From Carolina Counts to Carolina Creates. This time I’m looking at a student-led initiative that makes worthy (albeit incomplete) strides toward a more connected campus.
Led by the Chancellor’s Student Innovation Team (“CSIT”), Carolina Creates targets three issues: limited communication on campus, poor collaboration between student groups and insufficient access to knowledge about resources on campus.
Talk of collaboration reminds me of the joke I was told in Israel about two Jews stranded on a desert island who had built themselves three synagogues. Why three, you ask? Simple: one Orthodox, one Reform and one that neither will step foot in.
Rather than work under the existing frameworks, we students like to start our own thing. Three separate UNC groups run volunteer trips to Honduras during Spring Break, for example.
Successes like UNC’s “One Effort: Haiti,” which coordinated campus efforts toward a common goal, are rarer than you might like to think.
So you can’t accuse CSIT, chaired by junior Hudson Vincent, of having a dearth of ambition.
With a mission of “creation through connection,” they propose a two-pronged approach to achieve their goal. One part is virtual, through a website which serves as an information source, crowd-funding platform and event calendar. The other is physical, bringing arts, culture and global initiatives out across campus in front of wider audiences.
Some of the ideas are original, such as regular music performances in public spaces across campus and building UNC-specific online fundraising tools for student groups.
But by and large these initiatives involve trying to combine or improve things done elsewhere.
