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GSP Alumni Encourages Scholars to Seek Justice Using their Passions

  • Journalists
  • Jul 3, 2019
  • 2 min read

Updated: Jul 16, 2019

By: Susannah Sowell


This Sunday evening Gretchen Hunt encouraged the Bellarmine Governor’s Scholars to follow their passions in the second convocation of the summer. As a GSP alumni herself, she understands the culture of what a scholar’s summer looks like, and even detailed how she has met with her friends from GSP every summer for the past 27 years. 

As a native Kentuckian, Hunt never thought that she would stay in her hometown of Louisville. In fact, even as a child she was motivated to dream big from the book Girls Can be Anything by Norma Klein. So when she graduated from Boston College Law School, she was disheartened to be placed back in Louisville, rather than a large city abroad where she thought she could make a difference in the lives of refugees. However, to her surprise, Hunt was able to work in cases involving refugees and immigrants in abusive relationships here in Louisville. Hunt said,

“I was able to start seeing my Kentucky with new eyes when I started working with these human rights cases.” 

Hunt challenged us by asking what world we want to see and what role will we play in our world. Hunt started playing her part, even in Kentucky, in order to change the world to make it what she wanted to see.  


Hunt continued in her convocation by challenging us to take risks and get creative. We all have something we’re passionate about, although it can be uncomfortable she assured us that in order to really grow we must do things that scare us. She then emphasized that sharing our failure after taking risks that don’t work out the way we expected helps develop resiliency. Hunt continued in her talk by describing her campaign for a local election, in which she lost. However, because of the prominence she gained in the election, she was led to new paths. Today, she heads the Office of Victims Advocacy for the Kentucky Attorney General, but Hunt “find[s] a lot of joy in mentoring young people” and she “often tells people to follow their passion.”  


Though she focused her talk on her passion of human rights, specifically for refugees in abusive relationships, she inspired us to find our passion and use it to seek justice. Hunt used examples of engineers using their work to solve problems and human rights needs in order to show us how we can all seek justice through whatever our passion is.

Following the convocation, Hunt was asked a series of questions by the scholars. One of the most prominent was when one scholar asked,

“What do we do when we don’t know our passion, because it seems so big?”  

She responded with,

Scholar, Kendall Tubbs, introduces Gretchen Hunt as convocation speaker. His focus area is Philosophy.

“Follow it!”

and they asked,  

“Even if it seems impossible?”

and her response was  

“Absolutely!”

She ended the night encouraging us to have big and bold visions, and to hold on to them for as long as we can.

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Faculty

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Jennifer Price grew up in Hopkins County, Kentucky and attended South Hopkins High School. She was a Governor’s Scholar at Murray State University in 1992, and was assigned the Social and Political Theory focus area. After high school, she attended Transylvania University and pursued a degree in Psychology. She finished her bachelor’s degree and then decided to complete graduate school at the University of Arkansas, where she received a doctoral degree in clinical psychology. She has been a member of the GSP faculty and staff for many years, ranging from 1994 to present. She has done every job available except be a focus area instructor. Jen was recently encouraged by her friends to begin running and even completed a half marathon last may. Jen is a wife to Pete, and a mother to two children, Jacob (15) and Eli (12).

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Josh Woodward was a 1992 scholar at Murray State University. After completing undergraduate school at the University of Kentucky, Josh obtained a Masters in Water Resources from Minnesota and a Masters in Teaching from Cornell University. Outside of the program, Josh teaches a variety of science classes at Berea Community High School. When asked about his favorite part of the program, Josh responded with, “My favorite part is the notion that the five weeks is not really the program. It is everything after.” Nearly thirty years later, Josh and his fellow scholars are still close friends. 

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Helen Heines grew up in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, which is in Bullitt County. She attended North Bullitt High School where she applied and was accepted to attend GSP at Murray State University in 2010. Upon graduation in 2011, she continued her education at Western Kentucky University with a degree in elementary education. Currently, Helen is a 5th grade social studies teacher in Louisville, and spends her summers deeply involved in the GSP community. She began working as a Resident Advisor (RA) at Bellarmine University in 2015. She began moving up the ranks to become head RA and then later she obtained the title of Assistant Campus Director, a title that she still holds. 

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