Rotary Club of Milwaukee Tuesday Speaker Series

A Discussion about the Backline Accelerator Program

Rotarian Jamie Reeve interviewed Glenn Kleiman, Executive Director of 88Nine Radio Milwaukee, and Backline Artist, Klassik. Backline is 88Nine Radio Milwaukee’s program fostering and launching local musician’s careers.  It is a 12-week accelerator for area musicians who are worthy of breaking through into national prominence.  In collaboration with gener8tor, local talent benefits from industry training well beyond their art.  Among other tenets, Backline participants are exposed to national industry experts who mentor, fine-tune and advance their budding careers.  Additionally, the program aims to promote Milwaukee’s musical talent in an effort to reshape our city’s image nationally.  It’s a key strategy help our business community attract and retain the young millennial talent which employers need. 

CBD in Wisconsin: The Wild (Mid)West

Dennis is the CEO and Co-Owner of WI Hemp Scientific. The purpose of Dennis’ presentation was to give Rotary Members a brief consumers guide to CBD, focusing particularly on the current state of the CBD industry.  With hemp and CBD being so new to Wisconsin, Dennis explained why CBD seems to be appearing everywhere, and the importance of researching your CBD supplier before making a purchase.  Lastly, Dennis touched on how he hopes the CBD industry will evolve over the next few years.

View his PowerPoint presentation here.

Presidential Politics and US Nuclear Policy

With the departure of former National Security Advisor John Bolton, a new space has opened for policy towards Iran and North Korea. As the Democratic presidential campaign intensifies, candidates are jockeying to present their own, alternative national security strategies.

This makes the next 18 months potentially some of the most dynamic months in President Donald Trump’s tenure in office. Can he forge new deals with Iran and North Korea? How would a new Democratic president reshape America’s nuclear policy? This talk will explore the possibilities and predict some of the most likely outcomes.

Wisconsin’s dairy farmers are facing a brutal environment with price of milk down nearly 40 percent and farms closing by the dozens. Wisconsin lost nearly 700 farms in 2018 alone – nearly two a day. Rick Barrett, a reporter with years of experience covering the industry for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, joined dairy expert Pete Hardin to discuss what’s happened to the state’s signature dairy industry – and what might happen next. Rick is lead reporter on the Journal Sentinel’s Dairyland in Distress project, a yearlong look at the industry. Pete is founder of The Milkweed, a periodical that focuses on the dairy industry. He lives on a small farm near Brooklyn, south of Madison.

Dr. Steven Dykstra, licensed psychologist and director of the Milwaukee County Behavioral Health Division children’s mobile crisis team, discussed into national trends related to youth suicide and mental health.We learned how technology and social media have changed the way young people communicate, interact and behave and why these societal changes can play a role in the uptick in youth suicide and mental health cases.

Over the last decade as national behavioral health best practices and needs evolved, we learned how Milwaukee County and local health care partners have collaborated to enhance and provide additional services in the community to improve accessibility and quality of care.

As CEO for CNU,  Lynn Richards has insight on solutions and lessons learned about community building across a wide range — from region to neighborhood to building & block, creating places people love.

Dr. Jeffrey Whittle from the Medical College of Wisconsin talked about the National Institute’s of Health of All of Us Research Program. It is part of the Precision Medicine Initiative. This initiative seeks to carry out research that will help make healthcare more personalized by tailoring healthcare more precisely to each person’s unique biology, environment and behavior. The All of Us Research Program wants to enroll a million or more persons around the country as partners in this effort.

Effective leadership requires self-awareness, yet that trait is as rare as chicken lips. How can you lead a business when you don’t know what’s driving you? The kicker: while 95% of people report being self aware, only 1 in 10 actually are. Most of us know our aspirational selves, but few of us are open to spending time with our inner demons. To make clear-headed decisions, we have to wake up to our cognitive biases and shadow selves. None of us sees the world as clearly as we believe, which leaves us vulnerable to poor decision-making and being blindsided.

Kelly Fitzsimmons is a serial tech entrepreneur, artist, author, and mother of two. In May, she published “Lost in Startuplandia: Wayfinding for the Weary Entrepreneur,” which was named by Inc. magazine to its 2019 summer reading list. She is the cofounder of Custom Reality Services, a virtual reality (VR) production company whose first two projects, Across the Line (2016) and Ashe ’68 (2019), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Kelly is the recipient of the Silvertip PwC Entrepreneurship Award and Speech Technology’s Luminary Award. Her work has been published by Network Computing, InformationWeek, and Inc. An active angel investor, she serves on the technology committee for BELLE USA, a venture fund that invests in women-led startups. Originally trained as a classical archaeologist, Kelly holds a master’s degree from Harvard University.

Guy Smith, Director of the Milwaukee County Parks System shared updates on the Domes, discussed the Parks Fund with the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and talked about the challenges and opportunities facing the Parks system.

This is the Rotary Club version of the Rotary Program on Tuesday, August 13th with Richie Burke and Joe Solmonese. Stay tuned for the GoGedders Podcast coming out soon.

Rotarian Richie Burke interviewed Joe Solmonese, the CEO of the DNC Committee for a live GoGedders Podcast. They dived into Joe’s backstory, then talked about what the Committee is doing to prep for the convention, how it will impact the city before, during and after the convention, and much much more. The GoGedders is a community based podcast produced by GGMM and syndicated by OnMilwaukee.