Harry Gilliard

Fulbright Gives Alumnus Opportunity to Grow Community

Alumnus

Stories build culture by preserving traditions and teaching future generations, UNC Charlotte alumnus Harry Gilliard says. Gilliard’s stories set their first roots in Sandridge, South Carolina, a rural Lowcountry crossroads community.

“I arrived in college with little cultural competency,” says Gilliard, a first-generation college student whose roommate was of Indian heritage. “However, as I talked with my roommate about my life as a Southern Black man and listened to his stories, I began to learn what it meant to come from a different background. Through these experiences, I began to appreciate the benefits and power of difference, and how it can unite more than divide, which subsequently increased my belief in a shared dignity for all people.”

Gilliard will take with him this foundational belief in the positive potential of diversity, as he heads to Brazil in 2020 through a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. Gilliard completed his bachelor’s degree in meteorology in 2011 at UNC Charlotte. Read more >>