Snowflakes fell last February as bundled-up women walked into a downtown Green Bay coffee shop. Inside, Third Space Green Bay was celebrating its one-year anniversary as a group that creates a gathering space for local queer, Black and Indigenous residents and other people of color.  

Soft rhythm and blues — from SZA to Solange — filled the room as the group’s three co-founders led a Sunday morning clothes-mending and craft event that promised “healing through creativity.” 

In launching Third Space, Jasmine Gordon, Ivy McGee and Sarah Titus aim to help people with a range of backgrounds feel at home in a city that’s 70% white and in a state where less than 4% of people identify as LGBTQ+.

The women met at St. Norbert College, a Catholic liberal arts institution in De Pere, just outside of Green Bay. McGee grew up in De Pere, and Titus, a native Minnesotan, moved to Green Bay in 2008. They had worked together for years as librarians at the college when Gordon, a St. Norbert alum, became the library’s community engagement coordinator in 2021. Seeing a gap to fill on campus, the women rolled out library programming that engaged LGBTQ+ students and people of color. 

Events like “The Transperience,” an art installation in partnership with the Bay Area Council on Gender Diversity and the Trans Artist Collaborative, and a farmers market featuring more than  40 Black-owned businesses prompted feedback from residents who said they had never felt so seen, loved or cared for. 

“We would have people come up to us afterwards expressing, ‘Oh my gosh, I never knew I needed this,’” Titus said. 

But St. Norbert’s climate of inclusion changed over the years, the women said. In fall 2024, for instance, the college changed its gender policy, aligning with Catholic church guidelines recognizing only two genders: male and female. While leaders said the college remained committed to supporting people of diverse backgrounds, many students and staff said the change sent a different message. 

At the same time, Gordon, McGee and Titus envisioned a larger, independent project to promote inclusion across Green Bay — beyond the confines of campus.

Leaving their jobs at a college that faced financial turmoil, they launched Third Space to realize that vision.  

“We saw an opportunity and a responsibility to separate ourselves from the institution and develop something that felt more aligned with our core values, and that was including folks from all different walks of life regardless of who they love or what color their skin is or how they identify,” McGee said. 

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third space” in 1989, with home being someone’s “first place” and work as a “second place.” Third spaces are where people publicly gather informally, such as coffee shops, restaurants, coworking spaces and libraries. Third Space Green Bay seeks to create places for people to “just be,” its founders said.  

Its programs are free and “open and welcoming to folks that are on the margins,” McGee said. 

Third Space isn’t the only local group serving LGBTQ+ populations. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Pride Center provides resources and holds events. But Third Space is rare in that it also intentionally serves Black and Indigenous residents, alongside other people of color. 

“When we were thinking of how we wanted this organization to exist, we were really thinking about it as a coalition,” Titus said, adding that the group is “building and intertwining” multiple communities that are often marginalized locally. 

Third Space, which filed to become a nonprofit in April 2024, has hosted more than 10 hours of community programming and raised more than $11,000 in grants and $6,700 in donations. 

Earlier this year, Third Space hosted an International Women’s Day pop-up shop that included a poetry writing workshop and a live performance from a local poet.

McGee said joining other women in that space made her feel her organization was “absolutely on the right track” and helped her imagine what it could do with a permanent location.  

The trio of founders said they are building the scaffolding for Third Space’s future. Until they secure a permanent location in downtown Green Bay, they’ll continue borrowing spaces from like-minded people in the community. 

At the February anniversary event, Essence Wilks, a Milwaukee native who recently moved to Green Bay, and Taiyana Plummer, a Green Bay native, learned about Third Space after walking into the coffee shop in search of matcha tea. Plummer said she and Wilks had just been discussing a shortage of inclusive gathering spaces in Green Bay. 

“Growing up here, especially when I was younger, it was harder to find people similar to me or spaces where I felt welcomed or heard and seen,” Plummer said. “So seeing this was very nice and made me feel very comfortable and just really excited for what’s moving forward with Third Space.”

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Three women build a ‘third space’ for Green Bay residents who have felt left out is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

March marked three years since Paula Jolly opened Amanda’s House, a long-term, sober living home for women and their children in Green Bay. 

Within four days of the opening of the home she named to memorialize her daughter, its six bedrooms were full. For the last year and a half, 40 or more people have sat on a wait list, Jolly said. 

“It’s hard because a lot of times, they don’t have anywhere else to go,” Jolly said. “There’s other female sober living and male sober living (homes) in town but still not enough. They all have wait lists.” 

Jolly, who grew up in Niagara, Wisconsin, has called Green Bay home since the 1990s. She has two degrees from Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, where she studied medical office management and human services and substance use counseling. Jolly said she “could have gone to be a substance abuse counselor but I decided this was my path because I can help more people this way.”

The structure Jolly has built within Amanda’s House allowed her to escape what she described as rigid confines of typical counseling, where the state determines the terms of client services. She also made Amanda’s House a place where people could stay as long as they needed. While some may stay for just a couple of weeks, others have stayed for about two years. 

Staff at Amanda’s House provides them with life skills training, mental health support, substance use support and connections to community resources.

While working at another sober living home in Green Bay, Jolly saw the need for this type of program firsthand. She watched as women left treatment prematurely to reunite with their kids — only to fall back into their previous harmful cycles. 

“We’re trying to break the cycle,” she said.

Laurie Doxtator, 60, grew up west of Green Bay on the Oneida Reservation and returned to Wisconsin after living in California, where she said she used practically every drug you could think of and attempted suicide at one point. She said she began drinking alcohol at age 8 and experienced trauma over the decades, including the deaths of two of her children and a miscarriage. 

“But then I learned, you have a life and you have better things going for you,” Doxtator said. 

After 50 years of drinking, “it ain’t giving me nothing in life. It ain’t gonna bring my children back, it ain’t gonna bring my mom back,” she said. 

Doxtator previously spent four months in a 30-day rehabilitation program but knew she needed more structure and more time to learn how to heal. 

She has lived at Amanda’s House for more than two years.

After more than a year and a half of sobriety, aided by support from other women in the program and classes that help her heal, Doxtator said she feels safe there. “Me moving out from here into society, it’s scary for me,” Doxtator said. “I have to journey on one day but I have support here and support all over.” 

Jolly has told Doxtator: “You can stay here until the wheels fall off.”

Jolly believes such assurance would have helped her daughter.

Amanda Marcouiller was 13 months into recovery when she died in 2020 at age 37. She spent part of her final week at her mother’s house, where Jolly could tell something was wrong. 

“You’re acting like you did before, can I help you?” Jolly recalled asking her daughter, referring to Marcouiller’s previous period using substances. Marcouiller replied that she simply had a migraine. “So the last time I saw her was when she was probably under the influence, and I just couldn’t prove it or do anything about it,” Jolly recalled. 

Many people in the region and state face similar challenges. United Way of Wisconsin’s 211 helpline in the past year has fielded more requests from Brown County residents for housing and shelter and mental health and addiction resources than any other broad categories.

Before lightly declining in 2023, drug overdose deaths in Wisconsin increased each year since 2016, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. 

Marcouiller helped Jolly launch the Mandolin Foundation, the nonprofit organization operating Amanda’s House, just a month before she died. “I wasn’t gonna continue on,” Jolly said. “But I felt like she would have wanted me to.”

The next step for Jolly and her small staff at Amanda’s House: fundraise for a renovation to add five bedrooms. Jolly secured federal funds in January that give her a good start on that expansion. 

“There’s a lot of states that are way ahead of us in recovery and substance use disorder type recovery, like eons,” Jolly said. “We have a lot of catching up to do.”

Honoring her daughter, Amanda’s House founder seeks to break addiction’s cycle in Green Bay is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Aboard Amtrak’s Hiawatha service, quiet conversations complement the rumble of steel wheels maneuvering along the tracks.

A fresh layer of snow covers the ground while the train pulls away from the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, unraveling its cars from one Midwestern city toward another.

En route to Chicago Union Station, passengers ride along an Amtrak system forged by the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which sought to revitalize American train travel. In approving the law, Congress declared that “modern, efficient, intercity railroad passenger service is a necessary part of a balanced transportation system.” 

Wisconsin operates three Amtrak routes: the Hiawatha, which runs a round-trip corridor service seven times daily between Chicago and Milwaukee; the Empire Builder, running one long-distance round trip each day between Chicago and Seattle or Portland; and the Borealis, a route added last May that runs one daily round trip between St. Paul, Milwaukee and Chicago.

In 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed into law the  $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which awarded $2.1 billion to Amtrak and its partners — the largest federal investment in public transit in history. 

Wisconsin residents haven’t yet fully experienced the law’s effects, but plans are well underway. The law awarded the Wisconsin Department of Transportation four $500,000 grants through a federal Corridor Identification and Development Program. 

These grants are funding research for a range of potential new services. Those include a proposed corridor connecting Milwaukee to Minneapolis through Madison and Eau Claire; an additional daily round trip between Chicago and St. Paul via La Crosse to complement the Empire Builder; and making the Hiawatha more frequent and extending its service to Green Bay.

In late December, I rode a sold-out Hiawatha train from Milwaukee to Chicago. The route is Amtrak’s busiest in the Midwest and the nation’s seventh-busiest. 

I returned in early January, talking to passengers along the way for our latest edition of Public Square, a series highlighting how Wisconsin residents connect with their communities. I gathered a variety of perspectives about how people use passenger trains and on efforts to make them more accessible.

I heard from a range of people, including a Milwaukee college student riding home to Chicago and a trucker stranded on the first leg of a cross-country journey home for the holidays. All opted for the train instead of a car.

Amanda Simms, who works for a long-haul trucking company in Allenton, Wisconsin, didn’t initially plan to take Amtrak to see her family in Philadelphia over the holidays. But an eyesight issue prompted the 28-year-old to abandon her plans to make the 14-hour drive. Booking a flight wouldn’t have worked, due to high cost and baggage limits. 

So she pivoted to rail. Simms felt positive in the early stage of her three-train, 20-plus-hour Amtrak experience. 

“All the peace that you see, it’s quiet — it’s something different,” Simms said. “When I’m riding the train in the city, you see all the buildings and stuff, but to see it from this aspect it’s different. I’ll take this any day.”

Sitting quietly alone a few rows away, Teni Fajemisin, 18, watched through the window as the train passed a blur of snow-covered trees. The Chicago native was heading home after finishing his first semester of a two-year program at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he said he has “met nice people” and contributes to a project that aims to build a new community center in Milwaukee’s Metcalfe Park neighborhood.

Fajemisin said riding the 90-minute Hiawatha route made the most sense since his dad works near Chicago Union Station.

While riding the Hiawatha back to Milwaukee a few weeks later, I spoke with Phillip Loan, who was riding in a business class seat, which offers extra legroom and footrests for a higher place. The 27-year–old Atlanta native was en route to a job interview at a Milwaukee hospital — hoping to become a Wisconsin resident. 

Loan said Amtrak offered the cheapest option, and he said he’d consider riding again, particularly if the system improves the convenience and quality of the service. He mentioned the attractiveness of high-speed services in other countries, recounting an “awesome” experience riding between major cities while visiting Japan.

Research for an expansion in Wisconsin continues. Its prospects depend on the success of the Muskego Yard Freight Rail Bypass project, which would open up the shared tracks for Amtrak’s passenger trains to function more efficiently, state DOT Rail Chief Lisa Stern told WPR in October. 

Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin last year announced a fresh $72.8 million in federal funding for the bypass project, with plans to begin construction in 2026. 

While the feasibility of expansion to cities like Madison, Green Bay and Eau Claire continues to be researched, the state DOT says it’s working to execute the grant agreement for the bypass project — aiming to make train travel in Wisconsin more accessible for riders like those I met.

Ditching cars for rail, Wisconsin Amtrak passengers find accessibility is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.