During the 2024 Milwaukee iOpener, Novus Home Mortgage and their 2nd Annual Sponsorship Alumni Impact Award, was awarded to Touly Vang by Dale Mittelstaedt, CTO. Dale was one of the ‘Founding Fathers’ who were instrumental in getting i.c.stars in Milwaukee. He is passionate about working with our organization and non-traditional talent as well as non-profit organizations, he has a real passion for food insecurity in food deserts and has the biggest heart. We couldn’t have been more excited to have Dale present this award to Touly Vang.
We are so proud of Touly and he is so deserving of the Alumni Impact Award. He has been an incredible community leader within i.c.stars and outside.
After i.c.stars, Touly spent 4 years working in various IT roles. He started at Von Briesen in an IT support role and shortly after that, he worked at Northwestern Mutual as a Support Engineer. He was able to work his way up to being a Software Engineer writing code, working with product, devOps, design and testing teams. During his time at Northwestern Mutual, he volunteered with the Asian Employee Resource Group and was able to coordinate lunch and learns between Northwestern Mutual and a local Hmong School (Hmong American Peace Academy). This was a monthly recurring event where he would bring in working professionals from Northwestern Mutual to lead workshops at Hmong American Peace Academy about career, networking, employment, education, IT, etc.
Later on he opened a restaurant where he supported local business entrepreneurs, artists and small business by opening his space as a platform to host events for these local entrepreneurs. He has partnered with Turkeys N da hood to feed local families during the holidays and started his own cash scholarship (Zongsae and Der Vang New Generation Scholarship) for high school students committed to higher education.
While doing all of this, Touly is an advocate for youth, with a focus on encouraging and empowering the pre-career pipelines. He reached out to the Middle-Level Forensics Association to bring on an afterschool Forensics program to Hmong American Peace Academy. This afterschool program allows students to attend speaking competitions at other schools, which brings visibility to HAPA and helps to foster students with public speaking skills. (a highly needed skill in the Hmong community) In the first year, he took the middle school team to state. Today, HAPA has middle and high school forensics where Touly coaches the High School team during the academic school year.
On top of all of this, he finds the time to volunteer with Rescue Gang MKE, a non-profit animal rescue center, to foster and rehome dogs. He continues to keep in touch with the foster parents to help ensure a smooth transition between the families and the pets. He often finds ways to help other fosters train their pets through social media.
Growing up Touly’s mom went to school full time while his dad supported their family of 7, so he saw first hand the value of supporting each other and hard work. His dad is now a well known community leader and his mom is a Multicultural Student Service Specialist at MATC.
He’s been married for 7 years, has a 3 legged doberman named Bruce Wayne and in his free time loves to play disc golf, go running, and fishing. Touly is always looking for new opportunities to help impact the people around him. He’s ambitious, inspiring, and conscientious. We are so happy to see Touly receive this award.
