The Luminary Award recognizes a long arc of service. It traces a path from an early Sullivan honor at graduation to decades of work that strengthens communities and institutions. Recent honorees show how that path can look in practice, in different fields and at different scales.
Julie Gehrki
Julie’s career offers a working example of systems thinking applied to opportunity and pathways to good jobs. At Walmart and the Walmart Foundation, her team’s efforts have linked wage and benefit improvements with skill validation, mentorship, and portable credentials, pairing business investments in training with philanthropy that supports sector-wide frameworks and coalitions for upskilling. The result is a model that can reach far beyond one program or city when it proves out. She often credits formative experiences in project-based learning for preparing her to find answers in gray areas, and she names mentors who encouraged a blend of method matched with measurable practice. Along the way she has worked under several senior women leaders, a vantage point that sharpened her view of empathy and business acumen as complementary strengths.
Mark Peres
Mark’s record centers on the humanities as a civic instrument. After an early legal career, he pivoted toward work that invites people to think together in public, culminating in The Charlotte Center for the Humanities and Civic Imagination, a forum for dialogue about what is good and true in local life. The Center’s programming treats reflection and exchange as practical tools for community problem-solving. In the classroom, he has pressed students to consider global ethics and leadership through inquiry, reflection, and action. Colleagues note the integrity, empathy, and quiet achievement that characterize his approach, informed as well by his perspective as a first-generation American.
John M. McCardell Jr.
John’s story is rooted in the long work of higher education. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States with degrees from Washington and Lee, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, he went on to lead Middlebury College and later Sewanee as vice-chancellor and president. Peers describe him as forward-looking, reading the past in a way that complicates and enriches the present. His service includes NCAA leadership and recognition from national scholarly organizations. The Luminary Award’s purpose is consistent with his example, presented to a past Sullivan student recipient who has continued on a lifelong path of placing service above self.
Across these stories, a common pattern appears. Early service becomes lifelong practice. Lifelong practice becomes influence. Influence is used to benefit others in ways that can be seen and measured.
Nominations Now Open
Help us identify the next Luminary.
Who can be nominated
Past student recipients of the Algernon Sydney Sullivan or Mary Mildred Sullivan Awards whose record shows sustained service and leadership consistent with Sullivan ideals.
What to highlight in your nomination
Show a clear line from early recognition to long-term impact. Useful hallmarks include measurable community benefit, leadership that brings others along, and integrity in action.
How to submit
Share the nominee’s name, current role and contact information, and a brief narrative of impact with specific examples. Supporting items such as program outcomes, press or publications, or brief letters of support are welcome. The Sullivan team will follow up with next steps.
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