History

I was born and raised in western Kentucky. I joined the United Methodist Church and attended public schools in Kentucky. When my parents moved to Florida, I enrolled in The Webb School, a private boarding school to complete my high school education. Beginning in high school, I worked each summer to raise money for school. I attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut where I received a Bachelors of Arts in Mathematics. I completed my college degree in 3.5 years because I had to suspend my education one semester and go to work because we didn’t have enough money for tuition.

After graduation, I worked for a short period of time for the Cable News Network (CNN) in Atlanta. I began my career at Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in Dallas, TX in 1982. While at EDS I worked with the financial industry to leverage information technology to meet their business objectives and better serve their customers. I worked in Dallas, Columbus Ohio, and Uniondale New York for EDS. After spending fifteen years and achieving my career goals at EDS, I left to return to my high school as a volunteer to help with technology. I spent seven years there consulting with technology, teaching in the classroom, designing their webpage and administrative databases. I left Webb because I felt a call into the ministry. I earned a Masters of Divinity degree from Emory University in Atlanta, and became a minister within the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church. In 2009, I felt God leading me to take a leave of absence from the ministry in order to move to Oconee County to help out my parents. Less than a week after I arrived, I lost my mother. Since that time, I have been helping out my father. 

My leave of absence put me in a precarious situation with healthcare. Thanks to a federal law, I was able to buy my own health insurance through my employer, but I would lose that after 18 months. In 2007, I got cancer, and this means that no private insurance company would sell me health insurance. President Obama's healthcare reform fixed that problem. Today I have health insurance through a program started by that law. My dismay at the way the Republican Party fought against this law inspired me to get involved politically for the first time in my life. I volunteered for the Holleman for Education campaign in 2010, and I was a Summer Organizer for the Obama campaign last year.