Like many rural North Carolina counties, Lenoir County has both a shortage of employers able to pay middle-class wages and a shortage of employees eligible for such jobs. To help meet workforce development goals, inform the county’s efforts to retain and attract employers, and improve its workforce … Read more

Sejal Zota is the School of Government Immigration Law Specialist. Can community development organizations provide down payment assistance to immigrant populations? Can they provide housing rehabilitation assistance? Can they extend water and sewer services? In recent weeks, we have been asked wheth … Read more

Eileen Youens is a School of Government faculty member. In my last two posts (here and here), I’ve discussed the efforts of the City Council of Emerald City, North Carolina, to support its local businesses by adopting a local preference policy.  Purchasing Officer Scarecrow has just finished reviewi … Read more

Eileen Youens is a School of Government faculty member. In my last post, I talked about the efforts of the City Council of Emerald City, North Carolina, to support its local businesses by adopting a local preference policy. We now rejoin our friends in Emerald City, where the City Council has asked … Read more

Andrew Guinn is a graduate student in the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning and a Community Campus Partnership intern in Caswell and Lenoir Counties. Community-Campus Partnership interns are working to facilitate collaboration between the Caswell County Partnership for Children (PFC) and … Read more

Eileen Youens is a School of Government faculty member. This is the first in a series of posts on local purchasing preferences. Hard times have come to Emerald City, North Carolina.  People are out of work, no one is buying or building anything, and it doesn’t look like things will get better anytim … Read more

Will Lambe is the Director of the Community & Economic Development Program and the Community-Campus Partnership. For the last several months, a team of UNC graduate students from the Department of City and Regional Planning have been working with Professor Nichola Lowe and healthcare employers i … Read more

Rick Morse is a School of Government faculty member. A few months ago Tyler Mulligan and I had the opportunity to work with Bravo Company of the 98th Civil Affairs Battalion of the U.S. Army, stationed at Ft. Bragg. They asked for our help in developing their analytical skill-set in preparation for … Read more

Suzanne Julian is a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in Public Administration. She is currently working with the STEP leadership team in Pamlico County as part of the Carolina Economic Revitalization Corps program. All this week at Pamlico Community College, educators from … Read more

Joy Jackson is a graduate student in UNC’s  Master of Public Administration program and a CCP intern working in Caswell and Lenoir Counties. Recently, I was told a fun piece of trivia about Kinston, NC. “Do you know the song ‘Get Up’ by James Brown?” a resident asked me. After I replied yes, she con … Read more