Alumni Profile

Carrie Miluski

Carrie Miluski attended The School in Rose Valley until 1984. She went on to public schools in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District and graduated from Bates College in 1997 with a degree in Women's Studies.

At the age of three, I started school at SRV, proudly strutting my stuff in (only) Wonder Woman Underoos. I was blessed to have my mother as a music and art teacher, and to be surrounded by a tender and also bold family of teachers and staff. At 27, when I'm feeling boring, I recall the words my kindergarten teacher Chris sent home in a note to mom, "…it isn't easy, but God is it fun." I left Rose Valley after the 3rd Grade, and made the difficult transition to public school, where I struggled, and still struggle to hold in my heart what I consider the jewel of a Rose Valley education...the freedom to be adventurous and different while still building relationships and community.

Drawn by the intimacy balanced with freedom to design your own education, I chose Bates College, a small liberal arts school in southern Maine where I was joined by fellow SRV alumnae, Rosie Zaklad, and Meghan Cherner-Rahft. My junior year, I had the opportunity to go on a bold adventure and expand my community, by studying abroad in rural Kenya. I hope that while in Kenya, I challenged my own limits and gained some new understanding about difference, but also the thread of humanness that connects us all. I graduated from Bates in 1997 with a degree in Women's Studies, an interdisciplinary major examining the relationship of gender to various fields of study.

Shortly after graduation, I was fortunate to find a position with a local non-profit organization, The Center Foundation, in Media. At the Foundation, I am the Program Director of WomenCare mentoring. WomenCare is a free program that helps women who are going through difficult transitions reach their personal goals with the support of volunteer mentors. Through this communitybased program we seek to assist women through financial difficulties, career changes, returning to school, divorce or separation, developing better parenting skills, moving from welfare to work, and many other challenges. We do this by partnering them with female mentors who provide encouragement, moral support, and guidance, and also by providing them with a community of women who all are facing similar challenges. In this work I've had the wonderful opportunity to watch women achieve goals they didn't think they could, with the courage they gain though the support of other women.

Since about 1998, I've also been a volunteer for Women Organized Against Rape in Philadelphia, where I volunteer in the emergency room and staff a hotline devoted to providing crisis support to survivors of rape and sexual assault. Also, I was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Fair Housing Council of Suburban Philadelphia, which is a fair housing organization that advocates and works for freedom of residence in Delaware, Bucks, Montgomery, and Chester Counties.

Seventeen years after leaving SRV, I still consider myself a part of the family. I love to find old friends and classmates, like Keri Schregal, who's beautiful hand blown glass I'm proud to display in my apartment, and Rob Williams who I recently recognized performing his own music in a pub in Philadelphia.

This love of community has brought me so much, and taken me to so many wonderful places I'm not sure I would have ever gone. I'm still young and still getting to know myself. It's a joy to discover that the care I was given at SRV has planted some seeds I haven't even watered yet.

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