Leaders Rising: Jacob Ratliff
Described by his parents as a quiet, anxious and depressed child, Jacob Ratliff always sensed he didn’t fit in.
This became painfully apparent to him during the summer after his sixth grade year, when his family left their upper-scale home in Virginia and moved to a lower-tiered house in a more affluent neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I was keenly aware of the financial and social gap between myself and the others at school,” Jacob reflects. Not only did Jacob notice he was financially less well off than his peers, he began to realize he was politically and socially different from the largely conservative, Christian community they’d moved into.
