Leadership and Community | An interview with Grace Latimore

My name is Grace Latimore. I'm a senior here at UIS. I'm an English major with a double minor in Communications and African-American Studies. I'm the president of the Black Student Union. I volunteer with 4H—so all this semester we've been working with high school students—and then I am the fiction editor for The Alchemist Review, the literary journal here on campus.

Tonight we have just a general body meeting for BSU. Our mission is to educate, uplift, and empower. And that is in all aspects. One of the things that we really pushed ourselves this year with is just kind of expanding what that means.

So to educate, we don't just mean academics, although we put a strong emphasis on scholarship, but educating yourself about the resources available to you, about the world around you.

To uplift we try and do things that are positive, so we do, you know, throw parties hear on campus, but we also have voter registration; we also do HIV/STD testing.

And then for empowering, it kind of flows into the sense of having knowledge and being knowledgeable because we do believe that having knowledge is power.

What I like the most about UIS is the amount of opportunity here. So we're a part of the U of I school system, which is, you know, a well known, recognizable name and kind of brand. But we are the smallest of the three campuses, which means that… or I would say in many instances, we have tons of resources and not that many students.

So the opportunities per student are increased. I just premiered a documentary about the experiences of being a black student at a predominantly white institution. It's been well received. I've had faculty, you know, mentors—people who are really supportive of me—and I don't feel like those same resources are available to a student when there's, you know, 20,000 plus students.

What I learned about leadership just as the president of the Black Student Union is that it's not easy, but that's a good thing; that it's going to require time; that all great works and achievements are going to require time. I've also learned that it's incredibly important to know how to follow other people before you are a leader. A leader can't lead just themselves. You have to have people who trust you and trust your vision, and are willing to kind of follow you.

Transcribed 2/23/2023