Developer of peer support specialist program has few peers

Ronald Mangum will never forget what he learned years ago from two doctors. The first never looked up from her dinner when telling him and his wife that one of their newborn twins was going to die. The second one shrugged his shoulders when Mangum told him that the emergency procedure about to be used on the surviving twin had previously caused him to stop breathing. “That’s just a chance you’ll have to take,” the doctor told him before walking away.

“It was horrendous,” Mangum recalled. “My goal is to never, ever, ever do that to anyone intentionally. That set me on a path to really be present with people and be attentive — even when I could not do anything but listen — because sometimes that’s all that is required.”

Eventually, that path led him to the School of Social Work, where he worked 20 years as a clinical assistant professor.

Read the complete Carolina Story from the University Gazette…

Ronald Mangum is a 2018 winner of the C. Knox Massey Distinguished Service Award.

Related Stories

Restore a Watershed, Protect an Ecosystem

Ask a Professor: Rada Petric

UNC Coach’s Legacy Cemented Forever