Glenn and Heather Hilliard

Bio of Glenn Hilliard

Glenn currently serves as Chair and CEO of Hilliard Group, LLC, the Hilliard family’s investment and consulting organization. He also is the founder and serves as chair of the Saluda Grade Trails Conservancy.

Glenn graduated from Clemson, earned a law degree at GW Law School, while also working in DC for SC congressman Bryan Dorn, and he attended the Executive Program at UVA. He built his career in financial services and insurance, serving as counsel and later CEO of Liberty Life, and then working for ING Group, a Dutch financial company as Chair and CEO of North and South America. After acquiring and developing successful businesses in Canada, the US, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Peru Glenn retired from ING. He was then recruited by David Tepper and other members of the Creditors Committee to serve as Executive Chair and to bring Conseco (now CNO Financial) out of bankruptcy, and through re-listing on the NYSE.

Glenn has also served on numerous corporate boards including Columbia Funds, Banc of America Funds (Chair 2011-2016), Liberty Corporation, South Financial Corp (Carolina First Bank), CNO Financial (Executive Chair), and Alea Group Holdings, a UK listed, KKR controlled Bermuda based reinsurer. Glenn served on the Clemson University Foundation (Chair, 2004-2006), was founding chair of the SC Governor’s School for the Arts, was appointed a Palmetto Gentleman in both 1986 and 1990 and is a certified Kansas City Barbeque Society Master Judge.

Other environmental involvements include founding the Foothills Trail Conservancy and co-founding the Foothills Trail 50 years ago, co-founding SC’s Bartram Group of the Sierra Club and serving on the national board of the Rails to Trail Conservancy. He currently serves on the boards of Naturaland Trust, Upstate Forever, and the Upstate Land Conservation Fund. Glenn founded and serves as chair of the Saluda Grade Trails Conservancy, which recently acquired from Norfolk Southern 32 miles of abandoned railway which will become a rails to trail corridor connecting Spartanburg with Western NC and beyond.

Bio of Heather Hilliard

Heather attended Clemson where she “re-met” Glenn, and following a brief career at United Airlines, they married and will be celebrating 60 wonderful years of marriage in 2026.

Heather is a devoted and loving mother of 3 daughters and their husbands, seven granddaughters, one grandson and another much loved foster granddaughter. Heather grew up working in her father’s vegetable gardens and among her mother’s flower beds, and since her very early married years she, Glenn, and their family have thrived in the outdoors while camping, skiing, cycling, and running rivers in the Southeast, the American West and throughout Europe, Canada, and the Andes.

The most meaningful outdoor experiences include pilgrimage hikes on the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage trail to Rome to visit the Vatican, church mission trips she made to work with children in Russia and Bolivia and joining her daughter, Nancy, to travel to Cambodia to donate and deliver over 250 all-terrain bicycles to young, underprivileged girls so they could commute safely from their villages to their schools, and regularly enjoys hiking along their wonderful and much loved Foothills Trail.

Heather loves gardening and has built impressive flower and vegetable gardens at every home where they have lived. She is an Upstate Master Naturalist and a Master Gardener, is a Greenville member of the Heritage Garden Club and the Carolina Foothills Garden Club in Greenville and she has studied and worked in the Great Dixter Gardens in England.

The Hilliard’s have lived in Washington, DC, Greenville, SC, Colorado, The Netherlands and Atlanta, and returned to Greenville, SC in the summer of 2014 to be closer to nearby family members and friends.