NEWBERRY — Earlier this year Terecia Wilson became the Drug Free Communities Coalition coordinator at Westview Behavioral Health Services, picking up where Tom Perry, who passed away in August, left off.
“I appreciate very much the opportunity that Westview and the Coalition have given me to serve as the Drug Free Communities Coalition coordinator. Tom Perry did an outstanding job in organizing the Coalition and promoting and encouraging community collaborations to prevent underage drinking. It is an honor to follow in his footsteps,” Wilson said.
“I have met with a number of Coalition members. Their enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and the community is very blessed to have such a talented, caring and compassionate group of individuals involved in this effort,” she added. “I look forward to working with all the members of the Coalition and members of the community to implement evidence-based strategies to accomplish our mission, and to further expand efforts to involve more youth and parents in the work of the project. Through this project, we can all make a positive difference in the lives of the young people in our county, helping them to grow, thrive, and reach their full potential.”
Born in Independence, Va., Wilson grew up in the small town of Galax, Va., where she graduated from Galax High School in 1974. Wilson attended Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, N.C., where she graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in sociology and religion.
“During my time there, I was president of the Wake Forest Circle K Club. We were focused on lots of activities to benefit young people in the community. We had a tutoring program at a local orphanage. We coordinated a Big Brother/Big Sister program,” Wilson said.
After graduating, Wilson initially went to work for Rooftop of Virginia Community Action Agency. There, she coordinated a rural ride sharing program in a two-county area of Virginia. She said the area was a very mountainous area, and the main industry at that time were furniture factories and textile mills.
“We set up a program in coordination with Virginia Tech to survey the people working in the industries in the two-county area to find out what kind of vehicle they drove, make and model, how far they travelled for work, if they would be interested in carpooling,” she said. “Virginia Tech folks had a computer program where they entered all that data, and then did a matching of people who either worked at the same factory, or close to each other, who had the same schedule and provided information for them to contact each other so they could set up their own car pools and showed them based on the information they provided if they carpooled how much money they would save annually.”
Wilson worked there for about a year and a half, and then she went back to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. However, she said she ended up not graduating because she moved to South Carolina for a job. She also had plans to marry here.
In her new job, she directed a Youth Opportunity Program, a federally funded grant program through the Governor’s Office of Juvenile Justice. This was a diversion program that worked with young people in Richland County and in the City of Columbia who had committed some type of violation that got them into the Juvenile Justice System.
“If they went through our program and successfully completed it, they were diverted out of that system,” Wilson said. “We offered individual counseling, family counseling, had a tutoring center. We also did cultural enrichment activities. We also implemented career enrichment activities and we had people come in and speak. Then we took them on field trips to different places in the community.”
In 1984 Wilson moved into another grant funded position for an alternative sentencing program for DUI offenders. This program was operated out of the municipal court in the City of Columbia. The program was designed for first time DUI offenders who were referred to the program by a judge. They went through testing to see if they were addicted to alcohol, referred to treatment programs and were also assigned to do volunteer work at one of over 200 sites in Columbia.
Wilson worked for this program for nine months until the program ended. After that she was hired as the senior planner in the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety Program in November 1984. That office coordinated the 402 State and Community Highway Safety Program, a federally funded program through the National Highway Safety Administration.
“The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety received the federal grant funds and each year we identified the traffic safety problems in the state and worked with state agencies, local government agencies, non profits, to submit grant applications in specific funding areas for projects that would improve highway safety in South Carolina,” Wilson said.
During that time they helped fund alcohol countermeasure projects, which were designed to reduce DUI related crashes, as well as youth traffic safety programs designed to reduce underage drinking and driving and encourage youth safety belt usage.
“We wanted to reduce fatalities and incapacitating injuries as a result of traffic crashes,” Wilson said.
In April 1987, Wilson moved over to the S.C. Department of Highway and Public Transportation as the assistant director in the Highway Safety Office. She said they were responsible for the state’s traffic record system, where all collision reports in South Carolina are submitted.
This provided data that determined where most of the crashes were occurring, as well as fatal crashes, injury crashes, pedestrian crashes and alcohol related crashes.
“While there, I also wrote a grant that became one of the most famous and longest running highway safety public information campaigns in the world — ‘Highway or Dieways: The Choice is Yours.’ I wrote the grant for that and was a part of the project team that led the implementation for the grant,” Wilson said. “I also wrote the grant and worked to implement the ‘Let ‘Em Work, Let ‘Em Live’ campaign.”
In 1993, the State Legislature re-organized state government, and Wilson’s office was put into the new Department of Public Safety.
Some time after that, Wilson ended up serving as coordinator for the 402 Highway Safety Program, which she helped coordinate earlier on in her career. She said every project that 402 funded had very specific goals for fatality reduction and injury reduction.
In August 1999, the Department of Transportation decided it needed to have a safety function and re-established a SCDOT safety office function, so at that time Wilson went to the SCDOT as the director of the Safety Office.
“At that time South Carolina was in the top as far as millage death rates, percentage of DUI-related fatalities, pedestrian fatalities, bicycle fatalities, motorcycle fatalities. A high percent of those were not restrained,” Wilson said. “We developed a business plan to address those issues. We noted a lot of problems with safety were related to aggressive driving. So we wrote a grant to re-initiate the ‘Highway or Dieways’ campaign and did a campaign focused on aggressive driving. We also wrote a grant to re-initiate the ‘Let ‘Em Work, Let ‘Em Live’ campaign.”
During her time with the SCDOT, Wilson was involved in a variety of different groups within the state and nationally. She was on the board of consultants for the National Association of Women Highway Safety Leaders, and she was on the American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials, among others.
Wilson eventually moved over to the Public Transportation Division, and coordinated the Rural Transportation Assistance Program. This program serves all the public transportation providers in South Carolina. Wilson retired in 2012, but she did not stay retired long.
“In 2012 I had a call from the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Program, and they got a federal grant. The project was to prevent underage drinking of military personnel. I was hired as the state project manager for the initiative. That was a three year grant funded project,” Wilson said.
Wilson said there were similarities to what she was doing in that position to what she is doing now, especially the community involvement.
Wilson is married to Patrick Wilson, and they have lived in Newberry County since the early 1990s. Together they have two sons, Patrick and Ben. Wilson also serves as the music director for Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Little Mountain.