zion granville

Fall 2026 John Jay Fellow

Hometown: Sugar Land, TX
College: Illinois State University
Major: Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management

Zion Granville is from Sugar Land, Texas, in the Houston area, where he was raised in a family shaped by faith. He graduated from Illinois State University in 2025 with a degree in Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, playing Division I football along the way and serving on his program’s Team Leadership Council. While a student, he won the university’s business competition and launched the funded company that grew out of it.

Zion chose public service because of what he has seen up close. Serving young people through Campus Outreach, youth ministry at his church, and training high school athletes around Houston, he has spent years among a generation that is lost and hurting: strained relationships, declining mental health, addiction, and disorder. He traces these branches to a single root: a generation taught to find truth and identity by looking inward, to the self and its feelings — and so never taught how to seek truth outside themselves. Zion knows that root firsthand. On paper his education was sound; no one would have called it shallow. Only in waking up did he see how little depth it had truly given him. He has spent the past two years seriously studying history, philosophy, economics, and culture for himself — and what began as frustration with institutions unwilling to confront root problems became conviction compelling action rather than observation. Convinced that God is truth, he does not claim to have the solutions, which is part of why he is coming to be formed. One young person at a time was never going to be enough: people are formed by institutions — homes, churches, schools — and that is why he chose public service.

During his time with the John Jay Fellowship this Fall, Zion looks forward to deep study, lasting friendships with fellow believers, and formation for faith-informed public service. Where that service will lead, he does not yet know — and that, too, is why he is coming: to discern it.