Saleaqua Winston joined WUWM as member services specialist in April 2024.
She spoke with WUWM’s president and general manager, David Lee, about the work she’ll be doing for WUWM and why she’s excited to join the team.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
David Lee: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role here at the station.
Saleaqua Winston: I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I graduated from Milwaukee High School of the Arts and then went to UW-Milwaukee for acting. I did a lot of acting around Wisconsin. I am currently a teaching artist for the Milwaukee Rep. and am currently in school for business.
Lee: I also went to an art school in San Francisco. ... I studied acting like you, and my acting teacher said, "If you want to succeed as an actor, don't have a backup plan." So, are you developing a backup plan?
Winston: I don't know if I want to call it a backup plan. I know that because I'm also into music; in high school, I used to do music and I used to do spoken word, and so I think my long-term goal is to one day just have like a production company and just producing movies and TV shows and just all that good stuff. It's going to take money, of course, to do that. And so I believe that being a membership specialist and learning things in terms of fundraising — all the tools that I'm learning now is going to help me ... into doing the things that I'll be doing independently.
Lee: So talk a little bit about being a membership specialist. What does that mean? Why should people care and why are you going to do a great job at it?
Winston: The membership specialist is going to consist of a lot of the back end in terms of fundraising and development, so I'll be doing a lot of sending out acknowledgment letters or renewal letters to people. Responding back to our members who may have questions and things like that, and I think a big part of it is also going to be managing our database.
I do know that we will be switching [our database] over within probably the next couple of months, so I am definitely excited for that because that's something that I went through at my previous job, and I am hoping that we will be migrating to a new system that will be able to help us do things better.
Lee: What's one thing that has surprised you so far since joining the station?
Winston : The thing that surprised me was how nice everyone was. ... I just wasn't expecting everybody to be so welcoming and so warm. Yeah, so that was a very big surprise. Like I remember I had a few people come to me and and just introduce themselves like, "Hey, I didn't get to go to the little doughnut meeting that they had for you, and I just wanted to say, 'Hi and introduce myself.'" I just thought that was so nice because for most jobs, you don't really get that kind of energy. And so to really receive that — [it] was very nice.
