Chancellor Holden Thorp doesn’t want his ideas on innovation to be limited to the University. He wants the town to incorporate them as well.
Thorp was the keynote speaker Saturday at Chapel Hill 2020’s Innovation Unconference, which was both a brainstorming event and the latest effort to increase student involvement in forming a new comprehensive plan aimed at guiding town growth for the next decade.
Officials said the event’s on-campus location would likely increase student involvement in the project, but while several students attended Thorp’s speech, not one attended the afternoon small group meetings.
Before the event, planners said they hoped to gather information on what students want included in the comprehensive plan and ways to keep UNC graduates in Chapel Hill.
Suzanne Fleishman, member of Fair, Local, Organic Food — a campus organization focused on food sustainability and one of the few groups that attended Thorp’s speech — said members of the organization wanted to gain insight on the Chapel Hill 2020 process.
She said the meeting’s 9:30 a.m. start time and the all-day length might have deterred students, but she hopes more students will get involved in the future.
“I can understand that most students might not be interested in how Chapel Hill will work in 2020 … although we might not be students then, there are going to be other students,” she said.
Thorp spoke about local start-ups and UNC’s influence on entrepreneurship in Chapel Hill.
“All of us relate to the community in multiple ways, and I think our process will be successful if it accounts for all of that,” he said in his speech.
