Campus People, Groups Honored for Public Service

Posted on March 24, 2004

For all they do, all year long – from giving financial assistance in the community to providing food for those with HIV and AIDS – staff, faculty, students and organizations are getting a pat on the back.

The Carolina Center for Public Service is honoring the initiatives and outreach efforts led by members of the University through its annual awards given for exemplary service benefiting North Carolina. Eight individuals and organizations will be recognized at the center’s awards program on April 8.

Michael Stegman, MacRae professor of public policy and business and chair of the department of public policy, will receive the second annual Ned Brooks Award for Public Service.

The award, which recognizes a UNC faculty or staff member who has a sustained record of service to the community, honors Stegman for making his teaching and research relevant to solving the problems of everyday people. Stegman created and now directs the Center for Community Capitalism, based in the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, which applies private-sector knowledge to revitalizing distressed communities.

The center will present three Office of the Provost Public Service Awards, which honor University units, departments or student organizations for their service to the state. This year’s recipients are the N.C. Institute for Public Health, based in the School of Public Health; the Carolina Environmental Program; and the Student Health Action Coalition, which involves students in the schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health and social work.

Two students and two staff members will receive the Robert E. Bryan Public Service Award, which recognizes individual students, faculty and staff for exemplary public service efforts.

One of the two students, senior Megan Davy, is being honored for her creation of Project OpenHand, a Chapel Hill project that enables members of the UNC community to prepare and deliver home-cooked meals to residents of Alamance and Chatham counties who are living with HIV and AIDS.

Graduate student David Edwards is being recognized for work that brought together pre-medical and nursing students with mothers and children at the Carolina Children’s Clinic in Raleigh’s Salvation Army Shelter.

Katrina Coble, administrative manager in the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science, is being honored for her work as chair of the Universitywide blood drive. This year, she led one of UNC’s most successful drives.

Elizabeth Millwood, an administrative assistant for the Center for the Study of the American South, is being recognized for her work with grassroots oral history research in the state.

More than 50 individuals and University departments were nominated for the awards. A committee of students, faculty and staff narrowed the list.

“I think what we continue to see here is that there is a commitment to serving the state that reaches into every part of the University,” said CCPS Director Lynn Blanchard ’85 (MPH).

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