In community theatre, Vicky Selkowe’96 often portrayed the empathizer.
“I once played Anne Frank’s sister, who had no lines and stood there and looked sympathetic,” she says with a laugh about her part in a play about the 13-year-old girl whose family was forced into hiding by the Nazis in World War II.
In reality, Selkowe is more than a sympathetic bystander.
An attorney who chose to work with the poor, Selkowe is emerging as a leading strategist on some of the most controversial social justice initiatives in Madison, Wis., such as the campaign for a local minimum wage and paid sick leave for all employees.
“She’s bright as a whip,” says friend and political ally Alderman Austin King, 8th District. “She’s also sassy. She’ll tell me to shut up when I’m wrong and be clear about it. Her energy is contagious.”
But some are concerned about the impact of her activism, especially on the business community.
“I don’t know her. I’ve shook her hand twice,” says Alderman Zach Brandon, 7th District. But in terms of policy, “she’s a social justice attorney who doesn’t have experience with economic development or running a business. This is a two-way street. You can’t fight economic development initiatives and demand to mandate things on business.”
Given her upbringing, it’s no surprise Selkowe is political.
But it was hardly destined that she and her husband, Jason Engle’96, a consultant for the state Department of Public Instruction, would build lives in Madison, which they initially found lacking diversity and too polished.
“It felt like a big strip mall, at first,” Selkowe says.
But “Madison has surprised me,” she continues, voicing admiration for spirited activists and gratitude for the public dog parks where she runs her adopted greyhounds, Hondo and Wally. “It has really grown on me. I think we’re going to be here for a while.”
Although born in Hanover, N.H., Selkowe was raised and educated in the Midwest. Her father, Peter, a newspaper editor and publisher, was a “mainstream Democrat,” and her mom, Louise, was “pretty conservative, pretty Catholic.” A younger sister, Katie, works in the insurance industry in the Chicago area.
The family, she says, talked about social justice and politics during her childhood. “My dad was a newspaper guy and a lot of that came back to the dinner table,” she says.
Selkowe attended kindergarten through high school in Carbondale, Ill., home to Southern Illinois University, where her father ran the local newspaper, and remembers it as “a fantastic place to grow up.”
But she listened to her father at night and saw segregation in the area and at school, and became politically active at a young age. Before starting high school, she campaigned for local Democrats and attended rallies at the university. In high school, she was into theatre, the speech team, the student newspaper and yearbook, and campaigned for Bill Clinton in his first presidential bid in 1992.
Selkowe studied economics and sociology at Beloit College and got involved in the Women’s Center, a black students’ group, and even published a parody of the campus newsletter.
The indelible lesson: “If something bothers you about the way the world works, you can take action on it.”
She also met her future husband there, their first date unfolding when they were the only people to show up at a going-away gathering for a student-run market research team. They were married in 1998.
“She’s got a big heart,” Engle says. “She’s very confident and self-assured. She has a charismatic presence. And she’s stubborn.”
After Beloit, Selkowe got a fellowship and worked briefly for the federal Department of Health and Human Services. “I hated it,” she says. “Too many rigid rules.”
But she hooked up with the nonprofit Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and did community organizing, helping forge the first neighborhood association in an impoverished area in southeast Washington, D.C. She later worked for ACORN in Houston and Milwaukee and did a stint as a substitute teacher in Milwaukee.
Eventually, she landed a “dream job” with the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, where she studied the effects of the state’s W-2 program, finding a stark gap between how the program was supposed to work and its reality of “turning people away.”
At the institute, Selkowe met Darcy Luoma, who became a lifelong friend and is now director of Democratic U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl’s Madison office.
“We were both new,” Luoma recalls. “Even though she’s younger than me, I really felt Vicky to be a mentor ... She’s very sincere. What you see is what you get, whether it’s good or bad.”
Luoma vividly remembers testing a speech on Selkowe before a contentious town hall meeting on a school finance referendum. Selkowe didn’t like the soft approach and persuaded her to be bolder, show up in a red power suit and fight for the schools. As a result, the event “kicked a—,” Luoma says.
But there’s more to Selkowe than politics, Luoma says.
In Milwaukee, the pair became “aunties” to two pre-teen girls from a struggling family who had been evicted from their home.
And the relationships have lasted.
Selkowe and Luoma mentored the girls, took them to movies and shopping, and even used a digital camera to take their senior class pictures because they couldn’t afford them.
The younger of the girls stayed with Selkowe and Engle in Madison last summer, Selkowe helping her get a seasonal job and take a class at Madison Area Technical College.
“They’re just good, generous people,” Luoma says of the couple.
After leaving the institute, Selkowe and Engle moved to Madison and she began University of Wisconsin Law School, which she describes as “three years of pain.” The rigors of law school left scant time for activism, although she still helped negotiate a teaching assistants’ contract and volunteered at Madison’s Tenant Resource Center.
Since earning her degree, Selkowe has worked with the law school’s Neighborhood Law Project, a community-based law clinic on South Park Street helping poor people on housing, worker rights, and public benefits disputes.
Meanwhile, she connected with the grass-roots, leftist political party, Progressive Dane, and was moved by the seriousness and passion of a general membership discussion about the local minimum wage. She got involved in that effort and has since helped mold the party’s recommendations for tax incremental financing (TIF) reform, campaigned for City Council candidates, helped organize opposition to the mayor’s merger of the Affirmative Action Department and Equal Opportunities Commission, and now, is a leader in the initiative for paid sick leave for all employees.
“She is one of those bright, lawyerly types who is really helpful,” King says. “She is available to fill whatever role that needs to be filled. She’s never been one to claim credit, even though she should.”
And “she has an enormous amount of street credibility through working with clients one-on-one and being in their homes,” he says.
Such compassion is admirable, but Selkowe and her allies at Progressive Dane sometimes don’t consider the impact their initiatives can have on the private sector, says Mark Bugher, director of the University of Wisconsin Research Park and chairman of the city’s Economic Development Commission.
“The essence of good public policy is consensus and compromises,” he says.
But Selkowe rejects claims that Progressive Dane is anti-business.
“I don’t sit around with my friends and plot ways to hurt Madison businesses,” she says. “I do sit around with my friends at the Harmony Bar & Grill and talk about how we can do more for people who have the least.”
Selkowe, who hopes to continue a career where she can work closely with the needy, relaxes with books and Scrabble, hanging with friends at the Harmony, or walking Hondo and Wally, former racers she and Engle got from a greyhound rescue group.
Near the end of an interview at Cargo Café on South Park Street, she was asked about her interest in public office someday.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t have time to think about it.”
This article was reprinted with permission from the Wisconsin State Journal.
