Skip to main content

Good afternoon,

In early 2020, Carolina Next: Innovations for Public Good, was launched as Carolina’s comprehensive strategic plan. This week, I would like to share Operational Excellence’s work with the campus leaders who are fulfilling the objectives laid out in Strategic Initiative 5: Promote Democracy.

The overreaching goal of Promote Democracy is to make Carolina—the nation’s first public university–the beacon for principled and effective democracy worldwide. As expected, some initiatives of the Carolina Next plan were able to implement widespread changes immediately after conception, while others, like Promote Democracy, required some more deep-thinking and strategic planning to build infrastructure and a means to transformation.

Seeing an opportunity to promote the University’s mission of teaching, learning and research, Operational Excellence leveraged resources of the Carolina Together Ambassador Program to bolster the staffing and programming of Strategic Initiative 5. At this point, the strategic captain of Promote Democracy Mary-Rose Papandrea, Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law, and Nick Sengstaken, Program Coordinator for Operational Excellence and Strategic Initiatives, formed processes for ongoing collaboration between the initiative and Operational Excellence. In Fall of 2021, Amie Sigmann, Program Coordinator for CTA and Joshua Romero, Chancellor’s Fellow, joined as administrative staff.

Since these collaborations began, sizable progress has been made to tackle the ambitious and far-reaching objectives of Strategic Initiative 5. Through this partnership, the website democracy.unc.edu launched to promote existing democratic events on campus and disseminate information on voting. In addition, various professors, administrators, and key voices on democratic issues across campus have been invited and begun to serve in advisory groups for the three prongs of Promote Democracy – Civic Engagement, Civil Discourse and Interdisciplinary Research.

While supporting this Democracy Initiative, OE has been able to assist by facilitating visioning exercises in advisory meetings, producing content for the website, and otherwise engaging in project and change management to help propel ideas into infrastructure.

Please feel free to share this email with your colleagues. You can also visit our website to learn more about Operational Excellence, read my previous updates and submit feedback. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at wernoski@email.unc.edu. I read every email.

Best,
Rick


Comments are closed.