The 26-member team serving Christine Ann Domestic Abuse Services Inc., now includes 17 UWO alumni. They transitioned the agency to a new shelter and agency headquarters on Algoma Boulevard in 2024.

Name the community challenge: addiction, abuse, food insecurity, housing instability, neighborhood cohesion…

In Oshkosh, often not too far from the physical borders of the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh campus, Titans are helping agencies in the community confront them. And, in several cases, UWO graduates are leading these organizations, teams and missions.

A quick scan of the UWO neighboring nonprofit landscape with agency ribbon cuttings and expansions, reveals an array of organizations brimming with, if not led by, Titans alumni. Key agencies comprising the community’s and region’s “safety net”—a web of nonprofits founded and supported to help individuals and families struggling with food insecurity, homelessness, domestic violence, addiction and other challenges—rely on Titans talent.

“A good majority of the folks that work at Christine Ann Domestic Abuse Services were not originally from the Oshkosh area but were drawn to the city for college at UW-Oshkosh,” said Alicia Wenger, ’16, Executive Director of Christine Ann Domestic Abuse Services, Inc. (CADASI) and a UWO Human Services Leadership alumna.

Christine Ann now boasts 17 UWO alumni in a 26-member team, a whopping 65 percent of its workforce.

The Oshkosh nonprofit centered several blocks from UWO and serving Winnebago and Green Lake counties moved into an expanded homebase in 2024, now operating a 64-bed emergency shelter for individuals and families fleeing abuse while continuing to provide a 24-hour help line and outreach services for teens/children and community education. CADASI’s shelter provided nearly 8,000 safe nights to more than 130 clients in 2023 while fielding more than 1,000 hotline calls.

“With each year passing of undergrad, Oshkosh slowly began to feel like home, and a lot of folks decided to plant roots after graduation,” Wenger said. “They ended up at CADASI somewhere along their journey, whether that was through a college internship at CADASI which turned into a position, volunteered while they were going to school, or they worked part time as a crisis advocate supporting survivors throughout their college career. Whichever avenue landed them at CADASI’s door, a lot of those point back to UW-Oshkosh, and I am very grateful.”

Planting seeds of social assistance careers

From the class of 2022-23 alone, 48 UWO graduates signaled career launch in “social assistance,” according to the university’s “First Destination” survey of new alumni. Of those graduates, nearly 90 percent indicated UWO “prepared me for the next step.”

Human Services Leadership alone has produced nearly 330 graduates over the last five years, according to the new alumni reports. UWO Director of Career & Professional Development Jaime Page-Stadler said Social Work and Psychology graduates, too, commonly enter social assistance careers throughout the region and beyond. But an expanding array of degrees are proving valuable to nonprofits and their missions.

“Titans and the multifaceted knowledge, talent and leadership they provide are clearly a big part of the nonprofit ecosystem in the region,” Page-Stadler said. “And it’s not solely social-assistance-centered degree holders the many organizations draw from. They also need finance, human resources, marketing and other expertise. UWO and its many academic programs have long histories of developing relationships with nonprofits and helping develop the team members and leaders that continue to drive organizations vital to delivering some of the most fundamental services throughout the Fox Valley and beyond.”

In many cases, nonprofit internships that naturally draw upon the preparation within UWO majors transform into career-launch opportunities for students serving in the agencies. By graduation, talent developed becomes talent retained in both the organization and the community. That’s a factor in UWO’s strong hired-before-graduation rate, which, over the last few classes, has topped 81 percent.

Wenger is just one example of local organization’s team members ascending as leaders of the many flourishing, modernizing nonprofits.

• Under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer Tracy Ogden, ’01, the organization successfully opened an $18.5 million expansion and renovation of the Boys and Girls Club of Oshkosh (BGCO). Seven of BGCO’s 22 full time staff members are Titans, and 70 of the organization’s 100 part time staff are current UWO students, Ogden said. “We are eternally grateful to have UWO in our backyard,” Ogden said. “We would not be able to operate all of our sites and serve as many kids as we do without them.” 
• In December, Oshkosh Healthy Neighborhoods announced the hiring of Elizabeth Last, ’05, to lead the nonprofit, founded in 2016 “focus on building, enhancing and sustaining healthy neighborhoods in the greater Oshkosh area.” That small but mighty nonprofit’s crew is now entirely comprised of Titans.

Titans leadership, staff support driving Warming Shelter

Oshkosh-based Day by Day Shelter Inc. has been in operation since 2011 and, in 2023, moved into new, modern facility offering 50 beds for clients experiencing homelessness and in need of temporary shelter.

Day by Day Executive Director Molly Yatso Butz, ’99, is among the five of 24 employees on the nonprofit’s team with UWO degrees, three serving on the agency’s administrative team. Their knowledge and expertise draws from a spectrum of UWO programs, from Exercise Science/Fitness Management to Journalism, Graphic Design, Human Services Leadership and Spanish.

“Having students from UWO interested in working and volunteering at the Shelter is extremely beneficial to our organization,” Yatso Butz said.

“We appreciate (UWO students’) enthusiasm for giving back and for many times stepping outside of their comfort zone to work in an environment that is new to them. I believe it is just as impactful for the student as it is for Day by Day Shelter.”

Leading a growing Solutions Recovery

Megan Edwards, ’18 and ’21, never imagined herself as a nonprofit executive. But as the nonprofit she volunteered and worked at since 2018—Solutions Recovery Inc.—weathered growth and change over the last year, an opportunity to lead emerged. The double-alumna began her tenure as the addiction and recovery services agency’s executive director in October 2024.

“When I think about my college duration, undergrad was basic and general, but I learned about critical thinking skills, organizational skills, deadlines, professionalism,” Edwards said. “For my Master of Social Work program, I learned more detailed content about systems-change and mezzo-and-macro-level social work. In my role, I’m able to work between systems, and my social work background from UWO has prepared me for this and is so beneficial for my role.”

Edwards started her own recovery a decade ago as a patron at Solutions. The “peer-led” organization draws from its volunteers’ and staff members’ lived experiences in service to others.  A volunteer-driven agency just six years ago, the nonprofit’s services and reach have since flourished. Solutions Recovery has grown from offering four sober living beds to 80, most recently acquiring the former Christine Ann Center shelter as a transitional housing resource, Edwards said.

She now leads an agency continuing to innovate, managing a rapid response program able to deploy recovery coaches to substance use crises “anywhere (in Winnebago County) within 30 minutes or less.” The agency has also created a successful collaboration with the Winnebago County Jail, trailblazing programs that offer recovery coaching and meeting with inmates, serving more than 400 inmates in their first year, she said. The jail now integrates “recovery pods” to better support its population overcoming addiction.

“We are absolutely on the map where we kind of weren’t before,” Edwards said.

Food pantry draws from graduates, gen-eds and academic expertise

The Oshkosh Area Community Pantry employs a team of Titans, too, and it’s equally reliant on a steady supply of second-year UWO students who log service-learning hours with the nonprofit in fulfillment of their required general education “Quest III” community experience.

“Being able to get some UWO students, and quite frankly those students who have participated through internships or Quest with us–we consider that a great victory,” said Ryan Rasmussen, Oshkosh Area Community Pantry executive director.

The pantry’s five-person staff includes two Titans, Elizabeth Ahnert, ’19, the nonprofit’s program manager, who graduated with a degree in Political Science, and Izzy Thomann ’23, its operations manager, who graduated from UWO with a bachelor’s degree in Human Services and a certificate in coaching.

Not lost is the fact four of the nonprofit’s 12 board members are also UWO graduates.

“Having Elizabeth coming directly from UWO—she was part of the Quest program—we loved it,” Rasmussen said. “Izzy was also an intern and signed on full time. It’s huge. That piece of it alone is great. The Quest program is invaluable to us. I wish I could put a dollar amount to it.”

Rasmussen said the pantry has also developed partnerships with the UWO student-led, student-serving on-campus pantry called The Cabinet. And the nonprofit has also leaned on UWO Political Science and Finance programs, “having the students come over, take a tour, learn about us, take a look at our financials and do some analysis.”

“For them it was some great line of sight on how nonprofits work but also identifying whether a nonprofit is stable, growing, doing well or not,” he said. “Having that in our backyard is phenomenal.”

The value of UWO as both a talent generator and a nonprofit resource isn’t lost on Julie Keller, ’92, who previously served as executive director of CADASI and, for the last six years, has led the Women’s Fund for the Fox Valley Region, Inc.

“I think even in my other roles, you find people who went to UWO have great skills,” said Keller, who earned a finance degree from UWO. “They wanted to have an impact on our community and gravitated to those types of (nonprofit) roles. That was a big surprise for me personally, finding I could take a finance degree and work in a nonprofit. Hopefully more Titans are realizing that no matter what degrees you have, they can parlay into the nonprofit sector very easily.”

With 20 years in socially centered nonprofit leadership throughout the Fox Valley, Keller said rich opportunities make career launch easy for students, “from the environment to human services.” And those same students are vital to agencies consistently in need of volunteers, interns and solutions.

“I don’t know if people realize how key it is to have a university in the region for nonprofits,” she said. “They have resources for you. They have people who can facilitate strategic planning and students who can undertake projects. They have marketing groups to help you. That’s another key people don’t realize that we have here. A lot of communities can’t say that. We can… It’s a win-win.”

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