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New members of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will spend the week after Commencement on the road, getting to know the state and its people a little better. For five days, May 12-16, the 36 participants in the 11th Tar Heel Bus Tour will travel more than 1,100 miles, crossing the state from Morehead City in the east to Cherokee in the west. At numerous stops along the way, they will find out more about their students’ hometowns and meet people involved in programs and projects with a Carolina connection.

On Day 1 (Monday, May 12) of the tour, for example, they will visit a hair salon in Rocky Mount that is part of the Breaking Free! project, in which hair stylists are trained to talk with their customers about breast cancer and distribute information about mammograms and breast exams. Carolina Community Network, based at UNC-Chapel Hill, provided a grant to fund the project in 2007. On Day 3, bus tour participants will visit with partners in the Pathways to Prosperity Initiative, a demonstration project in Charlotte coordinated by Carolina’s Center for Community Capital that seeks to move people from public housing to prosperity. For the first time ever, the Tar Heel Bus Tour will meet up with its N.C. State counterpart, the Connecting in North Carolina tour. New Carolina and State faculty will have dinner together Tuesday (May 13) in Concord.

Other stops include UNC’s Institute for Marine Sciences in Morehead City; Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro; an organic farm near Asheville; and a camp for children with special needs in Randleman, operated by the Petty family of NASCAR fame. For the full itinerary, visit http://www.unc.edu/bustour/ .

In addition to helping faculty gain a better understanding of North Carolina and the people the University serves, another goal of the Tar Heel Bus Tour is to promote scholarship and service to benefit the state and its residents. After his bus tour in 2000, Kurt Ribisl of the School of Public Health received a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Foundation grant to fund the Eastern North Carolina Youth Empowerment Program. Conducted from 2000-2003, it identified 100 youth groups statewide that were asking their schools to become tobacco-free.  

The idea of a faculty bus tour was born in the mid-1990s, when the Public Service Roundtable, a group of volunteer faculty, staff and students, recommended bus tours of the state as a way to teach new faculty about North Carolina, its needs and where most of Carolina’s undergraduates grow up.

News Services contact: Susan Houston, (919) 962-8415 or susan_houston@unc.edu

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