by Elizabeth Campbell
Kelly Heilman is a rising Senior at Sewanee, the University of the South in Tennessee. She was a 2017 Summer Fellow for the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, and is an outstanding student activist.
CBL Center for Conservative Women has chosen Kelly for this award because of her dedication to promoting conservative values on her campus. Despite road block after road block from her school’s administration while trying to organize her lecture during her time as a Fellow, Kelly persevered successfully hosted the first conservative woman speaker on her campus in September of 2016.
While Kelly was trying to put the event together, her school kept trying to find reasons that she could not host the event. They tried to charge her to use a set of microphones in a school facility, requested to approve the flyer she chose to post around campus – which they took over a week to do, and tried to micromanage every aspect of the event while she was trying to organize it.
As you can tell from the picture above, Kelly was more than successful in hosting her standing-room-only event with Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers, and she continues to battle for intellectual diversity and conservative ideas on her campus.
Kelly will receive her award the night of our Woman of the Year reception on June 8 at our DC Summit.
Congratulations, Kelly!