![]() Read next: New Cornish Bakery pasty and pastry shop and café opens in Truro Upon her election on Monday (May 15) she said: "If anyone had told me, when I was sitting in that show-house and writing out a cheque to pay my plot reservation fee to Wainhomes, that 20 years later I would be standing here as Mayor of Truro, I would have said that it was impossible. After being re-elected two years ago, last year she became the city’s deputy mayor. In 2018, she was co-opted onto the city council as one of the councillors for the Tregolls ward where she continues to live. When health issues caused her to retire early from the NHS almost 20 years ago, Cllr Swain moved to Truro where she began volunteering at Mid-Cornwall Credit Union (Cornish Community Banking), later becoming chairman of the board of the Credit Union and of its loans committee. Originally from Lancashire, Cllr Swain trained as an accountant working for local councils in London and Essex, before joining the NHS, working for health authorities and mental health trusts in Bolton and Manchester. She replaces outgoing mayor Steven Webb who served in the role for two years. Councillor Carol Swain has been elected to serve as Mayor for Truro at this year’s annual mayor-making ceremony held at Truro Cathedral. It’s important for us to be true to whatever we’re called to do.Truro has a new mayor and she believes it's time to roll up our collective sleeves for the good of the city. We don’t know if we’re guaranteed tomorrow. “I would hope for young people, and others, that they would not have to wait until they’re as old as I am to get to the point where you have true freedom,” she said. ![]() When asked what she would say to the young people beginning the journey into the career field of education, Swain expressed high hopes. “But I’ve always been an out of the box thinker. ![]() “But I look back at my life-and there are people who might feel sorry for me, going through all sorts of things,” she said. And I could see how everything I’ve done as a young person fits in to what I’m doing now. “And the most important thing that I learned was that life is journey. “The person I am today is very difference from the person I was twenty years ago,” she said. Now, years later and retired from her professorship at Vanderbilt and working to bring light to political issues near and dear to her heart, Swain says that every hardship from her past led her to where she in now. Swain earned her PHD and went on to join the faculty of Princeton and later Vanderbilt “going in with the confidence that I would get early tenure. “And so I embarked on a career to get a PHD.” “I applied for jobs, and the jobs didn’t come through, but the graduate offers did,” she said. Moving on from education, Swain tried to spread her wings, but found that the job offers just weren’t quite coming through. So she went back to college to get her bachelor’s degree, and “made a conscious decision to graduate with honors, and graduated with magnum cum laude and a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.” “When I applied for the job, however, I was told I needed a four-year degree.” “I thought I’d be a store manager,” she said. Swain worked a full-time job to afford her education, which she got, in the form of a bachelors degree in business. “And I had not known that you could go to college with a high school equivalency, so I started at the community college as a work-study student.” “(While working a job), an African orderly told me I ought to go to college because there were a lot of people in college not as smart as I was,” Swain smiled at the memory. That compliment-and a divorce from her husband- got Swain thinking. But the medical doctor told me I was intelligent, I was attractive, and I could do more with my life. “I went through a period of my life when I did suicide gestures-I would take bottles of pills and would call someone and get rescued. “Part of my story is that people encouraged me,” she said. “I married at 16, and by the time I was 21 I had three small children.”Īlthough the success rates for young mothers with low education were not in her favor, Swain managed to turn her story around. “The poverty that I grew up in was such that all of my siblings and I dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade,” she said. Swain says the poverty of her childhood shaped her early adult years. “We were born and raised in rural poverty-and my father didn’t finish grade school, and my mother had a 10th grade education.” “I was born and raised in Southwestern Virginia, and I was one of 12 children,” Swain said. The Madison County Republican Women’s group kicked off the first of their new speaker series event in October by welcoming Carol Swain, a former professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University and television analyst.
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