Providing Opportunities for ERS Team Members
Deupree House resident Earl Mills believes a good education is one of the most important treasures people can gather during their lifetimes. His late wife, Jane, shared that belief, and the pair encouraged their children, grandchildren, and even neighbors to maximize their learning opportunities.
That’s one reason Earl felt compelled to generously support the Lauren Brown Empowerment Fund. This newly created fund is intended to empower historically disadvantaged BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) team members at Episcopal Retirement Services to gain the education they need to advance in their careers in elder care, with assistance to help overcome obstacles in their paths. The financial help can include unconventional help, such as transportation, childcare, and eliminating other barriers.
“We heard about the Lauren Brown Fund, and I thought, ‘Wow, that sheds a new light on scholarships — a very important one.’” Earl said. “Not only do you support the education part of it, but the ability to get the education, which really appealed to us. So that’s why we chose Lauren Brown.”
Earl and Jane both grew up in small towns — he in Riegelsville, Pa., where as a young man, he crossed the town’s Roebling suspension bridge across the Delaware River every day for his paper route — and she in Charters, Ky. Although both came from hard-working families, neither had the financial means to send them to college. So, he served in the Air Force from 1950-54 in Germany and used the GI Bill to earn two degrees, a bachelor’s in engineering from Penn State University and a master’s in business from Capital University in Columbus. The pair met in Columbus, where she studied at Ohio State University before stopping to raise their two daughters, Amy and Claudia.
“There’s just a good feeling of helping people,” he said. “My concern is mainly for the low-income population, which is significant. The most important step in their life is to get an education – as much as they can get, to carry them through that difficult part of their life.” “That way,” he added, “you can get a job you like, and do something you’re interested in, and be productive, be creative, be examples for your community.”
That has worked out for the Mills family, many of whom have followed in Earl’s engineering and philanthropic footsteps. Early in his career, he became interested in biomedical engineering. After a couple of jobs, he moved to Cincinnati where he developed the biomedical division of SENCO in Newtown, designing and producing skin staplers and internal-organ staplers. That later was purchased by Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary.
One daughter married an engineer, and three of four grandchildren are engineers, including a grandson now working at Ethicon Endo-Surgery, “where I used to work, in the same department,” he said with a broad smile.
ERS is grateful to Earl for supporting the ERS mission through his annual gift to the Good Samaritan Mission Fund, a major gift as well as a legacy gift from his estate to the Lauren Brown Empowerment Fund.
