Meet Alice. She is a Milwaukee-based performance artist who you may—or may not:)—have noticed as a living statue in and around street festivals and other fun events not only across our City of Festivals but also around the world. Pandemic-related shutdowns cut off a major source of her income in 2020 and turned her livelihood upside-down, but Alice did not despair. Instead, she bootstrapped herself by using her newfound free time to do something outdoors that she enjoys, while also helping to clean our waterways and support her fellow out-of-work artists.

Alice started kayaking on Milwaukee’s rivers for enjoyment, but could not help but notice all the trash—much of it from single-use plastic, like water bottles, plastic bags, or other packaging. So Alice started picking it up. She then decided to use her platform to share her story. Alice asked the community to support her time and that of other underemployed Milwaukee artists. Beth Handle at Milwaukee Kayak Company liked what she saw Alice doing and offered to support her with discounted rentals (and later provided her own kayaks!). Alice’s story made the paper, other people started sharing their time and kayaks, and her GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign really started to take off. She started with a goal of raising $3,000, but the community responded so positively she upped her goal in order to help pay more out-of-work Milwaukee artists to help. In just two months, Alice raised over $7,500 from over a hundred people toward her $10,000 goal.

Alice Wilson channels her inner Rosie the Riveter at a Milwaukee street festival prior to the pandemic.

In addition to single-use plastic waste like bottles, bags, and straws, Alice and her companions have also recovered several discarded needles from the water.

Initially aiming for $3,000 to support her hours on the water for a few months, the amount of support swelled so that Alice was able to pay other unemployed artists to clean up our local waterways. As of September 2020, the campaign raised over $7,500 toward Alice’s $10,000 goal.

The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District saluted Alice’s initiative with this Fresh Coast Guardians shirt.

Alice’s story is a testament to the power of both a single individual and a united community to make a difference for our water. Her efforts also inspired a collaboration with Harbor District, Inc., the nonprofit organization responsible for community engagement, visioning, and major public access improvements to the area in recent years. Harbor District offered to share its kayaks for Alice’s effort in return for her donating some of the proceeds to their innovative Trash Wheel project. Supported by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant as part of the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the proposed Trash Wheel will be a special conveyor belt skimming the water attached to a dumpster a few miles upstream on the Kinnickinnic River. It will be deployed to snare the trash on the water’s surface before flows into Milwaukee’s Inner Harbor. (According to an EPA press release, it’s expected to capture 75 tons of trash annually—that’s waste from all of us whenever our trash gets into the watershed and then blows or washes into the river.)

For her part, Alice plans to keep getting out on the water once or twice a week until it gets too cold. Then she’ll continue the cleanups on land.