Northeast Wisconsin: A Great Home for Heroes
For veterans and transitioning service members, the 18-county Northeast Wisconsin region is the perfect place to call home – and it’s easy to see why. Aside from being full of job opportunities, offering an affordable cost of living and brimming with entertainment and outdoor recreation options, former service members are met with the support and resources they need to plant roots and build a life they and their families will love.
Great Benefits for Veterans
Wisconsin leads the nation in the number of state benefits for veterans. That includes providing temporary housing, training and supportive services to veterans who meet specific requirements; remitting tuition and fees for eligible veterans and their dependents for up to eight semesters at any University of Wisconsin System or Wisconsin Technical College System school; and not taxing military retirement income, among other things.
New North, an economic development organization serving Northeast Wisconsin, actively engages with military and veteran families and provides connections to these resources and more through its New North Hires Heroes initiative. In 2024, it collaborated with Mission: Workforce Alliance, which connects transitioning service members with the Wisconsin business community, to launch a military hiring portal. This portal allows employers to recruit transitioning service members based on their specific skills.
Since 2020, New North has partnered with Mission Wisconsin, which provides military families with the resources needed to successfully settle in America’s Dairyland.
“We help transitioning service members and their families successfully connect to our partner companies through a referral network,” says Steve Janke, who is the founder of Mission Wisconsin and a former Marine. The leads captured by Mission Wisconsin are also added to the hiring portal.
Janke has helped more than 300 military families relocate to Wisconsin, with more than one-third of them settling in the New North region. When a service member indicates Wisconsin as an option, he reaches out and asks how he can help.
For Janke, the mission is personal. He remembers walking into a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office in 1996 with a friend and deciding to enlist on the spot. In 2000, he returned to Wisconsin to run the family business as a fifth-generation dairy farmer. He took on other roles focused on veterans services and saw a need for greater assistance for those transitioning to civilian life.
Forging a New Path
One example of a former service member who chose to build a new life in Northeast Wisconsin is retired 1st Sgt. Randall Copiskey. Born in Manitowoc, Copiskey enlisted in the Army as a reconnaissance specialist in 2000. He’d just graduated from high school in Sheboygan and hoped the military would give him direction.
He and his wife, Christie, a Kentucky native, met while he was stationed at Fort Knox. They married four months later. He was then reassigned to Fort Johnson (formerly Fort Polk) in Louisiana.
After time in Texas and Washington, two combat deployments, and missions in Germany and Korea, Copiskey finished his 21 years of service in Washington, D.C. Post service, he chose to take advantage of the entrepreneurial support in Northeast Wisconsin and opened a leatherworking business in Crivitz, Wisconsin, a community he and his family love.
“Everyone knows everyone, and it’s comforting that you know your neighbor,” Copiskey says.
