Norristown's Diana Millner, Child Advocate At Home And Abroad, Passes Away

Obituary originally posted on Tributes.com

DIANA AUBOURG MILLNER was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on February 26, 1975 to Joseph Amerlin Aubourg and Marie Immaculee Aubourg.

She departed this life surrounded by her husband, parents, siblings and brother-in-law on Wednesday morning, Aug. 12, 2015, after a four-year struggle with breast cancer.

Diana was the third of four children, and the first girl born to Joseph and Marie, Haitian immigrants to America. When Diana was two-and-a-half, her parents feared that she would never talk.

She remained silent, quietly observing other people’s conversations, but never saying a word. One Labor Day weekend in 1977 the family went on a road trip to Montreal.

While driving on a busy road in Montreal, Diana suddenly stood up from her seat and started singing and never stopped until they got to their destination. This was only the beginning Diana’s amazing journey in becoming a phenomenal woman.

Raised in East Cambridge, Diana attended St. John’s the Evangelist School for grades K to 8. She graduated from Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School in 1993, where she made honor roll all four years.

Diana would go on to attend Syracuse University, graduating in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in policy studies.

She then earned a master’s degree in international development planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She is a 1997 Harry S. Truman Scholar and served on the regional selection panels of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey for the Truman Scholar award since 2006.

Diana spent almost 15 years working to improve systems and inform public policy, in service of vulnerable children.

After graduate school, she worked as a research associate with the Right to Development Project at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and served on the boards of the Jubilee USA Network and Global Action for Children. L

ater, she became executive director of Save Africa’s Children, a project of the Pan African Children’s Fund, established by Rev. Charles E. Blake, Sr., Presiding Bishop of the Church of God in Christ.

She built the capacity of the program to serve over 400 orphan-care projects in more than a dozen sub-Saharan African countries.

Further, she served on the board of the Firelight Foundation, which also served HIV-affected orphans in sub-Saharan Africa.

After leaving SAC, Diana worked for Bread for the World Institute, as a senior foreign policy analyst. After nearly a decade working on issues in the international context, Dianatransitioned to the domestic policy front, joining the Stoneleigh Foundation of Philadelphia in 2011, as senior program officer.

At Stoneleigh, she oversaw the Stoneleigh Fellows program and the work of fellows engaged in cross-systems efforts that span the U.S. child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

With a particular focus on the juvenile justice field, she provided guidance on new research, best practices and innovations.

Diana was a member of the steering committee of the Youth Transition Funders Group, a national network of funders that work together to support the well-being and economic success of vulnerable young people age 14 to 25. Additionally, she co-chaired the YTFG youth justice working group. A passionate writer and advocate,Diana published a chapter in the 2004 volume Let Haiti Live, and had her own blog on the HuffingtonPost.com.

Diana was as passionate about faith as about work. She was raised Catholic, baptized as an infant, and confirmed as a teenager. After coming under the influence of activist ministers through the 30th Anniversary of Boston Freedom Summer as a college student, Diana was discipled in the Pentecostal tradition, and received the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Diana was active in every church of which she was a part, especially working with youth or encouraging small groups for prayer and Bible study. When Diana was four years old she came home from church and enthusiastically expressed to her mother that she prayed very hard for a little sister. Lo and behold a year later Shannon was born.

Diana certainly was careful of what she prayed for. It showed. She cared for Shannon as if she was her own.

At only five years old she was changing her baby sister’s diapers and feeding her.

Diana would have Shannon on one hip while making sure her homework was completed. This is a glimpse of the importance of Diana’s influence on her little sister, nieces, nephew, godchildren, and her own son and daughter.

Diana was a faithful woman devoted to prayer and equally devoted to her responsibilities when those prayers were answered. Diana met her husband, Marlon Millner at a Boston Theological Institute conference in February 2004.

After keeping Marlon at bay for months, she finally agreed to meet in August, in Harvard Square, and that became their first date, where Marlon told her after hours of conversation and two restaurants later he wanted to get married.

They were engaged a year later, and married Sept. 16, 2006 at Memorial Church at Harvard University. They made their home in Norristown, PA, where Diana gave birth to a son, Edouard Josef, in 2007 and a daughter, Immaculee Jeanette, in 2009. Diana was always a devoted and supportive wife and mother.

She was instrumental in her husband successfully running for councilman-at-large in Norristown in 2009.

Later, when Marlon, a minister, was called to serve as pastor of the McKinley Memorial Baptist Church, in Upper Moreland, PA, from 2012 to 2015, Diana faithfully served with her husband.

She wrote a grant for the church to receive thousands of dollars to work with youth and college students, she launched a children’s church ministry, and got the women’s ministry involved in helping those trafficked into the sex trade in the Philadelphia region.

Diana deeply informed Marlon’s commitment to reducing youth violence in Norristown, and she helped Norristown regain a lost grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency for Weed & Seed.

She also helped co-author a grant recently approved by PCCD to launch a countywide Faith and Community based effort with the Office of the Public Defender to reduce youth disproportionate minority contact in communities across Montgomery County. In her spare time, Diana was a lover of the arts. She trained many years in classical ballet, modern and jazz dance, starting at age five through adulthood.

She participated in the Harvard Radcliffe Dance Extension program throughout high school. This is a program that you are specifically chosen for by the dance director at CRLS. Many thought she was a professional dancer.

She was a patron of Theater Horizon and ACPPA Community Art Center in Norristown, and an active participant in the yoga community.

Diana loved drinking herbal teas, reading the Sunday New York Times (especially the engagements and weddings section) and could also be counted on to have the latest, critically acclaimed fiction from a bestseller’s list in her purse.

Some were privileged to read her poems and short stories. Diana literally traveled the world for work and school, including Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. But her favorite place to go was back to East Cambridge, to spend time with her parents, siblings and their children.

She was preceded in death by her older brother Winchel, who passed in January of 2015. Diana leaves to mourn her passing, but to forever cherish her presence: her husband, Marlon Millner, and their two children, EJ and Imma of Norristown, PA; her parents Joseph and Marie Aubourg of Cambridge, MA; a brother Merlin (Stephanie) of Brockton, MA; a sister Shannon (Ross) of Cambridge, MA; five nieces: Ruth Millner of Atlanta, Ayanna and Ashia Aubourg of Cambridge, MA and Naia and Nina Aubourg of Brockton, MA; one nephew, Jahad Aubourg of Cambridge, MA; four godchildren, Cassandra Fleurentin of Boston, MA, Christian Durogene of Miami, FL, Samuel Rubin of College Park, MD, and Madison Perotte of Somerset, NJ; a host of other relatives; her Stoneleigh, philanthropy and youth advocacy and public policy colleagues; and her church family and many, many, many friends near and far.