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 Ģ������ƵStories      May 23, 2025

By Cam Adams

Hank Henderson likens his place of work to where he went to college.

As a channel client development manager at Granite Telecommunications, the buck stops at the company’s owner. Henderson is never too far away from him. He’s in the cube everyday alongside his employees. 

Even eight years after graduating from Ģ������Ƶ, it still reminds the former student body president of late former Chancellor David Belcher.

“Belcher, I think, taught me so much about what a leader truly is,” Henderson said. “A lot of the time in corporate America, it’s like the executives are up on this pedestal. They don’t even eat in the same cafeteria or walk through the same place.

“I think having a leader that’s involved, it showed me becoming a leader that you need to understand the day-to-day of the people and the temperature of the campus, and I think he did a very good job of relating to people, understanding what Western was and the community was.”

In his position in West Palm Beach, Florida, Henderson works in executive sales, working with large enterprises on connectivity and navigating internal and external politics to drive those huge deals.

Henderson, who graduated from Ģ������Ƶwith a degree in entrepreneurship, believed his college experience taught him a lot about sales.

“I think exposure to the staff and faculty, especially at Western, taught me how to communicate with high-level decision makers from an early age,” Henderson said.

“It felt like I could have those conversations right off the bat just because we had such quality faculty that had been in business and been through it, and they were so involved with us in office hours and we got to know them that it really helped bridge the gap.”

That included his time as student body president and a member of the Ģ������Ƶboard of trustees. Henderson said being a part of the board helped him learn how to look at a university from a holistic standpoint and understanding how high-level decisions are made.

“I was very fortunate to have some great mentors,” Henderson said. “I think we had one of the best boards when I was there, and I still believe now, one of the best boards of trustees in the system because it's people that really care.”

So far, Henderson’s passed it down in Florida. Along with being a basketball referee and a former Leaders in Action Mentor for leadership minors at WCU, Henderson was named the 2023 Volunteer of the Year for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Palm Beach and Martin Counties.

Henderson decided he wanted to make a difference during the wave of civil unrest in the summer of 2020, so he got involved with the organization.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Palm Beach and Martin Counties matched Henderson with then-14-year-old Damarius Green, and despite things getting off to a rocky start, he didn’t give up on him.

“He had gotten in some trouble, and then they had actually offered if I wanted them to reassign me to someone else because he had to go back to an inpatient program,” Henderson said. 

“I thought about it and I was like, ‘Honestly, I feel like that would almost be worse,’ because we had finally built some connection, and then I'm kind of just leaving him.”

Henderson kept writing Green letters and hung out with him about once a week whether that be at the park or on a fishing trip. Things steadily improved, and over the course of the last few years, Green has turned a new leaf. 

Henderson said Green is working on his GED and has a job, and even though Green has aged out of the program at 18, the two still get together pretty regularly. He’s even helping Henderson and his family move to Atlanta in a few months. 

“It's the people who brought me up, so the people who taught me, the people I learned from, I try to kind of give that back in a sense,” Henderson said of his motivation to mentor. “I also think mentoring makes you sharper.”

“To me, it's as valuable to me to mentor as I think it is to the mentee. A lot of it, too, is finding the right people. If I find somebody who's got the drive who I like, and it's like, I want to invest in them.”

As Henderson moves to Atlanta and closer to Cullowhee, he said he hopes to be more involved with WCU. One of the first steps Henderson is pondering to reach that goal? Becoming a Leaders in Action mentor at Ģ������Ƶonce again.

“That's what I'm kind of looking forward to about moving back to Atlanta is being able to get up there more often because there's just something great about Cullowhee,” Henderson said.

“Coming through Catamount Gap when you come through it through Sylva and the university's just down there, it's like, 'I'm home.'”