Get to Know Our 2023 Gala Honorees a Little Bit Better!
By Sherry Reames
Heleema Berg‘s current job title is Recovery Support Specialist at the Wisconsin Resource Center (WRC), a maximum-security institution which provides the best opportunities in Wisconsin for incarcerated people to receive mental health and substance use treatment. Drawing on her own lived experiences of poverty, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and substance and sexual abuse, as well as several years of incarceration, she describes her vocation as “supporting others in recovery and walking with them as they figure it out.”
Heleema doesn’t limit herself to just a few kinds of support! In the past few years she has not only earned state certification as a Peer Support Specialist and Parent Peer Specialist, but has also become certified to train others for these roles. She works with Deb Mejchar, folks from the UW Odyssey Project, and others in the areas of restorative justice, grief support, re-entry parenting, and preventing sex trafficking. Drawing on other parts of her life experience, Heleema has also taken on the role of Native American spiritual leader at the WRC and volunteer spiritual leader at Taycheedah. She has become an Indigenous doula and completed training to work as a doula inside the prison system. She also does advocacy work surrounding justice-impacted individuals and victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Heleema lives in Green Bay and is the mother of five children, ranging in age from 7 to 25. She says her life motto is, “Do not let anyone put you in a box, including yourself, as you can do anything you want if you work hard for it!”
Catoya Roberts returned to Milwaukee, her hometown, after graduating from Hampton Institute in Virginia and started to make a name for herself as an organizer and community leader. If you look her up online, you will see her identified as an organizer for MICAH and Urban Milwaukee (a role she had from 2011 to 2018), later an associate director of WISDOM with the mission of supporting other local organizers, co-founder of FREE, and national director of Movement Building for the Children’s Defense Fund, with racial equity and the welfare of women and children as focus areas.
Catoya’s current title is director of the Community Justice Council in Milwaukee. That means she now heads an effort to bring together the principle decision-makers in the city who deal with criminal justice — the chief judge, district attorney, public defender, police chief, sheriff, mayor, and other community leaders — with the goal of developing strategic plans to improve public safety and the quality of life for everybody.
Catoya’s dedication to criminal-justice reform has been shaped in large part by her own life experience. Her father was often absent during her childhood because he was in and out of incarceration. Her brother has been repeatedly incarcerated as well because of mental illness, and she is helping to raise his children and trying to save her nephew from the system. Especially close to her heart are two current statewide campaigns: the work of FREE, as it strives in Madison and elsewhere to create healthy, affordable, and safe housing opportunities for re-entering women with children; and efforts to rethink the community supervision system, making it much less intrusive and more humane.
Note: Although our third honoree, Dee Star, was too busy to be interviewed, he is already well known in Madison.