Sunshine Griffin will graduate from Bowling Green State University today with two degrees, and with honors.
J.D. Pooley | Sentinel-Tribune
Sunshine Griffin is one bright package of boldness, beauty and brains.
The 47-year-old Bowling Green woman is graduating today with honors from Bowling Green State University. Her two bachelor degrees are in information systems and data analytics and intelligence.
Not bad for a “street kid” who experienced suicide, rape, abuse and exposure to drugs and alcohol at a very young age. Essentially homeless at age 13, Griffin is also twice divorced and a single mom of three who has lived in poverty for most of her life.
Griffin is an open book, willing to share her story with anyone — especially kids who are struggling and may not see the future and a second chance. She’s a certified life coach and blogger; her website, Thinking Sunshine, is filled with positive messages.
One day, she hopes to finish her book “Destined to Live.”
Growing up in Youngstown, her mom went from one alcoholic to another for companionship, marrying five times, Griffin said. She and her older sister endured assaults and forced liquor consumption. Griffin said she suffered several near-death experiences, attempted suicide and cut herself to cope.
When Griffin was 13, her mom was with husband number three, and left him for another man.
“One day, he said, ‘You know what, I don’t want your kids anymore.’ And my mom said, ‘you have to move out.’”
That started years of living in friends’ home, cars, bars and boarded-up buildings. Griffin hustled pool for cash.
Griffin said she was raped three times, including her prom night.
When she was 16, she hooked up with a guitarist in a bar band and moved in with his family for four years.
“Honestly, that is what kept me safe. His mom let me stay at the house and didn’t judge me.”
She also told Griffin about God.
“I found out someone would die for me, and that wrecked me,” Griffin said. “That was when I found my faith. I got baptized. I clung to it.”
Griffin graduated from high school with a 3.8 grade point average and went on to a business college to get an associate’s degree and started a job with Delphi.
There, she met her first husband. They married after a year of dating, she got pregnant and stayed at home to raise their three kids.
They officially divorced in 2011.
When they separated, the twins were 7 and her daughter was 3, and Griffin was on her own.
She rented a manufactured home in Perrysburg, working a monthly budget of $1,000 for child support, $300 in alimony and food stamps. She home-schooled the children.
Griffin got really good at selling things on eBay. Over 14 years, she sold $80,000 in items. She and the kids would scour garage sales for vintage Barbies and other things that could be sold for more money online.
Her most valuable find over the years was a tub of 200 Matchbox Hot Wheels Redlines for $2. One of the cars sold on eBay for $1,500.
At age 37, she wed again. The marriage, though, was a disaster as he dealt with post-traumatic stress from serving in Afghanistan and she suffered three miscarriages.
“I strived for love my whole life, wanted my parents to love me, wanted men to love me,” Griffin said. “I was never good enough.”
In 2015, she and the kids moved to Bowling Green and she decided to go back to school at age 41.
“I need to do something to give them a life and a better start,” she said of her children. “I’m going to do this for myself and this time it will be different. I need to change the statistics of what happens to a street kid.”
She enrolled in Owens Community College and got an associate’s degree, with honors.
In 2019, Griffin did an internship with Cherry Street Mission Ministries and earned her first “real” paycheck since before her marriages, a $55,000 annual salary. She helped a Findlay homeless shelter operation reorganize, and that plan to help other similar programs was about to be launched nationwide, Griffin said.
She treated the kids to Pop-Tarts and new tennis shoes.
Then the pandemic hit and that opportunity fizzled. She had just bought a new home.
Griffin decided to go back to school again, this time to get her bachelor’s degree from BGSU.
She financed it with a $20,000 Thompson Family Scholarship and a Pell grant. Student loans covered the balance.
In June, she’ll start a business intelligence analyst job with General Motors.
“It will be … essentially data mining all the stuff for the electric vehicles, and giving the executives for strategy insight and dashboards and report cards,” Griffin said.
Sunshine is her real name.
“My dad named me Sunshine because of the song ‘All for the Love of Sunshine’ by Hank Williams Jr.,” Griffin said. “It was in a movie called ‘Kelly’s Heroes.’”
She only had a brief relationship with her father, after locating him seven years ago in Florida, and taking a DNA test to prove their family ties.
Shortly after meeting, he was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer and died a few weeks later. He was 55.
Griffin has a tenuous relationship with her mother, who lives in Pittsburgh.
“It took me that time being alone … where I had to fall in love with myself, forgive myself,” she said of finding her way. “God said you are not a street kid anymore. You are a knowledgeable, powerful woman of God with a voice. And I had to find my voice.”
Griffin was voted Outstanding Senior for Information Systems at BGSU.
“A little at a time, I felt something in me to be something different, to break away from that poverty, to break away from barely making it,” she said. “If you can become better and not bitter, it will change your whole perspective.”
