Two Milwaukee zip codes, a few minutes apart on the same freeway. One number between them: a twelve-year gap in life expectancy. That number is where Oby Nwabuzor's story turns — the moment a data analyst who'd loved basketball, lost the game to an injury, and found her way into public health decided she couldn't un-see what the numbers were telling her.

Today she's the founder of Envision Growth, a Milwaukee development firm built on an idea most developers never consider: that real estate is a strategy to improve health outcomes. Her houses go up in the neighborhoods the market wrote off — homes that cost around a quarter-million dollars to build, sold to first-time buyers for roughly a hundred and five thousand, with mortgages lower than what many of her neighbors pay in rent. She's led more than four million dollars in development, and she's just getting started.

But Oby will tell you this was never really about real estate. She calls herself a vessel — rooted in a Nigerian family line of hereditary chiefs, "stewards of the soil," tethered to the city that raised her. This is a conversation about who a building is really for, why growth doesn't have to mean displacement, and what it looks like to close a gap you can measure in years of a person's life — one block, one home, one set of keys at a time.

In grad school, studying to become an environmental sociologist, Lisa Geason-Bauer read a book that changed how she thought about business. It introduced her to an idea called the triple bottom line — profit, people, and planet, measured together instead of profit alone. She built her whole company, Evolution Marketing, around that idea in 2007. The same year, without her knowing it yet, an organization called B Lab was founded to turn that idea into something you could actually get certified for.

It took Lisa over a decade to bring those two threads together — and when she finally did, she found a strange twist waiting for her: she'd been helping her own clients become certified B Corporations for two years before her own company got there. Today, she's one of the architects of Wisconsin's B Corp community. The state had four certified B Corps in 2017. Because of a workshop she helped run and a movement she helped build, it has twenty-six today.

This episode is part of The B Side, Rising Forward's season-long look at Wisconsin's B Corp movement. For the full breakdown of what a B Corp certification actually requires, check out our companion explainer episode, "The Whole Business."

Jon Bishop wanted to be a biologist since he was nine years old — he spent his graduate years studying bees in the Alaskan backcountry, training to understand ecosystems well enough to protect them. Then he lived for a stretch in rural Panama, and watched farmers clear rainforest they didn't want to clear, just to grow enough corn to feed their families. That contradiction — protect the land, or feed your family became the question that eventually pulled him out of ecology and into finance.

Today, Bishop is the founder and CEO of Envest Microfinance, a Madison-based fund that has spent twenty years lending capital into some of the smallest, hardest-to-fund microfinance institutions in the world — first across Latin America, and now in East Africa. His model leans on something most funds avoid: trusting local loan officers to make the calls he says he isn't equipped to make from thousands of miles away.

At nineteen years old, Steven Dyme was selling flowers out of a cart outside his own high
school graduation — one year after he'd stood on that same stage and delivered the
commencement speech. He didn't have a business plan. He didn't know anything about flowers.
What he had was a friend with a truckload of surplus stems, a fanny pack full of cash, and an
idea that would eventually turn into one of the first B Corps in the country.

Today, Steven is the co-founder and CEO of Flowers for Dreams, a florist with locations in
Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit that's given away close to two million dollars to grassroots
nonprofits since 2010. In this episode, host Shannon Sims traces how a summer hustle became
a business built on a bar napkin — and what it actually took to turn "give away a quarter of
everything we make" from a joke between friends into a permanent commitment.

This episode is part of The B Side, Rising Forward's season-long look at Wisconsin's B Corp
movement. For a primer on what a B Corp actually is and how certification works, check out our
companion explainer episode, "The Whole Business."

It sounds like a tax status. It isn't.

Certified B Corporation is a full audit of a company — not just what it sells, but how it pays
people, what it does to the environment, and how the whole business is run. In this episode,
host Shannon Sims sits down with three people who've lived that audit from three very different
angles: Lisa Geason-Bauer, Wisconsin's first Trained B Consultant and founder of B Local WI;
Steven Dyme, whose Chicago/Milwaukee flower company was one of the first B Corps in the
world; and Jon Bishop, whose Madison-based microfinance fund got certified twice, eight years
apart, and watched the process change in real time.

Together, they walk through what the certification actually checks, how Wisconsin's B Corp
community grew from four companies to more than two dozen, and whether — underneath the
badge — it means what it claims to.

This is the introduction to The B Side, a season-long thread on Rising Forward. Over the next
few episodes, we go deeper with Lisa, Steven, and Jon — the full stories behind the badge.

A phone call. Five overdraft fees. A $5 slice of pizza. That's the moment Brenda Campbell — executive director of Secure Futures — realized financial literacy was never really about knowledge. It's about access.

For twenty years, Secure Futures has taught Wisconsin students the mechanics of money: debit cards vs. credit cards, compound interest, paying yourself first. But knowing the rules and actually using them turned out to be two very different things and the data proved it. So Brenda's team rebuilt the program around one-on-one mentoring instead of classroom lessons alone.

Dejah Banister is what that rebuild looks like in practice. She signed up for Money Coach out of pure curiosity in high school. Today she's a homeowner, a landlord, and the person who broke a twenty-year silence around money in her own family. Now, she's teaching the same lessons to her students.

Host: Shannon Sims

Video & Audio Production: Dwight Cannon Audio

Engineering & Video Editing: Story First Media Group

Social Media: Brianna S.

Rising Forward: Stories of Change is a weekly conversation with Wisconsin social entrepreneurs building businesses to solve real community problems.

Nadiyah Johnson dreamed of being a CNN correspondent. Instead, she became one of the go to figures in Wisconsin's technology landscape.

In this episode of Rising Forward: Stories of Change, host Shannon Sims sits down with the founder and CEO of Jet Constellations and its social-impact arm, the Milky Way Tech Hub. What starts as a story about frustration — walking into a Milwaukee tech room where no one looked like her — becomes a blueprint for how one person builds an entire ecosystem.

Nadiyah opens up about the moment her pastor told her that anger can reveal purpose, the 26% calc exam that nearly ended her computer science career, and the decision to persevere instead of pivot. She explains why she built a software company instead of a nonprofit, how the Milky Way Tech Hub connects "the puzzle pieces" for
founders who can't code, and one of the most impactful programs of her life: going inside a correctional facility to teach justice-involved individuals to build AI-assisted
business plans weeks before their release.

This is a conversation about taking up space, closing the wealth gap, and why — when you drill all the way down — this isn't just a Wisconsin story. It's a Sherman Park story.

"Lean less into fear, and lean more into possibility." - Nadiyah Johnson

Some business origin stories start with a pitch deck. Tiffany Miller's started with a seed.

A word written on a chalkboard in a Near West Side Milwaukee classroom. A flower made for her mother's 60th birthday. A neighborhood that deserved a coffee shop someone could walk to and one woman who decided she was going to build it.

Tiffany Miller is the owner of Fruition MKE — a 4,000 square foot cafe, co-working space and makerspace on Milwaukee's 27th Street. But Fruition is more than a business. It's the manifestation of everything Tiffany has ever built — Fly Blooms, Live in Bloom, the Bronzeville Collective rooted in one belief: that joy is a business model. And that belonging has a return on investment.

In this episode, Tiffany talks about building a community institution from the ground up, losing a business partner three weeks after opening, and the ancestors who showed up when things got hard — including a grandmother who ran a restaurant in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, until someone burned it down because she was doing too good.

This one is for every entrepreneur who has ever talked themselves out of the thing they were built to do.

"I am not a transactional cafe. I want to know what your favorite drink is."

Rising Forward: Stories of Change tells stories of Wisconsin social entrepreneurs who build businesses that solve real problems in their communities. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Credits:

Shannon Sims, host

Bryce Richards, graphic designer/ grip

Brianna Sitkowski, producer

Junction Box Production, Dwight Cannon, audio editor/videographer

LionArts Media, Laura Dyan Kezma, audio/video editor

William Howell, photographer/ assistant editor

Mic’d & Ready Media