~story and photo by Paige Langenderfer
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addison Miller says her position as Brown County Community Foundation chief executive officer is the dream job she did not see coming. “I was happily employed at an incredible company when one of my friends sent me the job description,” Miller said. “As soon as I read it, I realized that it really was my dream job.” The road that led Miller to Brown County was long and winding. Miller’s dad was in the Air Force, which meant numerous moves and a lot of changes in her childhood. When she was in third grade her family settled in Lafayette, where her father’s family was from. It was there that she developed her life’s first true passion—classical music. “My grandfather played violin in the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra for 50 years,” Miller said. “He encouraged me to try the violin. I fell in love with classical music and played the violin through college.” She loved it so much that she started her freshman year at Ball State University as a music education major. “It was an intense program. I was overloaded and ultimately decided that I didn’t think I would make a very good music teacher,” she said. “My minor was in political science, so I switched my major to that and never looked back.” Reminiscing, Miller said she is not surprised that she ended up with a degree in political science. “I think I gained an interest by hearing my parents talk about politics,” she said. “In high school I started watching the news and educating myself on political issues.” Miller disagreed strongly with one political decision in particular. “At that time our country was gearing up for the war in Iraq. I thought that was a very unwise decision,” Miller said. “I wasn’t able to vote, but I knew that what I said mattered because I was the future of this country.”
32 Our Brown County • March/April 2020
To voice her opinions she wrote letters to her congressmen and carried posters protesting the war through her high school hallways. Protesting the war was just one of her political experiences. After learning about Muslim culture and Islamic backlash from a guest speaker in her high school foreign language class, Miller decided to conduct an experiment. She and a friend dressed in Muslim attire and went to the mall for a day. “We wanted to live a day in the life of a Muslim living in Lafayette, Indiana,” Miller said. “It was the most horrendous experience of my life. People were calling us names and refusing to serve us. Living a day in the life of someone else opened my eyes to the bigotry and hatred people experience on a daily basis. That experience was one of the reasons I ended up going into politics. It is why I wanted to learn how to make changes in government.” In 2008, as a sophomore in college, Miller began her first internship as a Majority Caucus Intern for the Indiana State Senate. “I had no idea how many people used the state legislature for (social services) help,” Miller said. “The people that work in
