Community Engagement

UNC Charlotte’s Hollywood-inspired Giving Green Campaign drew rave reviews from generous faculty and staff members. The result was an epic total of $194,698 in one-time gifts and payroll-deductible pledges to benefit the Arts & Science Council, the State Employees Combined Campaign and the UNC Charlotte Foundation.

Chancellor Philip L. Dubois expressed his appreciation to faculty and staff members who made a financial contribution during a special Giving Green “After Party” in the Barnhardt Student Activity Center Wednesday, Nov. 18.

Service members who are deployed away from family and friends during the holidays remember the comfort of receiving cards from the public. As one soldier remarked for the Army News, “For those guys to receive letters, it was the thing that made Christmas for them in a place where the environment is not covered in snow and cheer but with sand and fear.”

For the third consecutive year, UNC Charlotte students danced the night away to raise funds for the Levine Children’s Hospital.

Junior Angelica Rose Brown has been recognized for outstanding leadership and service by North Carolina Campus Compact, a statewide network of colleges and universities with a shared commitment to community engagement. She is a recipient of the network’s Community Impact Award honoring one student leader at each member school.

Sixty UNC Charlotte students who are enrolled in Spanish language classes caught a glimpse of what it means to live in poverty in a foreign country, struggling to survive with limited language skills.

During the poverty simulation, conducted in partnership with Crisis Assistance Ministry, the students were organized into “family” groups of three to six people with specific background stories and roles. They could only speak Spanish during the simulation and had to complete tasks while overcoming obstacles.

UNC Charlotte philosopher Shannon Sullivan posits that well-meaning white liberals are more concerned with establishing anti-racist credentials than with confronting systematic racism and privilege in her work “Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism.”

A professor of philosophy and health psychology, Sullivan will discuss the award-winning book and why she decided to write it at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 10, at UNC Charlotte Center City as part of the 2015-16 Personally Speaking series.

The InnovateHER Challenge national prize competition organized by the Small Business Administration (SBA), in partnership with Microsoft, is seeking products and services that impact and empower the lives of women and families.

Regional competitions are under way to identify 10 national finalists that will compete for $70,000 in cash prizes funded by Microsoft.

The Charlotte regional competition, hosted by Ventureprise and UNC Charlotte, invites applications; the deadline is Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Participants in Leadership Charlotte were on campus Thursday, Oct. 15, as part of the program’s Education Day to explore the history, current landscape and outlook of education for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS).

The current Leadership Charlotte class will examine challenges related to the educational opportunities for all students and ponder possible solutions. The day also will include a tour of Charlotte Engineering Early College High School, a presentation by CMS Superintendent Ann Clark and an interactive panel with four CMS Board of Education members.

Fourth-year architecture student and Levine Scholar Isabel Fee recently completed a community project funded through the Levine Scholars program. She designed and assisted in the construction of a special community garden at Brookdale Charlotte East, a senior living community near Albemarle Road.

The culmination of a three-year process, the raised-bed garden is designed for wheelchair accessibility, allowing Brookdale residents to actively participate in the gardening and to be physically closer to the plants and flowers to see, smell and enjoy.

How do Latinos and African Americans in Charlotte get along? They often live near each other and deal with similar issues, do they discuss them, or do the respective communities remain primarily to themselves?