political science professor, at 28 Godsil came to Milwaukee -- and found home.

For 30 years, Godsil was a roofer, growing Godsil Community Roofing and Restoration. At the same time, he mentored countless aspiring contractors who have built successful careers acrossMilwaukee. At the same Godsil planted seeds all over the Milwaukee community as a prolific activist, organizer, and storyteller.

Then, at 60, he began volunteering for Growing Power.

Taking significant financial risk, Godsil invested himself entirely into renovating a century old abandoned Bay View railroad factory in 2008 to launch Sweet Water Organics -- the nation's largest aquaponic farm. He also created Sweetwater Foundation to educate Milwaukee school children, veterans, and the community about agriculture, nutrition, biology, and environment. The Foundation has a network of 25 schools locally and nation-wide.

And THIS, is a huge new discovery for me about this Lightworker:

Introducing The Peddling Flaneur Experiment

Godsil + Jared + Muneer + Milwaukee + Artists + Youth + Farmers Market + Community Garden =  P.F.E.

Le Flaneur 

Currently embarking on Neighborhood Relationships in Washington Park with Muneer Bahauddeen, David Baucher & Company via the introduction from the wonderfully conscious Lightworker James Godsil. This dynamic group of visionaries is a testament to the Boomer/Millennial communal precedent that we are setting by bringing The Peddling Flaneur Experiment to fruition!

My Spiritual/Life Guide James Godsil

Muneer Bahauddeen: Founder of Ogbe Meji Studios

Muneer’s dreams are bigger than just his own personal space, and his presence in the neighborhood is immediately apparent. His distinctive ceramic tiles, and the tiles made by visitors to his workshop, can be seen in Amaranth Bakery, on a bench at the community center, in parks, and on wooden posts dotted around the community. Muneer explains that the posts, which contain visions for the community written down by its members and slipped behind handmade tiles, serve as a visual reminder of its potential and the people who care about it.


The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from 19th century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street.

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

—Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life", (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.

David Baucher is the epitome of Building Resilience through Relationships and is is the area's neighborhood planner.
"The relationships that he is building in Washington Park are making his community stronger by creating the social capital that brings community residents together to focus on opportunities and work against the isolation that poverty in the neighborhood has caused.  His relationship with Muneer Bahaudeen and Dan Bieser of Tabal Chocolate has helped to stabilize the area by encouraging artistic expression in the neighborhood and focusing on small business development on Lisbon Ave."

Express Yourself is across the street from Muneer's art studio/garden where the focus is on immersing young people in the arts, where they find a powerful tool for self-expression, uncover inner strength, & deepen connection.


I am looking forward to collaborating with Munner as we create Spiritual Batteries for the youth and community to hopefully invigorate and energize a robust, sustainable Washington Park environment. With these efforts, there is no doubt in my mind that we will showcase Milwaukee as the Holy City of the Sweet Water Seas.