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 >>