Get to know: Natalie Bomstad
Executive director, Wello
A trip to Nicaragua doing community-based public health work significantly changed Natalie Bomstad’s career, which she had previously envisioned being in dentistry.
“It was then I got a broader sense of what public health meant and what you could do with a public health degree,” Bomstad says. “I really pivoted at that moment, shifting from a direct service model like in clinical care to one more focused on community-based population health.”
Bomstad earned a master’s in public health administration and policy from the University of Minnesota in 2014 before relocating to Green Bay, her husband’s hometown. She joined Wello, a nonprofit working to build collective well-being across Greater Green Bay, in 2015 as its director of operations and assumed the executive director role in 2017.
Taking an equity-based approach to driving high levels of community well-being is a heavy lift, admits Bomstad, so partnerships are key.
“In order to do the big thing, you have to do the small things well,” Bomstad says. “As we work on the smaller things, we develop proofs of concept that allow other people to be a part of it and it builds a movement that allows those bigger things to happen.”
The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Council of Trustees recently presented its Community Service Award to Bomstad for her efforts to establish Brown County’s first measures of subjective resident well-being — one of the incremental parts to achieving Wello’s ambitious mission.
The biannual survey measures well-being by collecting community input on topics such as food insecurity, education, economic opportunity, belonging and inclusion. In 2021, the National League of Cities identified Green Bay as one of only six communities nationwide collecting and measuring this kind of data.
“Because we started measuring community well-being, people have started talking about it more. It’s a dynamic and flexible tool that allows you to have conversations across the community, across sectors, in ways you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.”
Wello’s 2023 Community Health and Well-Being survey results, released in April, are available at wello.org.
— Amelia Compton Wolff
Robot assist
At ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Neenah, nurses and other care team members can now call on a fleet of robots named Moxi to help with non-patient-care tasks such as fetching supplies, delivering lab samples and picking up medicines from the pharmacy. Automating these tasks allows care teams to spend more time with patients. ThedaCare Regional Medical Center-Neenah is the first hospital in Wisconsin to deploy Moxi robotic solutions to support care teams, which can spend up to 30% of their time fetching and gathering supplies. “In just the first couple of weeks since Moxi was introduced to the staff, we are already seeing the impact it is making on our team’s efficiency,” said Grace Gonzalez, vice president of nursing for the ThedaCare South Region.
Golf giveback
Three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year, 2017 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year and philanthropist JJ Watt will headline the 2024 U.S. Venture Open Aug. 14. The fundraiser is the nation’s largest one-day charity event dedicated to ending poverty, with $65 million raised and $56 million granted to nonprofits through the Basic Needs Giving Partnership. “The work being done to drive change and impact poverty in Northeast Wisconsin is close to my heart and I’m grateful to come back to Wisconsin and personally have a direct impact to my home state,” said Watt, a Pewaukee native who was drafted in 2011 by the Houston Texans out of the University of Wisconsin. For more information, visit usventureopen.com.
Sweet success
Leave it to an 11-year-old to create a booming candy business. Truman McNitt was inspired to launch Sugar Twist Trinkets after his mother, who owns Olivü in downtown Sheboygan, brought home a cotton candy machine. McNitt currently sells a variety of cotton candy, freeze-dried candy and small toys online, at his mother’s store and at events. In March, McNitt was the youngest finalist in the statewide Junior Achievement Young Entrepreneur Competition, where student entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to a panel of local celebrity judges.
