2024 Alumni Awards

Robin Subar

Courtesy of Victor Barnett

Ross Freedman ’97 Cofounder, Origin UW Major: Information Systems

Victor Barnett ’82 Founder and CEO, Running Rebels UW Major: Communication Arts

Ross Freedman’s entrepreneurial journey started move-in weekend his freshman year at the UW, where he met his friend and long time business partner Brad Schneider ’97 in the elevator of their dorm. After graduation, Freedman began his career as a software developer for Fortune 500 companies, but it didn’t take long for him to feel the entrepreneurial pull to launch his own tech related company. In 2000, he and Schneider founded Wired Matrix, a systems integration company which merged into West Monroe, a prominent Chicago-based consultancy in 2002. Five years later, Freedman and Schneider again partnered to create Rightpoint, a consulting firm that helped clients accelerate digital transformation. Rightpoint experienced explosive growth, expanding into an inter- national firm with 12 offices and more than 800 employees before its sale to Genpact in 2019. The sale offered Freedman some time to consider his next challenge. He joined the UW’s Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship’s WAVE Advisory Board. And he became a mentor for the university’s Creative Destruction Lab, a business accelerator program. In 2023, Freedman was named CDL’s Mentor of the Year. He also created a new UW business community called Badgers in Tech to help students and alumni network across the tech industry. In 2024, Freedman cofounded Origin, a data-experience company shaping the future of analytics, AI, and automation. Origin’s goal is to augment human intelligence, rather than replace it, he says. “We will accelerate knowledge by providing the tools and infrastructure that people need to do more and to achieve more with AI.”

When he was in middle school in Milwaukee, many of Victor Barnett’s friends were incarcerated for various reasons. Barnett suspected that a large part of the problem was a lack of positive male mentors — the kind he’d known during his early childhood in rural Mississippi. “I always had older guys that influenced me, helped me steer away from trouble,” he says. As a teenager, Barnett became one of those mentors to a struggling neighborhood boy. Barnett started to regularly play basketball with him, and word spread to other boys who wanted to play. Even after Barnett began his freshman year at UW–Madison, he traveled back to Milwaukee most weekends to keep playing with the group, which eventually swelled to 100 boys. Barnett decided to form the organization Running Rebels to keep the group going. More than 40 years later, the nonprofit has become a staple resource for inner-city youth, with athletic and academic programs that serve more than 2,500 students in seven public schools, a staff of 130, and partnerships with the city court system that help keep at-risk teenagers out of juvenile detention. Barnett has won numerous accolades for his work with Milwaukee youth. But his greatest achievements, he says, are the life stories of the young men who find successful paths after participating in Running Rebels. Their alumni include NBA champion Kevon Looney, Grambling State University basketball coach Donte Jackson, and several prominent community leaders — yet Barnett says he is equally proud of the young men who have simply avoided incarceration and become healthy, dedicated parents.

UWALUMNI.COM/AWARDS

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