UOPX alumni spotlight: Shannon DeWitt

“I was born into a loving but troubled family,” DeWitt says. “We had a house, but not necessarily a home.”

Another way DeWitt explains her upbringing: “We were functioning in our dysfunction. Growing up was more of ‘survive’ than ‘thrive.’”

This often translated to DeWitt and her siblings going hungry or not having money to pay the electric bill. They were figuratively, and often literally, operating in the dark.

When DeWitt reached high school, her father retired from the military, and the family moved again, this time to her parents’ hometown of East Orange, New Jersey. But at home and even at school, there was no emphasis on education.

“They just wanted to get [us] out of high school,” DeWitt says of her high school’s leadership. “They didn’t have guidance counselors guiding [us] toward a secondary education. Coming up in an urban area, if they could just get a good portion of us graduated from high school, they felt accomplished.”

At 16, DeWitt started to see her family’s brokenness for what it was. She rebelled and left home. As a senior in high school, DeWitt moved into an abandoned warehouse with a group of friends.

“It was insane,” she remembers. “There were no lights in the place. We’re just hanging out like we [were] Peter Pan’s group.” She laughs at the absurdity of it. “We are like the Lost Children.”

Fortunately, DeWitt’s aunt, Doleta Brown, was always there for her. "She is my heart,” says DeWitt. “She has always pulled and pushed for me and understood the situation I was in and tried to help me as much as she could.”

Brown is a firm believer in not being the victim of circumstances.

DeWitt was a strong-minded teenager and didn’t initially accept her aunt’s housing assistance. Even so, she was paying attention when Brown went back to school at Rutgers University.

“It resonated with me that there was life beyond high school and that you could have a degree and things like that,” she says.

During summer months, DeWitt and one of her siblings lived with Brown, so she saw firsthand how her aunt juggled life’s responsibilities to achieve her goals. In Brown’s case, this included a job and raising children as a single mom.

DeWitt wasn’t quite ready to follow her aunt’s example, though. After she graduated from high school, she says, she “kind of floated here, there and everywhere.” She became pregnant with her first child, a daughter, when she was 21. Her second daughter followed shortly thereafter.

Around that time, Carlas DeWitt, her husband of now nearly 30 years, came into her life.

Carlas was instantly smitten when DeWitt’s cousin introduced the two during a game night. Carlas was visiting from the South, and paid attention to DeWitt’s every move. DeWitt says she prefers to “noodle over things” and wasn’t as quickly convinced that he was the one.

Later that evening, the group headed to the movies and DeWitt began feeling unwell. She was then five months pregnant and understandably worried. Only her cousin knew she was expecting, so they tried to quietly leave for the hospital. But Carlas would not be left behind. He followed and stayed by DeWitt’s side through the night.

By morning, DeWitt had stabilized. Everyone but Carlas had gone home. “It was the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in my life,” DeWitt says of waking up to Carlas sitting by her bedside. That, she says, was the moment she fell in love with him.

Her previous relationships and tendency to ponder caused DeWitt to wait three years before agreeing to marry Carlas. That same year, the couple welcomed DeWitt’s third daughter. 

At that point in her life, DeWitt was building the stability she had always craved. “We decided intentionally that we were not going to live for pain, but for purpose,” she says. “We were very intentional about how we raised our girls and how we treated each other.”

Over time, the DeWitts moved from New Jersey to North Carolina. DeWitt was working at a major telecom corporation, and she began to teach herself project management. Her aptitude for self-education, combined with her work ethic, propelled her into leadership roles, culminating in one as a regional HR manager for a major home-goods retailer.

DeWitt loved the job, but after two years she was needed at home. Her daughters were in the throes of high school and Carlas had issues with diabetes. DeWitt resigned and spent the next year caring for her family. Once things on the home front were stabilized, however, DeWitt found she couldn’t simply sail back into a similar role.

“By the time I wanted to get back into the workforce, they’re very strict,” she says. She says she was told she needed a degree in HR as well as certifications, neither of which she had. She was willing to downshift but heard repeatedly that she had too many years of experience.

"I was running into this everywhere," DeWitt says.