Not a single class wasted – Harvey Ward
Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward’s first few classes at CJC laid the groundwork for how he would approach communications for the rest of his career.
His Intro to Mass Communications class with Andrea Billups and his Reporting class with Dr. Kim Walsh-Childers made the biggest impression.
“In Dr. Walsh-Childers’ Reporting class, I learned that all the good reporting and writing you offer not only can, but WILL be undone by a single factual error,” Ward explained. “More than 35 years later I remain mortified by grammatical or spelling errors in anything I publish, even on social media.”
Ward was born and raised in Gainesville, after graduating from Eastside High School and taking classes at Santa Fe College, he applied to UF. As a student in the early ’90s, Ward experienced the first football season of the Spurrier Era, a time he considers the highlight of his time as an undergraduate student.
After graduating in 1991 with a B.S. in Public Relations, Ward considered a career in law but took a job as an insurance claims adjuster. He quickly realized that the field wasn’t for him, however, and he instead found roles in marketing and sales throughout the ’90s. In 2001, he came back to UF to work at WUFT, where he not only found his calling in non-profit management and fundraising but also met his wife, Gillian Lord-Ward. In 2009, he would once again leave UF to become the Executive Director of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Foundation, a role he would maintain for several years before dipping his toes into local politics.
He ran for the Gainesville City Commission and was elected in 2017, serving two terms as a representative for District 2 before winning the Gainesville mayoral election in 2022. During his first term as mayor, he fought to make Gainesville cleaner, safer and more affordable by investing in housing and infrastructure projects, helping conserve Gainesville’s land and creating strategies to address climate change at the local level. His term ends later this year and his reelection campaign is already in full swing.
Ward’s time on the City Commission and in the mayor’s office have been greatly influenced by his time at CJC. He attributes his deep and abiding respect for the First Amendment to his constitutional law class, while classes like Cases and Campaigns and Statistics for Public Relations shaped his approach to persuasive cases and helped him more clearly understand the world around him. “Not a single class I took in my upper division work was wasted, and they all make me more able to serve the people of our community,” said Ward.
Category: Alumni Profiles, College News, Profiles
Tagged: Alumni Dean’s Report 2026 Public Relations
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