Carter Peterson McMillan Foundation
We Are United in Our Dedication to Supporting Students
Who We Are
Our Story
The Carter Peterson McMillan Foundation has been established to continue a family legacy that started a century ago in the hearts of my grandparents Bessie Dobbins and Espie Carter.
Both born in 1897, Bessie and Espie struggled to complete their educational goals. While attending Oakwood Junior College in Huntsville, Alabama, they met, and later married.
While pursuing their own degrees, the Carters housed students who couldn’t afford room and board fees as well as their tuition. When their own education was complete, they moved to Ohio and started a nursing home business to care for the elderly in their community and generate an income to continue to help students. This venture also provided a summer work program for students to become vested in their own education.
I am Stephanie McMillan, Founder of the Carter Peterson McMillan Foundation, and granddaughter of Bessie and Espie Carter and Alberta and Jacob Peterson. I established the CPM Foundation to continue my family’s legacy of assisting students, financially as well as encouraging them.
My mother, Wanda Carter, continued the tradition until the nursing home business closed in 1991. Since the closing, with my husband Edroy, who also comes from a family valuing higher learning, we’ve continued helping students in need as well as supporting different scholarship funds. In 2017, I created McStitch by Stephanie to sell my hand knitwear to contribute to this cause.
We now have the CPM Foundation to continue the legacy in a formal fashion, and it is our hope, to serve a broader spectrum of students as my grandparents did. With the astronomical cost of education these days, not having a business to support this family tradition, we need your help. Any donation, large or small, will make a difference in the life of a student fulfilling the dream of an education!
If you would like to read a more in depth biography of Bessie Carter, please click here.
