Greetings Fellow Tar Heels!
As this academic year and my term as the chair of ACRED come to a close, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on all of the positive things happening on campus and beyond.
As you know, the Campaign for Carolina is well underway and the University has already raised a staggering $2 billion of the $4.25 Billion dollar goal. While that is an amazing accomplishment, we still have much work to do and need your help to do it! You can support the campaign by supporting any program that you are passionate about. While there are too many to list, a few that you may be hearing about this year are the Project Uplift at 50 celebration, which aims to raise more than one million dollars to endow the program, and the Stone Center’s seat naming campaign.
There have certainly been issues of concern for students and alumni over the course of the last year. While the University has a long way to go, there are some wonderful programs on campus that aim to get at the heart of the concerns many of us have, specifically the recruitment, retention and success of students. For this newsletter, we wanted to highlight a couple of the amazing programs on campus: the Carolina LatinX Collaborative and the MALES program.
We hope you will be moved by the students involved, proud of our staff’s dedication and inspired to support these programs with your talents and resources.
Finally, I want to say thank you for allowing me to give back and serve the University as chair of ACRED. Our mission, to create deeper partnerships between alumni of color and the University, has been successful because of you. During my tenure as chair of ACRED, we’ve held alumni engagement events in New York City, Miami, Charlotte, Raleigh, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. We advocated for the LatinX Center. We hosted a webinar on estate planning and raised funds for Tar Heel Preview Day — a program that exposes middle school males of color to Carolina (and often is their first exposure to college).
ACRED was also proud to collaborate with the Carolina Asia Center and the Southern Oral History Project to create the Southern Mix, a program that aims to memorialize the voices of Asians in the South.
I want to thank our amazing ACRED members for stepping up to the plate to make these events possible. And I want to thank all of the alumni who have hosted, co-hosted and supported our events.
I point to our accomplishments not to boast — but to let you know that there is room for your talents. No matter where you are, you can help spread the good news of what’s happening at Carolina!
Thank you.
Reyna S. Walters-Morgan ’99