If you are interested in the Inspired Leadership Initiative (ILI), now is the time to apply. We are in the stages of the final admission for the Class of 2020-21 and encourage you to express your interest before the end of May. Further, if you know someone who would be an excellent candidate, please be in touch with them or with us, and we will be sure to reach out. 

Please visit our admissions page to apply online, or call 574-631-8070 for more information.

As Karen Cunningham approached Haggar Hall, Archie was telling her how excited he was to be visiting the AnBryce Scholars. He had a spring in his step. He was whimpering. And, he was wagging his tail.

Yes, Archie is Cunningham’s Goldendoodle. A giant and playful ball of fluff, he is also a trained therapy dog.

“I love that I can share that unconditional love and happiness,” says Cunningham, “It just gives me joy watching people react when Archie comes into the room! You can see their demeanors change instantly when he is around. They relax; they smile; their voices change when they start talking to him."

The duo completed the Paws & Think program in Indianapolis in 2018, and Cunningham joined the organization’s board of directors.

At that time, the Inspired Leadership Initiative (ILI) hadn’t yet been established, but Cunningham’s participation in the ILI and her relationship with AnBryce were both destined to be. When Cunningham came to Notre Dame last fall, she was matched with Dr. Maria McKenna. Among McKenna’s many appointments at the University, the associate professor of the practice for the Department of Africana Studies and the Education, Schooling, & Society Program is also co-director of the AnBryce Scholars Initiative. 

“Working with Karen over the past year has been a delight,” says McKenna. “Hearing about her professional experiences was great, but it was when she talked about her philanthropic work and her hopes for the future that she really lit up. When we arranged for her to bring Archie to the AnBryce Scholars Lounge to love on and support students I was thrilled.”

AnBryce Scholars are exceptional students who are the first in their family to attend college. The initiative aims to “identify and support future leaders who will be committed to making a difference in the complex and often fractured world in which we live.” Currently, it comprises 32 students. And Cunningham was glad to have the opportunity to be with them.

“I really, truly believe in the cause,” she says. “It feels like a wonderfully supportive program, and it’s a nice outlet for dog therapy. Archie just has this huge grin when he is with the kids.”

And the kids were grateful for the visits. There aren’t many opportunities to see or pet dogs on campus, or to interact with adults who aren’t professors.

“Archie and Karen were a welcome addition to our Friday community as students popped in and out to say hello, and her caring and casual nature with the students was a joy to watch,” says McKenna. “Just yesterday one of our students, Helton, asked me if I knew how Archie was doing.”

He definitely still has a spring in his step, but there’s no doubt he is missing his AnBryce pals.

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The AnBryce Scholars and the ILI Fellows got together last fall—when getting together was still something people did. The groups shared a meal and lively conversation. 

“Hearing about their journeys and sharing our journeys, hopefully giving them a little bit of useful insight or advice—it was really wonderful. I think everyone had a good time,” says Cunningham. “It was a great example of the intergenerational give and take we have with the ILI. The scholars are impressive! They are taking hard courses, majoring in pre-med, engineering—just a wide variety of interests. They seem to be such hard workers, and they’re all extremely polite and kind. I think any of the fellows would tell you the dinner we had was a terrific experience and just a whole lot of fun.”  -Karen Cunningham  

During his years at Notre Dame in the late 60s, Bill Miller was kicked out of the ROTC program.

Ironically, my heart was too big—physically,” he recalls with a chuckle.

While that certainly is true, Miller has a pretty big heart metaphorically speaking as well. He has spent a lifetime dedicated to his family, hard work, social justice, and his Catholic faith—and he is just getting started.

A lifelong Midwesterner, Miller was the last born to a farming couple in rural Western Minnesota. 

“They were farmers, but the real term is entrepreneur. They had a lot of risk, stuff they couldn’t control,” he says. “Along with cash grains like oats, corn, and soybeans, my father raised a lot of cattle. He would take the train out to Montana, and he would buy yearlings and ship them back to Minnesota. You could hear the train come in—it was exciting. There were all the cattle cars, and then he would truck them to the farm.” 

As Miller approached high school, his parents approached retirement. While they wintered in warmer climates, Miller attended a Benedictine high school. One of his coaches was a Notre Dame grad, and so was one of his brothers-in-law, who kindly took him to his first Fighting Irish football game. When he was ultimately accepted to the University, there were other enticing offers, but the decision was essentially already made.

“Along with my mom liking the Catholic nature of it, that pretty much sealed the deal,” he says, “I also loved it, by the way.” A deep fondness that has remained. “I am a rah-rah. I drank the Kool-Aid so many years ago. If there are blemishes I have to look hard to find them.”

While Miller had a typical college experience in many ways, it was also shaped by the times. He remembers the ramp-up of the Vietnam War amidst the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. 

“In the years that I was there, the world changed and Notre Dame changed with it,” he says. “ND has always impressed me with values and being able to explore things, talk about things, and so it was probably more conducive to dialogue than a lot of other places.”

Miller joined the Irish Guard and focused on his studies. He majored in economics, because he was curious about the field and found it interesting. He also wanted a liberal arts education.

“Then when I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, I gravitated toward accounting, just because I was good at it, and it seemed to make sense,” he says. “Although good accounting is not necessarily good economics. They operate in different worlds, but one does kind of inform the other. At least I found that to be true in my life.”

During graduate school, Miller married Ann Irlbeck, and the couple had the first of their four children (who in time, would give them 11 grandchildren). After graduation, he joined Arthur Andersen & Co. After learning the ropes of auditing, he wanted to move to the other side of the dialogue.

“So I went to Oscar Mayer, and they make hot dogs and other meat products. If your bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R,” he confirms. “Arthur Andersen was a very ethical firm which was great, and Oscar Mayer was the same. It was essentially a consumer products firm but with a meatpacking orientation and background.”

His curiosity and competence would continue to fuel a robust career, diverse but grounded in accounting and financial management, which he found to be a very useful discipline. After Oscar Mayer, Miller moved on to General Foods and then to Cargill, joining their beef and pork packing subsidiary.

While he was certainly busy with career and family, Miller’s big heart had so much more to give. And being in the food industry, it often led him to serve on governing boards for food banks in the cities where he lived, such as Second Harvest Heartland in St. Paul, Minn., and Feeding America in Wichita, Kans.

“It was a natural connection between the business I was in, but also just a core belief that unless you have food security, it’s really hard to work on any other issue in your life—hard to get your GED, combat chemical dependency. If you can't solve the food thing, there is no energy left for the rest of it,” he says.

Through his parish in Minneapolis, he also became involved with HopeMakers, which helps people learn life skills and find jobs. It was a nine-week course, but Miller couldn’t stand asking people to wait for the course to reboot, so he co-founded Pathways to fill in the gaps. Every Thursday night, folks could come in for a meal and a talk about life skills, such as budgeting, spirituality, self-worth, change, and self-control.

“Some people came in right off the street, the rest of us from jobs or whatever. The meal would bring all of us together,” he says, “And for the people we served, the meal itself was important.”

This service work was fulfilling for Miller, and for the most part, so was his financial work. But after decades in the same industry, he sought new professional challenges: he began doing private CPA-work, established a details-oriented organization and moving business, and even became a spin instructor. 

It was with this mindset, Miller attended his 50-Year Reunion last summer. Amongst the celebrations and seminars, he found himself in a session on the Inspired Leadership Initiative (ILI). Within weeks he had applied and was accepted into the program.

“I had gotten to the point where I knew I didn’t want to do more of the same, but I didn't know next. And if you don’t know next, then the default is more of the same,” he says.

The numbers part of Miller’s brain was pointing out the risks of the program, and the cost, but ultimately the rah-rah part won out.  

“I love the place, the values, the whole ballgame,” he says, “When my kids were toddlers, I would be watching the game on Saturdays, and they would be sleeping on my chest. So I figured there was no downside, at the least I would have a hell of a good time. But also the possibility of really figuring some things out.”

And his alma mater did not disappoint. Miller went to all the football games and attended lectures and shows and cursed the course catalog for having too many amazing options. And then something else happened that he didn’t expect.

“It occurred to me on fall break,” he explains. “It was wonderful to be home, but I missed 14 people I had not known a month and a half before, and that seemed kind of neat.”

Miller says the friendships he has made with the people in his cohort were a surprise gift, and it is with some of these people that he plans to continue his service work. They hope to take on a brutal and complicated class project: the fight against human trafficking.

He has many other ideas for service work and professional work in the years to come, and he has some new tools to use as well. When Miller was initially choosing classes, he started listing those that interested him on a vast spreadsheet (of course he did). But he was very disciplined in the final selections. 

“I had really never written anything,” he says, “The only thing I had ever written outside of a few papers in college, none of which were memorable, were business memos, and then letters, and then it morphed into emails. Nothing more boring than that,” he says, poking fun at himself.

So he took courses in creative writing and journalism to hone his skills. 

“Not because I ever thought of being a reporter or in a newsroom, what I wanted was to learn the discipline of gathering facts, and then understanding what facts were salient, and then being able to communicate those facts ethically,” he says. “And I wanted to challenge the creative side of me. Fiction was never a positive attribute in financial reporting.”

Going back to the classroom and taking pen to paper for the first time in 50 years wasn’t always easy. But it was a journey well worth taking for Miller. And as he’s shown throughout his life, he had the heart to see it through.