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Private Donations Up; Second-Best Year Ever

Carolina received $287.4 million in gifts from private donors in fiscal 2012. The total marked the University’s second-best year in history and topped the previous fiscal year’s total of $277 million — then the second-highest total — by 4 percent.

Longer term commitments also rose for the year that ended June 30, to $331.4 million from $305.6 million — an 8 percent increase. Commitments include pledges as well as gifts.

Commitments in 2012 also helped the University create nine endowed professorships and a total of 95 undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships. Carolina had more than 78,000 donors for the year.

Some examples:

  • A $2.5 million gift from Fred Eshelman ’72 will expand the Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s research programs and help transform the classroom experience for pharmacy students. The gift brings Eshelman’s total support for the school to more than $35 million. Eshelman is the founder of Pharmaceutical Product Development Inc. The school was named for him in 2008.
  • A $1 million commitment from Nelson Schwab III ’67, business executive and former chair of the Board of Trustees, endowed the “Nelson Schwab ‘Say Yes’ Fund” in the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and initially will provide $50,000 a year to benefit faculty in fine arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences departments. The funds will support teaching and scholarly activities, seek to build morale, enable strategic planning or realize other goals or initiatives envisioned by department chairs.
  • An $850,000, three-year grant from The Duke Endowment will enable the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health in the School of Medicine to integrate primary care into its mental health care programs for persons in Orange, Person and Chatham counties, creating a “health home” for those patients. A health- and wellness-programming component will support health lifestyle change and prevent chronic disease.
  • A $1.39 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will expand digital humanities in a transformative way at UNC, including the hiring of new faculty and the support of graduate students in this emerging field. The grant will help UNC create the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative, a $5 million effort that will explore the application of cutting-edge digital technologies to humanities research, teaching, graduate training and public engagement. Digital humanities is an area of research, teaching and knowledge creation at the intersection of computing and humanities. It is interdisciplinary and embraces a variety of topics, ranging from curating online collections to mining information from large data sets.
  • Two contributions totaling $2.7 million from the Kathrine R. Everett Charitable Trust will support the School of Law. The first gift of $2.4 million will create an endowment to fund at least six full-tuition Everett Chancellors’ Scholarships for promising law students from North Carolina. A second complementary gift of $300,000 will endow the Everett Enrichment Fund, which will provide program support of all students awarded Chancellors’ Scholarships at the law school.
  • A $666,000 gift from Don and Jennifer Holzworth created the Don and Jennifer Holzworth Distinguished Professorship Fund in the Gillings School of Global Public Health. The professorship supports a professor who is a global leader in research and policies for improving the world’s access to clean water and sanitation. Don Holzworth founded Constella Group and Expression Analysis Inc. Jennifer Holzworth was Constella’s chief financial officer during its start-up phase and has focused on volunteer work, most recently with emergency and other medical services in Vail, Colo.

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