The 99-cent piece of cardboard from Dollar Tree sat on the table before her, blank and full of possibility. Thirteen-year-old Sheena Fain carefully spread out the magazines she’d borrowed from the library—she couldn’t afford to buy her own—and began searching for images that captured the future she dared to imagine.
“Resourceful. Influential. Powerful.” These were the words Sheena chose to define herself, words that seemed a world away from her current reality of couch-surfing between relatives’ homes, never having a space to call her own.
“I didn’t have any boundaries or barriers,” Sheena would later recall of that first vision board. “I was just like, yeah, I’m going for it.”
Since her mother’s divorce when Sheena was 10, stability had been scarce. By the time she was 18, she would move nine different times. Yet somehow, she found her way to self-development classes at Goodwill Industries.
“If anybody will believe in me, it has to be me first,” became her mantra. “Once I set my intention, no matter what happened, I knew I could reach my goal.”
School was a challenge. At one inner-city institution, Sheena missed nearly 70 days. Her English teacher, Mrs. Jones, became an unexpected ally.
“I’m going to give you this homework for the next three weeks, “Mrs. Jones would tell her. “I know I won’t see you. So I want you to follow with me in three weeks when you get back.”
That simple acknowledgment—understanding without judgment—made a difference. Eventually, Sheena found herself at Woodridge High School, where her stepfather drove her daily despite her parents’ divorce.
“I experienced so much peace at school,” Sheena remembered. “From there, I kind of started to flourish.”
She joined everything: track and field, basketball, marching band, concert band, literary club, photography club. Her culinary teacher took a liking to her and allowed her to make and sell chocolate candy suckers during lunch, the experience allowed her to discover her entrepreneurial side that she didn’t realize she had..
The environment opened her eyes. Her classmates’ parents owned businesses—some even had horses. “I was like, you have a horse? I’ve never seen that before,” Sheena recalled. “I knew this was possible. This was possible for me.”
After graduation, working full-time at a gas station while attending college, Sheena’s attention to detail caught a customer’s eye.
This customer changed the course of Sheena’s life. It all started with a simple conversation where the woman said, “’I remember when you first started and the drive-through line would be around the corner. Now I come and you already have my order ready.’’’
The customer gave Sheena her business card and then offered her a position at a hospital.
Years later, through what she calls a “career crisis” and subsequent exploration, Sheena found herself in a construction training class.
“I look around and I’m like, there’s nobody that looks like me in this class,” she remembered thinking. “This would be perfect because all the transferable skills that I have from my previous career in HR—customer service, negotiations, customer relations, employee relations—I can transfer those to this area.”
That insight eventually led her to Turner Construction, where she became the Community and Citizenship Manager, creating opportunities for smaller contractors and helping unemployed or underemployed individuals find pathways into the trades.
Today, as a professional and mother, Sheena continues creating vision boards annually, setting intentions and filtering out society’s noise. Nearly everything from that first vision board has been accomplished.
“In underserved communities, which is where I lived, I knew that I did not want that kind of life; living off people. I didn’t want to share houses and rooms with people. And I didn’t want my income to be determined by someone else,” she explains of her early motivation.
To young people facing similar circumstances, she offers hard-earned wisdom: “Nobody can tell you what you can or can’t be. This is not your final destination, it’s hard and people will misunderstand you. You’ll have to keep pushing, there will be setbacks, but that doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong track. All the rules are made up, you’ll get in life what you’re willing to work smart and hard for it. Everything that I went through in my adolescent years and my teen years, helped shape me into who I am today and that has helped me in the boardroom and other areas of life.”
Through determination, resourcefulness, and what she calls “stick-to-it-iveness,” Sheena transformed challenging beginnings into a purpose-driven life—proving that with vision and persistence, anyone can rewrite their story.