Story by Dwain Hebda
Two of Chelsea Miller’s (’18) most telling traits growing up in North Carolina were her passion for service and her love for politics. As a youth, she participated in Girl Scouts, ultimately earning the organization’s pinnacle Gold Award as well as the CEO Award.
When she wasn’t stacking up badges, this eldest of four siblings was watching political dramas on television.
“Growing up, I was obsessed with the West Wing,” she said with a laugh. “I grew up obsessed with first ladies; when I went to college, my college admissions essay was saying how I was going to be the next Hillary Clinton.”
“My first job, where most people babysit or work at Subway, was answering phones for a U.S. congressman, Patrick McHenry, who retired as the financial services chair of the House of Representatives. He briefly served as the interim speaker of the house. I worked for him back in 2007 to 2009. It was a different era then, but it definitely shaped my worldview on what it meant to be of service to a constituency and all that it takes to make the government run.”
Miller’s hopes a U.S. post abroad ran aground in college when she flunked out of her freshman Arabic class (“Turned out I am terrible at foreign languages,” she said). Undeterred, she set her sights on other ways of making a difference upon graduating from college in 2012.
“I had a friend from undergrad who had graduated a year ahead of me, and he had done the Episcopal Service Corps,” she said. “I had applied for other roles and had no luck, so I decided to give it a shot and was accepted into the inaugural cohort of the Ark Fellows. And so, on Labor Day weekend, 2012, I moved to Fayetteville.”
“I’d been to Memphis maybe once, and had been out on the west coast, but hadn’t really spent any time in what I would now call America’s heartland. I was a part of the service corps for a year. We lived in communal housing, like Real World Arkansas. It was really something.”
After jobs with a local homeless shelter and then a sexual assault crisis center, Miller started to feel the weight of the work she was doing and began to consider going back to school. As one of her idols, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was campaigning for president in 2016, Miller thought a public service degree would be a good first step toward one day serving in the White House.
“I started at the Clinton School in August of 2016,” she said. “To be at the Clinton School when Hillary lost and all of that happened was surreal, but I learned a lot and I was super grateful to be there.”
Armed with her Clinton School degree, which included a stint in India for her international service project, Miller would dive back into politics by launching a political consultancy, Arkansas People First Consulting. Supporting twelve candidates in two states, she realized quickly that a long-term career in politics was not sustainable.
A connection made on the campaign trail gave her the opportunity work for Walmart, supporting their education benefit program. During her five years at the company, the education benefit expanded and eliminated their dollar a day cost for associates, resulting in a 66% increase in program enrollment year over year.
Her passion for public service was always present, encouraging the company to join the Section 127 coalition, supporting tax code reform to support employers who offer education benefit programs. In the most recent tax reconciliation bill, the first permanent changes were made since that part of the tax code went into effect.
Miller now serves as the associate director of UpSkill America at the Aspen Institute, where she works to improve talent development programs between the educational and private sector employers. In her first year, she produced a major body of research on small businesses’ approach to upskilling and re-did the Upskilling Playbook, a guide for employers looking to create talent development programs at their organization.
She considers the Clinton School an essential component of the work she does, adding that the bond among her classmates helped her gain perspective on what her public service degree would lead to.
“There was this sense of community,” she said of the experience. “The cohort size is small, so we all knew each other, and I found I made fast friends. I consider those relationships so precious because, once I started working in adult education, I realized the Clinton School is all just work-based learning experiences. How lucky I was to get to be learning alongside all these smart people who had all these different plans.”
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