ALUMNI SNAPSHOTS

Storybook rapper Wes Tank

DR. SEUSS MEETS DR. DRE, AND A STAR IS BORN

Wes Tank’s career as a performer and film producer took an unexpected turn, thanks to a Dr. Seuss book lying on the ground while he was getting ready for a rap show.

The book was “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” and Tank decided it would be fun to improvise a rap by putting the words to a Dr. Dre beat.

Tank, a 2006 UWM alumnus who has been rapping since he was 16, began incorporating the Dr. Seuss raps occasionally into his performances and the shows he did for children.

“I knew the crowd was enjoying it, so I decided to take it further,” Tank says. He put the performances on YouTube, using his comic and acting skills to make the words in the books bounce and hop to the beats.

Then the pandemic hit, and parents and children went online in droves looking for entertainment. Suddenly, the Dr. Seuss/ Dr. Dre mashups had a million hits and counting. Tank’s work was being featured in Oprah and Variety magazines and on the front page of Reddit.

“I wasn’t expecting that, but I was really happy about it,” he says. “I was glad that project was able to get some traction, and it sort of spawned this whole other side tangent in children’s entertainment.”

That side tangent was a deal to produce episodes for Kidoodle, an online network focused on content for children. Tank and his collaborators are taking classic children’s stories, setting them to music, and adding their own art and twists to the plots. They’re accessible through the website StoryRaps.com. A five-minute episode on “Goldilox and the Three Bears,” for example, features Tank in a pseudobear costume and extols the virtue of learning about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Tank, who is from Dodgeville, Wisconsin, credits UWM with giving him the skills that allowed his creativity to flourish. He made his own films, trying different approaches. “I made some videos where I played all the characters,” he says, “and my classmates thought they were pretty funny. I just really enjoyed my time at UWM because it allowed me a lot of room to breathe creatively.”

Tank also runs a film production company called TankThink that highlights the efforts of community organizations working to improve Milwaukee.

In addition, he and a group of collaborators, many of whom got to know each other at UWM, are working on a passion project, a movie titled “Corridor,” a crime caper about a murder that may or may not have happened.

The movie, which is about half finished, is set in Milwaukee. “UWM is the magnet that pulled everybody here. Our work has a Midwestern tone,” says 2013 alum Zach Erdmann, one of the movie’s writers, who notes its focus on an industrial Rust Belt city figuring out its identity. “Those ideas inform the script, so it has to be filmed here.” – Kathy Quirk

HOW UWM HELPED FUEL CITY´S NEW FIRE CHIEF

Aaron Lipski may be Milwaukee’s new fire chief, but he’s certainly not new to the job. He is the fourth generation in a family of firefighters, and he has served for 24 years.

“I was around it my whole life, but my family never pressured me,” Lipski says. “In fact, they encouraged me to go to college, do something easier on the body.” He took part of their advice – earning undergraduate and master’s degrees at UWM.

Named to a one-year term as Milwaukee Fire Department chief in May 2021 after serving as acting chief since October 2020, Lipski knows that the department is facing some major challenges.

“First and foremost, we’ve been struggling with pretty massive budget cuts for the past 10 or 15 years,” he says, “and it doesn’t look like that’s going to be letting up anytime.”

He faces those challenges and others armed with the knowledge gained from his days at UWM.

He recalls one class discussion about measuring the replacement cycle for a fleet, including standard approaches and various recommendations.

“I left that class and probably stayed up half the night refiguring everything we had previously just done on a hunch,” Lipski says. “The next day, I went before a pretty powerful body here in the city,” and the officials were amazed and impressed by what he presented.

In addition to administrative and budget issues, Lipski is focused on another major challenge the department faces: increasing diversity.

“The fire service nationwide – and Milwaukee is no different – has been largely a predominately white male group of employees,” he says. “There is value in every one of those individuals, and they have saved a ton of lives, but I will tell you we don’t represent demographically the city we serve, and that’s a problem.”

The department has also begun taking more of a role in public health efforts, including delivering gun locks and smoke alarms.

Lipski is particularly proud of the role the department has played during the pandemic, working together with subject matter experts and city and county agencies to form a crisis response team.

He says the department maintained a strong reputation in the community, even during a summer of protests and unrest. Fire trucks or ambulances would turn a corner and find the street curb-to-curb with people.

“In the midst of probably the most intense protests of my era at least, we were witness to those people who were very angry,” he says, “but they would part like the Red Sea and clap as we drove our ambulances or fire trucks through.” – Kathy Quirk

Aaron Lipski

A MENTOR PUTS HIS BEST FOOT FORWARD

His organization has already donated more than 10,000 pairs of shoes to children. And Jacarrie Carr’s focus in the summer of 2021 was on helping kids be kids again at a four-week summer camp for 75 youngsters.

The camp, based at Milwaukee’s St. Marcus School, where Carr is on staff, provided field trips, hot meals, leadership training, and learning opportunities in areas as diverse as dance and American Sign Language. Twenty teens gained job experience and leadership skills working as aides to the five teachers. “We want to help kids understand life in general, develop a work ethic and have camp opportunities they’re not used to having,” Carr says.

Carr is president and CEO of Jacarrie Kicks for Kids (JK4K), a small nonprofit that is having a big community impact. The organization’s motto, “Changing the World Two Feet at a Time,” references its roots of collecting and distributing shoes for children. Over six years, JK4K has expanded its efforts to providing school supplies and haircuts as well as youthdriven programming, mentorship and soft skills development.

Among the projects: a turkey drive for Thanksgiving and a toy drive around the holidays as well as Kicking for Success, a Saturday workshop to help young people ages 10 to 18 gain skills they need to find jobs and create their own businesses.

Carr started his organization as a UWM undergraduate studying nonprofit management and community organization in the School of Education’s Educational Policy and Community Studies department. He completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees

HARNESSING WATER

FROM THE STORM

Carrie Bristoll-Groll hasn’t only built a successful stormwater management business, but she’s also created a small pipeline for employing other UWM alumnae.

Bristoll-Groll, who holds a UWM degree in civil engineering, is the principal civil engineer and CEO of Stormwater Solutions Engineering, a firm she founded in 2002. The company designs sustainable stormwater plans that imitate natural water management processes, thus reducing flooding and improving water quality. These include things like combination rain barrels and rain gardens for residences.

The business has grown slowly but steadily since 2002. It now employs 10 people – most of them women and many of them UWM grads. The field of engineering has become more diverse since she started, Bristoll-Groll says, and her office provides a supportive environment. “We’re mindful of what it takes to be a professional woman running a household,” she says.

Before starting her own business, she worked for the cities of Milwaukee and Brookfield as a stormwater civil engineer. It gave her a solid background in understanding the issues cities and developers face, so once government stormwater regulations came to the fore in the 1990s, her experience was very helpful in getting her business off the ground.

“I had a niche business that focused specifically on those stormwater management issues,” Bristoll-Groll says, “and I was determined to implement stormwater solutions with the health of our local environment in mind.”

Carrie Bristoll-Groll A nontraditional student herself, Bristoll-Groll completed college while raising two small children, with a third one joining the family during her time at UWM. Her husband, Tony, was very supportive. “He’d take care of the kids when I had to study or had an exam,” she says. Bristoll-Groll is a founding member of Women of Water, a group of over 100 women in water-related industries who network and perform community service projects. She’s also been a technical mentor for Engineers Without Borders and promotes careerrelated volunteer activity with her staff. – Kathy Quirk

at UWM and was the first winner of the School of Education’s Love Kindness award in 2017. He was also honored with a Graduate of the Last Decade Award from the Alumni Association in 2018.

Support and volunteers for JK4K come from the community, a network of friends, local foundations and organizations, and his family. “If it wasn’t for my parents, I wouldn’t be able to do this at all,” Carr says. “My parents are definitely my backbone.” – Kathy Quirk

Erica Herrera

RESILIENCE LED HER TO UWM AND BEYOND

Erica Herrera’s motto consists of only five words, but they’ve carried her through a lifetime of challenges: What more can I do?

So far, the answer has included being a rock for her family, serving her country, raising four children, earning a UWM degree and being honored for starting a successful business. And she’s not done yet.

“I always wanted to fulfill my dream,” Herrera says. “My goal was to go to UWM and finish my bachelor’s degree.”

The path wasn’t easy for the firstgeneration college student. Her mother was widowed when Herrera was in high school. She had to drop out of MATC in 2000 when her mother became disabled. She enlisted in the Air Force in 2000, and then dealt with an abusive relationship.

But in 2008, she married and now has four children. She also cares for her mother and mother-in-law, who live with her family. She started her own business in 2014, EFH Trucking, which today has 31 dump trucks. Then in 2016, in addition to re-enlisting in the Air National Guard, she began again taking steps toward earning a college degree.

“I was a little intimidated by UWM, the big university, but I conquered all my fears and decided to just get it done,” says Herrera, who pursued a bachelor’s degree in human resources.

While attending UWM, buoyed by the success of her trucking company, Herrera won the Governor’s Trailblazer Award for Women in Business in 2018. “I had (National Guard) training in Tennessee that weekend,” Herrera says, “so my husband picked up the award for me because I had to honor that commitment.” She completed her bachelor’s degree in 2020 and was accepted into UWM’s Executive MBA program, earning a scholarship supported in part by the program's alumni.

Adam Wickersham, director of UWM’s Executive MBA program, recalls his first meeting with her. “I told her that she is seeking to join a program where she will be surrounded by a lot of talented people,” he says. “She immediately told me that she always wants to surround herself with people of greater talent and success because it motivated her. I knew right then she would be the quality candidate I was looking for.” Wickersham was impressed with her resume and bio, and asked Herrera how she planned to add more to her plate. “She said, ‘Hard work beats talent every time.’ I signed her admission paperwork that night.”

The plate got fuller. In January 2021, Herrera started a second business in property management. “To get a loan,” she says, “I had to do a financial analysis and interpret the data from business, which is exactly what I do in class.”

She hopes her story will inspire other women. “My entire journey – good or bad – is worth sharing if it helps another woman, a single mom,” Herrera says. “There are no obstacles. There may be a rock, but move that rock and keep pushing forward. The only one that can stop you from doing anything is you.” – Kathy Quirk