Gina Sopa spent thirty-two years in the air, flying for Delta. When she came down to earth — retiring in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, a few years after losing her husband — she didn't have a grocery background or a business plan. What she had was a habit of praying about what came next, and a conviction, built from years volunteering at food pantries and at Trickle B Cafe, that something was broken: good produce thrown in dumpsters, blocks from people who couldn't get to a grocery store.

So on January 6, 2021, on a borrowed corner of Cloud Nine Workshop on North Avenue, she opened a folding table. The rule was simple: take what you need, pay what you can. Four years later, when that lease ended, the model found a second home at Concordia 27, near 27th and Wells — a stretch of Milwaukee where fresh food access has become hard to find. Milwaukee's county executive, mayor, and Near West Side Partners have all shown up to support it since.

This conversation traces that arc — from a dumpster full of cauliflower, to a truck full of veggies that showed up the moment she ran out of produce, to her five-year vision of Greater Good(s) locations scattered across the city. It's a conversation about dignity, about a business that runs on faith and math at the same time, and about what it actually looks like to move Wisconsin forward — the state's own motto — one neighborhood at a time.

Five episodes into this stretch of the season, host Shannon Sims noticed something no single
conversation could show her on its own: the same pattern, showing up in five completely
different industries. A software founder. A real estate developer. A woman running five
companies out of one purpose. A marketing consultant who helped build a statewide movement.
A nonprofit director who'd spent twenty years learning the hard way what actually changes
behavior around money. Every one of them had hit some version of a closed door — a
boardroom, a zip code, a market that had written them off — and every one of them made the
same first move: instead of asking for a seat, they built a new table.

This episode is a pause, not a new interview. Shannon went into the season thinking she
already knew the shape of this story — grit, hard work, somebody said no and they proved it
wrong. That's not wrong, exactly. It's just not the whole story. What she actually found, laying
these five conversations side by side, is that not one of these women stopped once she'd solved
the problem for herself. Each one built something designed, from day one, to reach people she'd never met.

Deanna Singh's father gave her one rule growing up: never measure your success by how well you're doing — measure it by how well the people around you are doing. She's spent her whole career trying to live up to that sentence, and along the way built not one business but five, all pointed at the same purpose: shifting power to marginalized communities.

Her newest venture is the biggest test of that rule yet. Uplifting Mansion — an eight-thousand-square-foot, 125-year-old home on Milwaukee's west side — came into her life with, in her words, "total divine intervention": no business plan, no strategy, just a prayer about legacy and a listing her sister sent her. Then came the catch. The building's grand ballroom could only be reached by a staircase. Engineer after engineer told her a ramp wasn't possible in a building this old. She spent six figures and fought through more "no's" than most people could stomach until it was.

A year in, Deanna says the thing she's proudest of isn't the building — it's what happens inside it. In a world she describes as full of "no after no after no," Uplifting Mansion is a place built to say yes.