@work on the economy:

 

 

 

 

 

Creating a Future Workforce....on Film   

 

 

There’s no business like the film business in North Carolina.  Since the film business first came to North Carolina in 1980, film productions have generated more than $7 billion in economic impact and thousands of jobs.   

 

UNCW has taken a series of steps to get students interested in working in the film industry.

 

The most recent activity was a full scale film festival that drew 375 people to the campus. The 2012 Visions Film Festival and Conference provided aspiring student filmmakers with both an inspiration and exposure to showcase their potential.

 

What is unique about UNCW’s Vision Conference?  It gives students a chance to put into practice what they have learned in the classroom, while building the state’s film workforce. Viewers not only get to see interesting films; film professionals and investors get a chance to see the next generation of filmmakers.  

 

The Conference draws upon the skills and abilities of 300 film majors and premajors, who each year produce about 500 motion picture projects.  This year’s attendees came from across the state as well as from New York, Chicago and Michigan. 

 

The conference is a recognition of the role that a university can play in the burgeoning film industry, which this year employs approximately 27,000 workers.  In 2011, production companies spent more than $220 million, up from $75 million in 2010.  No wonder some people in “the business” call North Carolina “Hollywood East."

 

Since 1980, North Carolina has hosted more than 800 motion pictures, 14 network and cable television series, and thousands of national and regional television commercials across the state, with film degree programs at UNCW and UNC School of the Arts.  Approximately 2,000 professionals, and a million square feet of studio space and make North Carolina film-friendly backdrop for a production of any size or budget. And with film degree and programs at UNCW and UNC School of the Arts, we are growing some of the talent needed to keep the business alive and thriving.  

 

The state has created tax incentives and built key soundstages to add to the scenic beauty that makes North Carolina an attractive place to make films. Add a new cadre of skilled, creative filmmakers to that mix and someday they may be calling Hollywood “NC East.”

 

 

@work in the community:

 

 

 

UNC Schools Get National Recognition for Community Service

 

  

Our communities face big challenges. What they don’t always have are big assets to draw on to respond to them. The 2007 Report of the UNC Tomorrow Commission encouraged all UNC campuses to find ways to bring their assets to bear on responding to the needs of the State.

 

The work by campuses is starting to pay off, most importantly in good work on tough community problems. And UNC schools are beginning to achieve national recognition for their work as well. The latest evidence? Three of the five schools nationally selected as “regional winners” of the 2012 Outreach Scholarship Engagement Award are part of the UNC system.

 

East Carolina, NC A&T State University and NC State are being recognized for outstanding community service programming, for programs that help their communities reduce domestic violence, reduce illegal drug use, train people for jobs, reduce crime, improve health  and protect the environment. Their work provides clear evidence of how universities are working  in partnership with communities to solve tough challenges.

 

ECU is the “South Region” award winner for its work through the Lucille W. Gorham Intergenerational Community Center, which provides comprehensive community-based services to Greenville residents. Working with the City of Greenville, Pitt Community College and other community organizations, the Center hosts community meetings, conducts community-based research, assists with strategic planning and provides direct services, including educational programs, parenting classes, help for juvenile offenders and drug abusers, health screenings and job training and apprenticeships.

 

NCA&T State University has been selected as the winner in the “1890 Region” for its partnership with NC State to build a sustainable local food economy in North Carolina that works for farmers and consumers. Through the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, the universities worked in partnership with the NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Sciences to help balance concerns of the agriculture and environmental communities.  The groups created a new partnership called “NC Choices,” which now includes the NC Farm Bureau, Environmental Defense and hundreds of nonprofits, businesses associations and state agencies, working together to bring together meat producers, processors, food professionals and food buyers.

 

The regional winners “exemplify the broad principles of outreach and engagement with the community and surrounding region embraced today by the public university community,” said Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, or APLU. “We salute these outstanding initiatives that stand as model engagement programs for colleges and universities nationwide.”

 

In all eleven UNC campuses are designated by the Carnegie Foundation as “engaged universities” with intentional efforts underway to respond to and work with their surrounding communities on key challenges.  

 

For those selected as regional winners this year, the next step in recognition is a few months away. One of the projects will be selected to receive the national C. Peter Magrath University Community Engagement Award at the annual meeting of APLU in November

 

@work in the world:

 

 

NC Global Economy is Hot, Hot, Hot!

 

 

 

How hot is the global economy in North Carolina, and where is it “hottest”?

 

That’s the question the Center for International Understanding (CIU) http://ciu.northcarolina.edu/, a program of UNC General Administration, is answering through a new interactive tool.

 

The “Heat Map,” http://ciu.northcarolina.edu/global-heatmap/, developed by CIU with huge technical assistance from SAS and strong support from the NC Department of Commerce and other agencies, is a first-of-its-kind database that offers a county-by-county look at the impact of the global economy in North Carolina on jobs and education, so that anyone anywhere in NC can get a look at the global economy from 53 different data angles, including how many jobs in that county come from global-owned companies or exports to other countries, how many people from which kind of backgrounds live or go to school there or how their counties are connected to the rest of the world.

 

The idea of the map is to help local policy-makers and business people determine how they can most effectively respond to and take advantage of the global economy:  “I hope this can be a policy tool for North Carolina to figure out how to  make good business decisions about where they do to do more exports and how they help their county grow,” says Ted Abernathy, executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board. “For example, counties that have more foreign-born residents have more startups – statistically foreign-born people are more entrepreneurial. How can counties take advantage of that?”  

 

Maurice Smith, head of the Local Government Federal Credit Union, which helped sponsor development of the Heat Map, said it is in the interest of businesses like his to have more globally-aware citizens and policy makers: “We have more than $1 billion invested in North Carolina. We have a vested interest in making sure we have people here who understand the world. The more people understand the information that is in this heat map, the more successful our state economy will be.”

 

The project is part of a UNC effort designed to ensure that it provides NC policymakers, students and faculty with information about where the state is and where it could go in the future. “NC’s economy and future are dependent on the rest of the world,” said Tom Ross, president of UNC. “UNC has an economic and moral responsibility to make sure our students and others have the information they need to work with the rest of the world.”

 

Clearly there are huge opportunities for communities who think about some recent national student findings:

 

·         Currently only about 1% of US companies export; half of those to only one country.

 

·         The fastest growing markets are outside of the US. Exports from North Carolina grew by 8% last year, about three times the rate of growth of the overall economy.

 

·         One half of students graduating from college say they expect to work in at least one other country during their lifetime.

 

·         38% of US scientists, and a disproportionate percentage of those considered “highly productive” grew up outside of the US.

 

Blending those trends with county specific data can give any county or state leader an advantage in solving some of the myriad of challenges they face. CIU executive director Adam Hartzell says he hopes there will be widespread interest in the tool: “We want to encourage policymakers to find ways to ‘light up the map,’ intentionally creating new policies that make their local economy more successful by understanding where they can do more.”

 

Besides SAS and the Local Government Federal Credit Union, other sponsors of the map include the Moise and Khayrallah Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation and Quintiles. 

 

 

 

Fact of the Month

 

 

The Carolina Consortium enables academic libraries in North and South Carolina to leverage their bulk buying power to negotiate for better pricing of electronic information including scholarly journals and databases.  In 2008, the cost avoidance achieved by the Carolina Consortium just for UNC System campus libraries was $92,545,201.65.  Last year, the UNC System cost avoidance achieved by negotiating for e-resources was collectively over $100 million.  The consortium works with major journal publishers such as Oxford, Cambridge, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier as well as database publishers such as Ebsco, ProQuest, and Gale, and multiple e-book vendors.    

 

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