Kickstarting a Carolina Law Entrepreneurship Program

“Clinical education geared to organizational clients, and the business and social entrepreneurs who establish them, is important to large numbers of our students,” says Martin H. Brinkley, dean and Arch T. Allen Distinguished Professor at UNC School of Law.

What does it take to be an entrepreneur? It takes drive, ambition, patience and persistence to identify a need and create a business to fill that need. It also takes access to legal resources.

Early-stage legal counsel is critical to the success of a new for-profit or nonprofit venture. And a new program at Carolina Law will provide just that, filling a consistent gap across all startup settings. The new program will also serve business and social enterprise entrepreneurs on the campuses of UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, in partnership with UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, NC State University’s Poole College of Management, as well as the innovation and entrepreneurship infrastructures on both campuses. The UNC School of Law also intends to identify one or more economic incubators in underserved parts of North Carolina that the entrepreneurship program can support.

Read the complete Carolina Story from the UNC School of Law…

This is story number 99 in the Carolina Stories 225th Anniversary Edition magazine.

The William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust made a $1.53 million gift to support the establishment of a clinical entrepreneurship program at UNC School of Law. The program will provide rigorous, hands-on training for the next generation of public-spirited lawyers while also filling gaps in North Carolina’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. In addition to the Kenan Trust, the North Carolina General Assembly has appropriated $465,000 in recurring funds to support the program.

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    string(2687) "A shot of Peabody Hall, the home of the School of Education
A transformational gift to the UNC School of Education will create a unique fellowship program that will enable a multi-faceted approach to ensure highly effective educators serve students in rural, high-needs North Carolina communities.

State-wide data has shown that having a Carolina-trained teacher can boost student learning beyond what is expected for learning in a given school year. The largest gains were among students from underrepresented backgrounds and economically disadvantaged schools.

With a $3 million commitment over the next four years, the Fellows for Inclusive Excellence program will remove barriers and support current UNC School of Education students and recent graduates to serve as teachers and school counselors in Title 1 schools, starting in Chatham County Schools and Person County Schools.

Ultimately, the Fellows program aims to create high-quality professional learning communities that provide school students with enhanced opportunities to succeed and thrive.

The Fellows for Inclusive Excellence program was made possible by donors who wish to remain anonymous.

Students in the UNC School of Education’s Master of Arts in Teaching and Social Counseling programs will work with teachers and counselors in Chatham and Person counties’ Title 1 schools.

Once graduated, those teachers and school counselors will have the opportunity to return to those schools as new school professionals and receive professional development opportunities to help them thrive in their profession. Combined with district funding, they will also receive a generous graduated bonus, earning more money over a 3-year period if they choose to continue working in their school.

“I do not know of another program like the Fellows for Inclusive Excellence,” said Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, dean of the UNC School of Education and Alumni Distinguished Professor. “One that takes a comprehensive approach, beginning within an educator preparation program and engaging nearly every level of school personnel, to create the highest quality professional learning communities.

“The best education begins with investment in educators. The Fellows for Inclusive Excellence program exemplifies that.”

Read the complete Carolina Story…"
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    string(1769) "Medical personnel put their hands together in a huddleThe UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Center for the Business of Health (CBOH) and Acadia Healthcare have announced a partnership to fund a two-year project to create an adaptable opioid settlement playbook for state, municipal and local governments to effectively address America’s opioid epidemic.

The project’s goal is to review the opioid epidemic’s deep impact, address untested or under-researched treatment and prevention approaches, and develop best practice recommendations tailored to individual communities.

The partnership with Acadia Healthcare comes as thousands of communities across the U.S. are receiving money to support opioid recovery efforts, the result of legal settlements with opioid manufacturers and pharmacy chains. North Carolina has already received about $30 million in settlement funds of the nearly $758 million coming to North Carolina communities through 2038.

“States and municipalities are receiving these funds without any guidance on how best to deploy them,” said Professor Brad Staats, CBOH faculty director and senior associate dean for strategy and academics at UNC Kenan-Flagler. “As settlement funds flow into communities across the country and North Carolina, we hope a playbook will help guide policy and other decision makers as they allocate resources.”

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Kristina Hefferle ‘24 and Leah Morrissey ’25 spent the fall 2022 semester looking for elusive male Blue Ridge two-lined salamanders ― bright orange 6-to10-centimeter-long amphibians about the thickness of a pencil, known to hang out around the streams and lakes of the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Stumbling through mountainous terrain in the dark for hours on end, turning over rocks and leaves in muddy creek beds, and looking for an animal the size and color of a baby carrot makes having a reliable research partner crucial.

“I cannot, for the life of me, spot a salamander — but Leah can. And she might miss it when she tries to catch it, but I’m there to back her up if she needs it,” said Hefferle.

It’s the kind of teamwork that develops after a semester of close collaboration at the UNC Institute for the Environment’s Highlands Field Site — a program for a small cohort of UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduates to live and conduct research at the Highlands Biological Station in western North Carolina.

That semester, the duo gathered data on 105 salamanders, three times the number of last year’s survey. Both credit their success to their partnership.

The data compares the genetic makeup of males, their reproductive behavior and how they may change over a lifetime.

“Getting out on the trail, looking for salamanders, just really sparked that childlike curiosity about nature,” Morrissey said. “This program has convinced me to switch my major to science in the hopes of more fieldwork either during school or in a future career.”

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Advancing Rural Education

Planning State Opioid Settlements

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