Jennifer H. Gunter, Ph.D., is the director of the South Carolina Collaborative on Race and Reconciliation at the University of South Carolina. She is a facilitator for the Welcome Table process, a tested community trust-building process that began in Mississippi in 2004. With this tool, she works to help communities heal from societal divisions that have been historically embedded. Her knowledge that the key to reconciliation is rooted in an understanding of history fuels this work.
She created the South Carolina Youth Collective to help the state grow its own leaders by developing skills and acquiring historic information to increase their ability to change their own communities. The SCYC is two-fold. One part is a social justice book club, and the other part is a yearly summer fellows program. She also organizes the annual Equity Summit, an interdisciplinary, intergenerational regional discussion of race and equity.
After working for several years at Hal & Mal’s in Jackson and serving as the first assistant editor of the Jackson Free Press, she received a B.A. and M.A. in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in History from the University of South Carolina. She is a historian who specializes in the intersections of region, gender, race, health, law and activism.
