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January 27, 2025
NORTHEAST WISCONSIN – A partnership turned official merger between two organizations on Wisconsin’s shoreline is celebrating 60 years of uplifting boys and girls in the Manitowoc and Sheboygan areas.
Denise Wittstock, CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters WI Shoreline, said though each Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) organization is an independent company affiliated with the national BBBS of America nonprofit, neighboring affiliates collaborate often.
“We actually have 14 Big Brothers Big Sisters (organizations) in Wisconsin, and we all work very closely together within our outlined geographic footprints,” she said. “So that had been no different between the Manitowoc and Sheboygan organizations.”
According to the BBBS WI Shoreline’s website (bbbswishoreline.org), the Manitowoc and Sheboygan counties BBBS organizations – both established in the late 1960s – remained separate organizations despite their geographical proximity before merging in recent years.
“(BBBS) WI Shoreline did not come into fruition until the official merger in 2021,” Wittstock said. “Different Big Brothers Big Sisters agencies (in the country) have merged, renamed and served different counties. But as far as I know, there’s not been a lot of that here in Wisconsin.”
Now, BBBS WI Shoreline is celebrating 60 years of combined operation – fostering connections between adult volunteers (bigs) and more than 20,000 children (littles) across the two regions.
Local business, big impact
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Wittstock said BBBS WI Shoreline “couldn’t do the work we do,” without its local business partners.
“We’re a very unique nonprofit in that we fund the work that we do through philanthropic support, but in our organization, we really can’t do the work in an equal fashion if we don’t go out and recruit mentors as well,” she said. “So some organizations, some nonprofits, have to go out and raise money, but we go out and recruit mentors at the same time. So we’re looking for two bodies of support, so to speak.”
Wittstock said local corporations – such as “Sargento, Lakeside Foods, Johnsonville, Kohler – those kinds of companies” – provide necessary support to BBBS WI Shoreline in numerous ways.
Corporations, like the ones mentioned above, Wittstock said, are in a unique position to help nonprofits both monetarily and through encouraging volunteerism among their workforce.
“They stand in front of their employees and explain why our organization is so important to the health of youth and the health of the community, which allows their employees to feel confident that they can explore volunteering or engage with us in some way,” she said.
Whether through employee engagement or philanthropic events, Wittstock said businesses play a major role in the lives of the children receiving mentorship through BBBS WI Shoreline.
“(They support us by) providing volunteers or promoting volunteer opportunities within their employee base that allows us to hold events for our (big and little) matches,” she said. “They sometimes invite our bigs and littles into their company so our kids can check out their business, learn about career paths, things like that. They offer opportunities for us to hold (donation) drives for back-to-school events or during the holidays (when) we’re looking for goods and folks who might want to contribute time or in-kind donations to bigs and littles and their families.”
Wittstock said companies also assist in the sustainability and growth of nonprofits like BBBS WI Shoreline by supporting adjacent organizations as well to foster community collaboration on deeply rooted issues.
“Corporations take information about the work that we’re doing and then leverage that across other partnerships they have,” she said. “So they’re supporting organizations that potentially are similar to ours, or are very complimentary to ours. And so if we’re working on some root cause issues in the community, organizations like ours are receiving that multi-faceted support in order to allow us to really dig into collaborations like that.”
On a personal level, Wittstock said collaboration between herself and the executives of BBBS WI Shoreline’s corporate partners assist her in becoming a better leader.
“Leaders of those companies consider me a peer,” she said. “We’re able to have business conversations, and they’re able to lend some support or advice and mentor me when it comes to business that our organization may not have come across yet. We may rely on philanthropy to fund our organization, but we run very much like a corporation… and when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, we’ve not done one of those before (2021). So I leaned heavily on some of my corporate leader partners and peers to say, ‘Can you give me some advice?’”
Outside of her personal relationships with business leaders in the community, Wittstock said companies will also go above and beyond to help fill gaps often found in nonprofits’ executive workforce.
“They lend their strategic and leadership support to our board of directors and to our standing committees that help us plan our marketing and public relations efforts,” she said. “Being a small nonprofit, we don’t employ full-time accountants and marketing directors and things like that. We rely on experts in the community to volunteer their time on those standing committees.”
‘An investment in the future’
Though funded by monetary donations, Wittstock said a unique differentiator of BBBS WI Shoreline, is that it is looking for partnerships, not transactions.
“Sometimes companies are only interested in transactions – that’s what they have the capacity for,” she said. “(They’ll say), ‘Yes, we’ll make a donation of this (amount), just call us next year. We’re not interested in doing more.’ So, there’s different relationships all across the board, but I would say the biggest compliment I’ve received from a corporate leader has been that we approach partnerships by really trying to understand what they are looking for in terms of outcomes in the community. What are they trying to achieve, and what’s the legacy they want to leave for the work that they do?”
One such organization that has had a longstanding relationship with BBBS WI Shoreline is local cheese manufacturer, Sargento – headquartered in Plymouth.
Louie Gentine, Sargento’s chairman and CEO, said one of the company’s corporate values is community outreach.
“We encourage our employees to give back to the community whenever they can,” he said.
And it’s not just the company’s employees who give back.
A few years ago, shortly after the Sheboygan and Manitowoc BBBS organizations merged, Gentine said Sargento received the Wisconsin Business Achievement Award from The Flowers Family Foundation.
With that recognition, came a $75,000 check to be donated to the nonprofit of Sargento’s choice, which Gentine said he awarded to BBBS WI Shoreline “because of the need for mentorship in our community that became more important than ever during and immediately after the pandemic.”
When he informed Wittstock of his choice, Gentine said she was “thrilled” and the grant “couldn’t have come at a better time” due to the financial restraints the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was putting on the nonprofit at the time.
Currently, Gentine said nearly two dozen employees are volunteering as Bigs for BBBS WI Shoreline, and that most recently, a long-time employee and his wife – Barry and Kay Blatz – were recognized by the nonprofit for 25 years of mentorship.
“We’re grateful that many of our employees choose to give their time to kids in our community through Big Brothers Big Sisters WI Shoreline,” he said. “Helping young people grow in their confidence and self-esteem is really an investment in the future of our community.”
Wittstock said another stand-out company that has been a valued partner to BBBS WI Shoreline is Van Horn Automotive.
“They have, I believe, 14 dealerships around both (Wisconsin and Iowa) and several years ago, through growing engagement with Big Brothers Big Sisters, they made a decision to make Big Brothers Big Sisters their partner of choice, so to speak,” she said.
As Van Horn’s “partner of choice,” Wittstock said they have standing, yearly events with the auto group.
“Over Memorial Day, they have a test drive event, (where) every test drive over a three-day period, they will donate a dollar amount to Big Brothers Big Sisters,” she said. “A month before that, they bring bigs and littles to the dealerships (for) a private test drive session where they bring in the best of the best. So they’re bringing in sports cars, they’re bringing in really lifted high-end jeeps and trucks and things like that. So the kids get a chance to see them, drive in them with their bigs… and then they have a cookout.”
Wittstock said this event also gives Van Horn the opportunity to market their community philanthropy and drive customers to the Memorial Day event.
“There’s a lot of creative ways (to support nonprofits),” she said. “There’s a lot of human power that it takes to run our business in addition to the financial support, and we really couldn’t do so much of what we do without our partners.”
The importance of youth mentorship
Recently, Wittstock said BBBS of America released a report highlighting the importance of youth mentorship.
“We’ve been working on (the report) for many years, but (the) research is underscoring the societal impacts that mentoring has, and how it’s affecting the talent pipeline, how it’s affecting economic improvements for young people earning potential, and looked at mentored versus non-mentored young people,” she said. “The research is showing that the type of mentoring that we do can close two-thirds of the socioeconomic gap for young people.”
Wittstock said this research helps prove that BBBS organizations are more than simply a for-show nonprofit.
“Historically, some have thought of Big Brothers Big Sisters as, ‘oh, we find a great person and a great kid, and we give them a lollipop and send them off to walk under a rainbow,’” she said. “I’m being facetious, of course, but (mentorship can) really be transformational, and the societal impacts are now being recognized and quantified. Which I think isn’t a surprise to us who work in the business, but it will be a surprise to a lot of folks, particularly in the corporate world, who didn’t quite know or didn’t quite have enough information to make that leap.”
Uplifting the youth in the community, Wittstock said, is a worthwhile initiative that benefits all, not just the children or the families, or even the volunteers, and that it involves collaboration and partnership with companies across the economic landscape.
“We really are interested in hearing what they want to do and how they want to make a difference to then see where that alignment (with BBBS) lies and see what we can build from there,” she said.
For companies interested in partnering with BBBS WI Shoreline, Wittstock said the best thing to do is give them a call.
“I’d love to have a conversation (because), again, it really starts with us wanting to hear what they’re trying to achieve,” she said. “(We want to) have a conversation, find out what they’re trying to achieve and then talk about many of the different things that are going on that they could potentially get involved in.”
