The Hub (HOPE)

The Center for Community Capital (CCC) administers the Hub for Opportunity, Prosperity, and Entrepreneurship (HOPE) with generous funding from the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. The Hub enhances the position UNC already has as a national leader on issues related to economic opportunity, financial inclusion, and entrepreneurship by advancing knowledge, informing policy, and sparking critical conversations on- and off-campus. The Hub builds on the work that CCC has been doing for over two decades to connect faculty and students from around the University to each other and other stakeholders working on these critical issues.

Current HOPE programs include:

• The CCC HOPE Graduate Student Fellowship recruits a cohort of masters students from across UNC every year who are passionate about economic opportunity and social justice research. Fellows are matched to ongoing research projects, paired with mentors, build community through seminars, and receive professional development training.
• The Carolina Inequality Lab, a new group that seeks to bring together social scientists and scholars from the humanities to share ideas and present research in an informal, ad hoc setting. This group supports inter-disciplinary thinking on the critical problem of inequality and the mechanisms at work at the metropolitan scale.
• The Opportunity in Redevelopment Workshop Course is a student-designed independent study capstone course in the Department of City and Regional Planning advised by CCC Director Dr. Roberto Quercia. The course, in the style of a professional workshop or design studio, creates space for students to not only consider what opportunities for shared prosperity exist in urban redevelopment projects, but to move beyond critique and analysis and grapple with the creation of practical yet imperfect solutions.

For more information about this new program, or to get involved, email communitycapital@unc.edu.