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.

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.