2021 Q3 - Chapter Communications

August 3, 2021

Greetings again to all Wisconsin Chapter IoPP members, affiliates, and supporters!

I hope this communication finds you well. I wanted to cover a couple of topics for this quarter’s update and will get right into it.

First, I like to extend a very special Congratulations to Gary Konop who retired from Pentair this past April. I got to know Gary from our days in Iowa as we traveled the state together while leading and growing the Mississippi Valley IoPP Chapter. I have grown to know and admire Gary’s professionalism, his continued support of IoPP, and lasting dedication to the packaging field. I would like to thank Gary for his contributions, insights and just his courage for helping to get the chapters combined into what’s now known as a single WI chapter. Here’s to wishing Gary all the best in the future, health, happiness, and I hope you live your best life!

Secondly, “it’s not about the golf”. I’m hoping everyone knows by now that our annual golf outing will take place Friday, August 20th at beautiful Royal St Patrick’s in Wrightstown, WI. We’ve held the event at RSP for a few years now and keep coming back not only because of how smoothly the event is run, but also because both the course and clubhouse grounds are always kept in excellent condition. While the event is encompassed by golf, the focus is really on fund raising with the purpose to promote the packaging profession. We do this primarily through an annual scholarship to UW Stout. Congratulations goes out to the recipient of our 2021-2022 scholarship: Ms Maggie Kendhammer. Maggie is from LaCrosse, currently on her internship in California, and in her final year of school at UWS.

We will cross a milestone at this years event which is to fully fund the WI Chapter IoPP endowed scholarship. This requires north of a $30K contribution. In doing so, we will likely set records for participants and hole advertisers – maybe a better word choice is we will likely “shatter” previous records! How fun is it to acknowledge being a part of something this spectacular? And I sincerely hope we set another record next year! While we received some funding tailwind when we combined with the former WI chapter, the primary work completed to accomplish this goal was done through the annual golf outing. And while I say “it’s not about the golf”, it really is an event like this that brings us all together to support a very worthy cause. Please understand I personally am not a golfer, this being typically the only time I get my golf clubs out of closet for the year, but rest assured I won’t miss this annual event as “it’s not about the golf” for me!

Related to the golf outing, we took advantage of an opportunity to upgrade our website and pay mechanism (thanks in no small part to Eric Moe!). The look and feel of the checkout system is professional and will work well for us into the future for not only golf outings, but also for chapter meetings.

And speaking of chapter meetings, please earmark October for our next chapter event. Craig Hable is busy making arrangements for a plant tour at a package test facility in Appleton with dinner to follow at a local restaurant. Of course we’ll have more information following with related details (like actual dates and times and locations), but for now just earmark October as the timing for our next event after the August golf outing.

In closing, a huge thank you goes out to the golf planning committee who have dedicated several lunch hours, over the past 4 months, to make plans for the event along with several more hours spent emailing and contacting event participants and sponsors. If you are someone who is still on the fence about joining the event, time is getting short but we have space and would welcome you as either a hole advertiser or participant or even better yet, both! Visit the website and sign up!

Until next time, continued best wishes for you and your family’s health and safety.

Kind Regards,

Mike