Michael Welker, Director of Policy and Research Partnerships, ncIMPACT Initiative

March 11, 2025

This year, Carolina Across 100, led by the ncIMPACT Initiative, organized three events for the University’s fourth annual Engagement Week celebration. As both Carolina Across 100 and Engagement Week have grown, the rewards of engagement for Carolina and for the communities where we work have become ever clearer.

Above all, successful engagement strengthens capacity on both sides of the campus-community relationship. This year’s events demonstrate that the University’s scholarship and student learning can be enriched and enhanced through partnership with communities. Simultaneously, communities’ contributions to Carolina’s work better equip them to address the conditions they face.

On February 26, ncIMPACT helped arrange the session How to Use Data to Assess Local Housing Needs featuring presenter Frank Muraca from the UNC Development Finance Initiative. 

DFI is the lead partner in Carolina Across 100’s Our State, Our Homes program. Announced late last year, Our State, Our Homes seeks to apply ncIMPACT’s model of community collaboration to the issue of housing. DFI is contributing its expertise in affordable housing law, finance, and development to the program to strengthen communities’ approaches to housing challenges. 

Muraca’s session provided a taste of the expertise that the DFI team offers to its clients and the Our State, Our Homes cohort. Walking through publicly available datasets including the decennial Census, the American Community Survey, and the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development’s Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) data, Muraca demonstrated the capabilities and limitations of each source.

These datasets can provide community members with insights into metrics like vacancy rates, rents, housing age, and housing cost burden within a geography. However, Muraca noted that the federal data is often limited in its timeliness and level of detail, especially for small geographies.

For that reason, data should be a starting point for community discussions about housing, rather than an end point. Muraca stressed that communities should have conversations about their data to root the numbers in local history, geography, and community members’ experiences. 

Appropriately, many of the 60 virtual attendees were community representatives in the Our State, Our Homes cohort. Though they are learning skills to quantify and analyze housing needs, these community members will also be tasked with incorporating critical local context in our collective understanding of the state’s housing challenges.

On February 27, Defining Engaged Scholarship: A Shared Vision for Carolina highlighted four campus leaders to discuss the role of engaged scholarship at Carolina.

The session’s featured speakers were Giselle Corbie, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs; Angela Kashuba, Dean of the Eshelman School of Pharmacy; Essie Torres, Director of Research Workforce Strategy and Community Partnerships; and Jeff Warren, Executive Director of the NC Collaboratory. ncIMPACT Director Anita Brown-Graham moderated.

Panelists offered a variety of examples of how engaged scholarship fits into the University’s work. Torres highlighted that community engagement in research is at the center of Carolina’s strategic research roadmap, while Corbie and Kashuba discussed how products of engaged scholarship contribute to faculty appointment, promotion, and tenure decisions in the same way that traditional scholarly products do. Warren, who works closely with the General Assembly and state agencies, said that the Collaboratory serves as the “front porch” for external stakeholders looking for evidence to inform policy decisions that impact the state.

But the panelists also suggested that engaged scholarship strengthens Carolina’s scholarly culture in larger ways.

Warren told the story of a family from Marion who recently brought a sick child to Chapel Hill to participate in Collaboratory-funded research on a mosquito-borne illness found in the Appalachian region. Warren said he was inspired by the family’s commitment, driving across the state shortly after their lives were disrupted by Hurricane Helene to be part of research that will benefit many other North Carolinians.

Corbie added that anecdotes like Warren’s are “catalytic” in inspiring more people at Carolina to pursue engaged scholarship. As more researchers seek out engaged projects, they get exposed to the experiences and expertise of community members, which allows them to innovate by asking new questions or applying knowledge in new ways. In turn, community members can shape the research in ways that are more directly responsive to their needs and context.

The work can be challenging and time-consuming to do well, but this cycle can ultimately benefit all involved: more innovation in scholarship and more results in communities, producing more return on the public resources invested into the University.

Engagement at Carolina is not just for the University’s faculty and researchers. As the annual POV Challenge demonstrates, engagement can help students both enrich their own learning and provide benefit to North Carolina’s communities.

Now in its fourth year, the POV Challenge invites students to conduct research about a major issue facing the state and use their findings to generate a creative product. This year, students were asked to respond to one of three prompts about housing as a tie-in to Our State, Our Homes.

A total of 12 teams submitted projects for this year’s competition. The students who participated included 15 undergraduates and 22 graduate students from 24 distinct disciplines across campus. More than 30 campus and community partners also volunteered to serve as judges.

Graduate students Samantha Hamburger, Sara Honaker, Marah Maita, and Sophia Ryan won one of two $500 prizes for a story map that examined intersections between affordable housing, mobile homes, and hurricanes. 

The students are currently taking a public health course on measuring health care access, and they saw an opportunity to apply skills and frameworks they were learning in class to a different issue. The research process exposed the team to intersecting challenges in housing, which led them to find a topic area that is often overlooked. 

Hamburger said that narrowing the focus to mobile homes and hurricanes was a meaningful learning experience and one of her favorite parts of the POV Challenge. “We started with an initial idea and then iteratively looked at data and trends until we narrowed the focus on what we saw as a gap,” Hamburger said. “We hope to introduce a new perspective to the conversation and highlight intersectional ways of thinking.”

The POV Challenge asks students to grow their knowledge and make use of their skills and talents, but by doing so, they also serve as a resource and inspiration for communities. 

Undergraduates Gage Austin and Kiersten Johnson won the other top prize for music-driven short film telling four stories of individuals facing housing challenges. Multiple judges who reviewed Johnson and Austin’s submission later asked for permission to share their film through their organizations’ social media pages and educational programs. Their project – along with all the other student submissions – will also be shared as resources for the Our State, Our Homes cohort.

“If even one person feels more informed, more empathetic, or more motivated to advocate for change after watching, then we’ve accomplished something meaningful,” Johnson said.