Working with the Burmese immigrant community in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, partnering with the Special Olympics of Orange County, developing a state-wide consortium of future K-12 teachers who take the practice of service-learning into public schools and addressing the state’s major health and healthcare issues are a few of the public service efforts recognized by the university this year.
The Carolina Center for Public Service recently recognized those and other initiatives at its annual service awards.
Pam Silberman, a research associate professor in the School of Public Health, received the Ned Brooks Award for Public Service. Silberman, who is also president of the North Carolina Institute of Medicine, was recognized for research that has led to legislation including the state’s child health insurance law, dental care access and insurance coverage for low-income populations.
The Carolina Center for Public Service awards, which honors campus units for service to North Carolina, went to the Student Coalition for Advocacy in Literacy Education (SCALE) and the UNC School of Law Center for Civil Rights.
SCALE was honored for Learning to Teach, Learning to Serve, a statewide consortium of public and private universities designed to develop a generation of K-12 teachers who have extensive experience with service-learning. The UNC School of Law Center for Civil Rights was recognized for its work representing several communities in Moore County advocating to address annexation issues.
The Robert E. Bryan Public Service Award — recognizing individual students and faculty for exemplary public service efforts — went to graduate students Megan Ellenson and Thanh-Thu Tran, faculty member Flora Lu and staff member Hannah Gill.
Ellenson, a graduate student in the School of Public Health, has worked with and for the Burmese immigrant community in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. After working as part of a team project to identify issues faced by these recent refugees, she wrote a grant to support the children’s participation in a school-based art-therapy program.
Tran, a second-year student in the School of Medicine, is honored for her work in initiating and nurturing the involvement of the school with Orange County’s Special Olympics program. Lu, assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, is being recognized for her community-based research course on social justice. Undergraduates in Dr. Lu’s course have worked on issues ranging from assessing hog waste technologies to investigating the feasibility of the university purchasing locally produced food.
Gill, assistant director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas in the Center for Global Initiatives, was honored for her work in developing the Latin American Immigrant Perspectives course.