November 2023 Greetings Wisconsin Chapter IoPP members, affiliates and supporters! There is a lot to share with this newsletter which are as follows:
New Members/WI Chapter Growth
Annual Golf Outing Results
2023-2024 Scholarship Recipient Announcement
Scholarship/Endowment Update
Past Event Update
Upcoming Events
2023 Q4 Event: Lakefront Brewery Tour
2024 Q1 Event: Green Bay Packaging Tour (New Paper Mill)
2024 Q2 Event: Charlie Berens: Good Ole Fashioned Comedy Tour
National IoPP Technical Committee Info
Conclusion
New Members/WI Chapter Growth Welcome new members! We have added over 25 members to our chapter since the beginning of 2023! There’s still a few months to go, so please consider spreading the membership word to your friends and colleagues in the packaging industry. Annual Golf Outing Results Let's tee off this Q4 communications with the golf outing. As planned, the event was held August 18th at Royal St Patrick’s in Wrightstown, WI. We had a bit of a scare as the clubhouse was hit by a devastating storm ~3 weeks prior to our event that ripped the roof off the clubhouse and we had to pivot around our dinner plans. The weather cooperated and the course delivered with excellent grounds. The sponsors/advertisers and participants delivered too as we set a high mark for teams and attendance with 30 teams and 117 individuals participating. That drove an all time record gross of ~$29.3K and our 2nd highest net of ~$16.4K. Thank you to all the sponsors/advertisers for your contributions, we can’t do this as successfully as we do without you stepping up each and every year. Thank you also to each and every participant, new, and repeat! You are the catalyst that propels us to keep reaching to make the next year’s event better than the last. And last but certainly not least, a HUGE thank you goes out to our golf outing subcommittee led by Kyle Kozlowski. I know each of us dedicates a lot of time from May to August putting this event together and it shows with how the event comes together year after year. As this past event has taught us, we can’t take anything for granted. The committee members include; Andrea Manor, Bob Dessauer, Chris DeJardin, Craig Hable, Eric Moe and Mike Knowles. Now let’s do it again….and even better in 2024 😉! 2023-2024 Scholarship Recipient Announcement That leads me to our 2023/2024 scholarship awardees. Three student applicants from UW-Stout were awarded scholarships created from our golf outing! These scholarships would not be available without your support so THANK YOU and please continue to help grow these opportunities for students/future packaging!
Joseph Gierl (Medford WI) received the $1000 upperclassman award (Joseph received the underclassman award in 2022/2023. This is his second award with the Wisconsin IoPP Chapter).
Samual Petkovsek and Madalyn Klaja each received our underclassman award of $500 each.
Each of them have provided some type of thank you note to the chapter. Congratulations to the award recipients. Scholarship/Endowment Update Sticking with the scholarship theme, the chapter leadership met in early October with one of the discussion topics being scholarship award amounts. After discussion and vote, chapter leadership concluded we will increase the upperclassman award from $1000 to $2000 and both underclassman awards from $500 to $800. The thought is we want these scholarships to be a meaningful and purposeful amount to help impact each of the recipients. From here I’ll work with UW Stout Foundation on what this means to our endowment investment, but until we can shore it up with the endowment funds, the chapter will make up the difference with an annual donation. Past Event Update On October 4th, the WI & MN IoPP chapters co-hosted a tour at UW Stout to view the packaging program facilities, equipment, and labs. The event was free to the students and we had chapter members attend as well. Click here for photos from the event and take a look at the participation! Great turnout and thanks to everyone who were able to make it! Upcoming Events We are excited to announce multiple events scheduled for the remainder of 2023 into Q2 of 2024! One of our chapter goals is to get more involvement and we have proceeded with scheduling events in a broader area. Therefore we have 2 tours and a comedy show to inform you about! 2023 Q4 Event Our next chapter event will be a tour at Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee on Wednesday, December 13, 2023! You can see the flyer (CLICK IMAGE) posted to the website for details and link to registration (See link under Registration deadline). One of our chapter’s goals is to get more involvement from folks in SE WI and we put this event together with you in mind specifically. So please make plans to come out and show your support for the chapter. ***Please note we purchased a limited number of tours and once we run out, there are no more. The fee will include the tour, tasting, and meal. Sign up early if you want a tour, otherwise your tastings and meal will be a bit more than the early-bird signup folks.*** 2024 Q1 Event And that’s not it for event planning….there is a new Green Bay Packaging paper mill in Green Bay providing tours. We’ll work on getting a tour lined up for our Q1 2024 event after the first of the year. We’ll put a flyer and post it to the website after we finalize the dates, times and other meeting details. 2024 Q2 Event And finally I have even more exciting news for 2024 events…..we have purchased tickets for Charlie Berens: Good Ole Fashioned Tour on Saturday, April 27th at the Resch Center in Green Bay for our Q2 2024 event!!! We have a limited number of tickets, but once they’re gone...they’re gone. With this being a non-traditional event, we’ll open it up to spouses/”friends” of the chapter as well. Watch for the flyer and signup after the Dec 11 event at Lakefront Brewery is completed. National IoPP Technical Committee Info National IoPP recently held a chapter presidents meeting and the topic of technical committees was presented. Honestly, I’m not super familiar with the technical committees available within IoPP, but for the purposes of communicating information to our chapter members, I feel the need to mention it here. Take a look at what’s offered and consider signing up with the committee representative if something sparks your interest. Conclusion Alright, that gets us pretty up to date with the happenings in the Chapter. Like always, I’ll close with a couple of thoughts:
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have ideas for an event or would like to host a tour or would like to get more involved with the chapter leadership.
Please consider participating in the tour on December 11th, hope to see you then!
Best Regards and enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday,
~Mike
