One class, 21 students, and $10,000 to award and distribute to nonprofits in our state.

Class pictured outside the UNC School of Public Health

For those of you who are reading, this blog is going to document the story of a group of UNC students who are all currently enrolled in the course HBEH 611: Philanthropy as a Tool for Social Change. This class is structured so that a group of students are to serve on a foundation board funded by the Learning by Giving Foundation. The class has $10,000 and an entire to semester to pick an issue, send out a Request for Proposal, receive and read grant requests, and ultimately, select nonprofits to fund.

We are over one month into the semester and we are getting started on the process. We spent the first few weeks examining philanthropy in an academic sense - learning about topics such as critiques about philanthropy and needs-assessments for various issues.

Class pictured outside the UNC School of Public Health

We have spent the past few weeks working on creating a mission statement and a focus area for what type of organizations we want to fund, as well as writing a request for proposals and writing the application. The class wants to help out the refugee and immigrant community within the state of North Carolina. Since we are a university for the state of North Carolina, we are extending our request for proposals to the entire state.

The students in this class come from various academic tracks from Business to Journalism to Public Health. Each student is in this class because of their passion for philanthropy and this blog will feature the stories of each student and why they decided to take this course.

In the upcoming posts, we will continue to keep our readers updated on our process of awarding grant money to the nonprofits and introduce the students in our class.

Thank you for reading!