At the time of this conversation, Dr. April Scott was leading student health and wellbeing work at University Health Services at UW-Madison, having come to Madison from the South. This week, Angela sits down with her for a wide-ranging conversation about what's really going on with young people's health — and our own.

They get into the loneliness showing up on campus even in a sea of cohorts and group chats, why connection has become a skill that has to be taught, and what it means to "take up space" in rooms that weren't built with you in mind. Dr. Scott makes the case for normalizing failure as part of sending a kid off to college, offers a coach's-eye view of the shift from parenting to letting go, and gives a genuinely useful tour of sleep — why naps go sideways, what your alarm is telling you, and why most of us are walking around sleep-deprived.

Jodie Pope leads the Gateway to College program at Madison College, which serves students on the verge of leaving high school, or who already have. This week, Angela sits down with her to talk about what changes when you build an educational space around being seen instead of sorted.

The conversation moves from the practical to the profound: why relational trust is the whole game, how our schools became so transactional, and what it means that "half of our players aren't in the game." Jodie is disarmingly honest about her first day running the program, about parenting a teenager, and about the day she interviewed a biracial 17-year-old at her own former high school and found herself talking to a younger version of herself. What she got to tell that student, she says, was life-changing for both of them.

This season of Black Oxygen is about community and collective care as resistance — and Jodie is learning, in real time, to receive the community she's spent a lifetime giving to others.

#BlackOxygenPodcast #BlackOxygen #BlackInWisconsin #BlackPodcasters #MadisonCollege

This season of Black Oxygen is about care and collective care — and this conversation is a candid look at what it actually costs, and takes, to lead as a Black person in a city like Madison. Angela sits down with Reverend Dr. Alex Gee, who has raised roughly $70 million over 30 years, built multiple organizations, and is still, in his words, only ever invited onto the "Community Relations" committee — never Finance, never HR, never the chair.

Alex traces his leadership back to his mother, Verlene Gee, a single mom and pioneering social worker who taught him to advocate boldly, hold boundaries, and never fear telling the truth. From there, the conversation moves through the specific weight of being labeled a "Black leader" instead of simply a leader, the discipline of "protecting his ears to protect his voice," the unspoken tensions Black leaders navigate in majority-white institutions, and how all of it shaped his vision for the Center for Black Excellence and Culture — a space built from 700 community voices, designed to let Black leaders and residents finally feel at home in Madison.

In This Episode
00:00 — Welcome and introduction of Reverend Dr. Alex Gee
00:35 — What brought Alex to Wisconsin and what keeps him here — his mother's 1970 move to Madison and enrollment in UW's brand-new African American Studies Department, the root of the family's roots in the city
07:10 — Leadership lessons from caregiving: becoming his mother's advocate, learning to say "no" to doctors, and the boundaries that let him lead at home and at work
14:30 — What his mother, a pioneering social worker, modeled about community leadership — advocacy, boldness, and going "to the mat" for people with no one else in their corner
20:56 — Finding and keeping his own voice, and the 1983 UW classroom moment when his mother challenged a professor on white privilege in front of his classmates
28:06 — Being a Black leader in Madison, unpacked: raising $70 million and never once being asked to serve on a finance, HR, or budget committee — only "Community Relations"; the decision to call himself "a leader who's Black" instead of a "Black leader"
31:00 — Protecting his ears to protect his voice: on being called a slur by someone in his own community, and choosing not to let outside noise dictate his focus
33:00 — Criticism as a signal, not a setback — why pushback from both Black and white Madisonians is often proof a leader is doing something new
35:00 — The double duty of "super leadership": a decade spent building pathways for non-Black allies through Justified Anger, and why he's now turning his focus toward strengthening the Black community directly
37:00 — Naming the unspoken dynamics — including tensions with white women in leadership — that Madison rarely discusses openly, and why he says it's "killing Black people"
38:07 — The origin story of the Center for Black Excellence and Culture — a childhood dream, 700 community listening-session voices, and building something that isn't a museum or a cultural center but a place to belong
48:13 — Alex's 10-year vision: recruiting and retaining Black professionals as an economic strategy for the whole region, and the question he's asked funders since 2000 that no one has ever been able to answer
59:35 — What's on the Center's playlist (and what's — or isn't — on Alex's)
1:01:45 — Where to learn more and how to get involved

Leadership Takeaways
Redefine the label before it defines you. Alex chose to describe himself as "a leader who's Black" rather than a "Black leader" — a shift that broadened what rooms and questions he had access to.
Protect your ears to protect your voice. He deliberately limits how much criticism and noise he takes in, so it doesn't erode his ability to lead clearly.
Treat criticism as a signal. Pushback, in his experience, often means you're doing something new enough to matter — not that you're doing something wrong.
Build your own tables. After decades of being kept off finance and budget committees, Alex stopped waiting for a seat and built the Center for Black Excellence and Culture instead.
Name what's unspoken. He points directly at dynamics — like tokenism on nonprofit boards, or unresolved tension between Black professionals and white supervisors — that many leaders privately navigate but rarely say out loud.