Grant Williams, through his foundation, wants to change the life of a child.

Of course, Providence Day’s former star basketball player and the Charlotte Hornets power forward will aim higher than that - and being back home helps.

In February, Grant returned to Charlotte, the NBA team he grew up cheering for, as part of a trade. His Grant Williams Family Foundation launched in 2022. The foundation is meant to give life-changing opportunities to children and families and level the playing field with mentors, scholarships, and camps.

“The goal is if we reach one child the entire week, and we change the life of that one child, then we know we did our job,” Grant’s father, Gil says. “We would love to reach several children and based on our program, I believe we can."

Williams became one of four high school players ever to be named The Charlotte Observer’s All-Observer Player of the Year in back-to-back seasons at Providence Day.  He led the Chargers to the 2016 N.C. Independent Schools state championship over High Point Christian.

He grew up in the West Charlotte area and held a basketball camp at West Charlotte High last summer.

“I am thankful to be able to teach the game that has blessed me in life to the next generation,” Grant says. “The goal is not just to teach the kids basketball skills,  but also life and financial skills, as well, because these are critical in their development.”

‘Pay it forward’

This week, Grant Williams is running a basketball camp through his foundation at Providence Day. 

Growing up, the family didn’t have a computer and struggled financially. Still, Grant hung onto his dream of playing professional basketball and received the life-changing opportunity to receive a private school education at Providence Day.

Through this education, Grant continued honing his basketball skills and developed vital interpersonal and communication skills.

“We created the foundation to pay it forward to other people,” Gil says. “The idea is to reach children who want to excel in their lives and make a difference in their lives. We want to help shape and mold those kids you can later add to society.”

The camps, which run for a week, came about through Gil’s and later Grant’s experiences. 

“I have been involved in basketball most of my life,” Gil says. “I did clinics with Operation Sports Rescue, which was based out of New York. I was exposed to some of the NBA greats during these camps, and it later helped me form an idea for our own camps.”

Grant’s life-changing moment came when he turned 8 years old and attended the Sam Mitchell Foundation Camp in Columbus, Georgia. Prior to that, his family says he had never really had an interest in basketball. But that experience made a light go off in his mind. He excelled, and basketball took off for Grant from that moment.

“We plan to do more camps,” Gil says. “You can check the Grant Williams Family Foundation for more information as we add more events. The point of our camps is for kids to have fun, but we offer a lot more than that. We want to give back.”

The Grant Williams Family Foundation strives to close the inequality gap and hopes to remove obstacles for underserved students by providing invaluable resources and programs centered on our four core pillars - mentorship, financial literacy, technology, and the arts, according to its website. 

“We have a financial literacy component in addition to teaching all of the basketball skills,” Gil says. “We want these kids to know they can be anything they want in life.”

Providence Day’s camp is drawing big names from Charlotte’s business community.

“We have professionals from Morgan Stanley coming by,” Gil says. “Keith Cockrell, President of Bank of America, will also talk to the kids. We have several different visitors from the medical profession, including Marc Upshaw, [the] CEO and founder of Global Diagnostic Services, Inc.”

Williams was a two-time SEC Player of the Year at the University of Tennessee before Boston drafted him in the first round in 2019. He spent four seasons in Boston, including its 2022 NBA Finals appearance against the Golden State Warriors. Grant is wearing number two for the Hornets - his number on all his earliest basketball teams in Charlotte.

“Basketball is a team sport,” Gil says. “ It is about showing up. We want to teach them that, too.”