First year Leadership Fellows
The start of a new year is a time for Elon students to dream big and set ambitious, lofty goals for the semester without being overwhelmed by the realities of school assignments, hours of work, and various meetings for extracurricular organizations. At the first Fellows Forum of the year, this year’s Leadership Fellows were reminded that no dreams are too bold after listening to the compelling story of Gladys Hadley, a resident of Graham, NC who overcame racial and socioeconomic obstacles to graduate University of Chapel Hill, receive a Rhodes Scholarship, and travel the world before returning back to Alamance County to work in education. Ms. Hadley’s leadership journey required her to aggressively utilize all of her resources, including her bombastic personality as well as the many friends she met throughout her life. She learned to take advantage of every opportunity available, whether that meant backpacking and canoeing through lakes on the Canadian-Minnesota border for a summer or pursuing an internship in the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles the summer of the 1984 Olympics. Ms. Hadley grew up at a time when a lower class African-American girl who grew up in Alamance County didn’t get many opportunities to visit the beaches on the Atlantic Ocean or see the Smokey Mountains on the Tennessee border, let alone be offered scholarships to such illustrious universities as Harvard, Duke, and UNC. But Ms. Hadley was a special young woman who – instead of seeing barriers – hurdled difficult obstacles with her go-getter mentality and unyielding positivity. Despite the odds, she gained the attention of universities through her athletic ability in basketball as well as her leadership in Student Government, where she helped host the first non-segregated high school Student Government Conference in North Carolina’s history at Graham High School. Ms. Hadley’s story proved inspiring for many Leadership Fellows present at the Forum, many of whom hope to channel her tenacity and unnerving motivation this coming year as they exercise their own leadership in an effort to improve their respective organizations and Elon’s campus as whole.
