Forsyth County woman shows girls bright future

FORSYTH COUNTY, N.C. (WGHP) — Lisa McMillan is letting girls know that no matter their circumstances, the future is bright.

She’s giving them the encouragement she was missing at their age to help them make better choices.

“I am transparent so people understand I am no different than you and what you think I got, you can get too, and let me show you how to get it,” she said.

McMillan cherishes connecting with people in their communities, and one in Greensboro is near and dear to her.

“What I had to think about is where I came from. I was put in foster care in Claremont Courts Housing Project,” she said.

McMillan is transparent about the challenges she faced in her youth.

She and her siblings were placed in foster care because of their mother’s alcohol use disorder.

McMillan dropped out of high school while homeless at 17 and became pregnant two years later.

“When I was 19 years old, I purposefully got pregnant because I didn’t feel loved, and I was like, ‘Man, I want to have a human being that loved me,’” she said.

“Yes, my partner at the time was aware, so it wasn’t like a trickery-type situation, but I was not aware of what I was getting myself into,” she said.

At times, the circumstances were overwhelming.

“Poverty is not even a word for what I was,” McMillan said.

Eventually, McMillan would experience a turnaround.

She went back to school in her 30s.

“Something happened that disrupted my career opportunities, and I said … ‘They don’t value me because I just have this GED, so [I’m going to go] and prove to them that I’m worth earning this money,’ so I started A&T, and my God, people don’t understand why I bleed blue and gold … It was the first time that I ever thought I was smart, and it was because people gave me the opportunity,” she said.

McMillan graduated from North Carolina A&T University with a degree in sociology when she was 39.

Unfortunately, some of her plans, like completing law school, were halted after she says she was in a serious crash in 2015.

“I have since become totally disabled from that accident,” she said. “I tried to connect with organizations to try to get me to a level of on the way back to where I was going. Unfortunately, I did not find one that could assist me based on what my trajectory was.”

Lisa is the founder and executive director of Turning Everything Around .

It’s a nonprofit that coaches people and connects them to resources that will improve their quality of life.

“I probably spent a year … trying to find all the places to get me where I actually wanted to go, so I was just putting all those resources into my coffers … Once I created and founded Turning Everything Around, I was better able to go out into community and find other people with similar situations or circumstances [who] just did not know where to go,” she said.

Turning Everything Around has a mentoring component that brings McMillan back to Claremont Courts.

“I got 47 Black women, and I mean some amazing women from a plethora of careers that are unlike anything I know I saw, so we had lawyers and judges and artists … and even religious officials and all types of women that came and volunteered their time to come and coach these girls,” she said. “The idea was to share with these young girls that you can be anything. You can do anything, and here’s the proof.”

McMillan is open about her life in the hope that it will help someone else move in the right direction.

“You may not think that I’m a divorced mom with five kids. You may not think I was in the foster system. You may not think my mother was an alcoholic that died when I was 16, and a whole lot of other traumas and dramas came, so it’s helpful because if you cannot see what it is you want to be or if you can’t see who it is you think you are … how can you aspire to that?” she said. “What matters in changing someone’s potential trajectory. Now they still get to make the choice, but it’s up to us to say, ‘I was there, too. I was there, too.'”

Turning Everything Around is preparing to host a golf tournament at Gillespie Golf Course on Sept. 21.

All proceeds will be used to provide scholarships to seniors at Eastern Guilford High School.

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