Achievers
Gov. Roy Cooper has nominated Corey Viers of Winston-Salem to the North Carolina Mining Commission as a representative of the mining industry. Viers is the vice president of operations support for the Vulcan Materials Company. Viers currently serves on the Mining Commission and is being nominated for his third term.
Also, Gov. Cooper has appointed Patricia A. Brown of Winston-Salem to the North Carolina Arts Council as a member at-large. Brown is a member of the Board of Visitors for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Brown worked as the honorary co-chairwoman for their $75 million campaign for the advancement office of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
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Truliant Federal Credit Union has announced that Kimberly Bullock Gatling, an associate director of its board of directors, has been named to the 2023 “Legal Elite” list by Business North Carolina magazine.
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She has been with Fox Rothschild for more than two decades and is a partner and the chief diversity and inclusion officer for the law firm. Gatling was honored in the area of intellectual law.
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Truliant Federal Credit Union has announced that Callisha Flack has been selected to “Crash the GAC” in Washington, D.C., later this month.
Crash the GAC takes place at the Credit Union National Association’s Governmental Affairs Conference. It allows young professionals and emerging leaders to “crash” the event and take a deep dive into the world of advocacy.
Flack, who is associated products and services coordinator at Truliant, was chosen from 233 applications. It was Crash the GAC’s largest ever applicant pool, and a total of 58 crashers were chosen from 48 states.
She will attend with financial assistance from Truliant’s Schaefer Legacy of Leadership Scholarship. Created in honor of former Truliant President and CEO Marc Schaefer, the professional development scholarship is dedicated to ensuring that credit union values are instilled in its workforce.
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Nine outstanding public school principals, including Donna Bledsoe, Cedar Ridge Elementary of Surry County Schools, have been selected as regional Wells Fargo North Carolina Principals of the Year who will now compete for the state title of 2023 Wells Fargo North Carolina Principal of the Year. The winner will succeed the 2022 recipient, Patrick Greene, principal of Greene Central High School.
The Wells Fargo Principal of the Year Award was introduced in 1984 to recognize the critical role of the principal in establishing a culture that supports the pursuit and achievement of academic excellence in North Carolina schools. The 2023 Wells Fargo North Carolina Principal of the Year will be announced May 19.
Funds
Venture capital firm Equilibrium Impact Ventures is supporting women and business owners of color through major investments beginning this spring. Founding partners Adrian Smith, Shante Williams and Kasem Rodriguez Mohsen are leading the fund that will deploy checks ranging from $50,000 to $75,000 each to North Carolina-based, mission-driven startups to support sustainable social impact. Historically, underrepresented founders have faced systemic barriers in attempts to secure venture capital, with less than 2% of VC funding allocated to startups with diverse leaders.
EQIV will allocate 100% of all venture investments to Black, Brown and women founders with scalable businesses focused on issues such as access to healthcare, food security, economic mobility and climate resilience. The fund started in 2021 with a $250,000 investment from The Winston-Salem Foundation. EQIV says early rounds of deployment, which will begin in April, will focus on businesses based in the Piedmont Triad region — home to 12 counties and anchored by the cities of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Partners aim to invest into five companies this year.
Diversity, equity and inclusion investments to Black founders flooded the market following the death of George Floyd in 2020. Those historic gains, however, all but vanished by the end of 2022 as interest rates and inflation rose — Black businesses saw a 45% drop in financing. Additionally, a study by the Aspen Institute found that lack of investment in Latino-owned small businesses contributes a $900 billion cost to the U.S. economy.
For information, interested founders can visit www.eqiv.vc to complete the contact form or email info@eqiv.vc.
Grants
The National Science Foundation awarded the 2023 NSF Early CAREER Award to Elham Ghadiri who teaches inorganic chemistry at Wake Forest University and recently began a new course that focuses on nanochemistry in energy and medicine.
The grant for $650,000 will be distributed over five years.
On weekday afternoons, Ghadiri can be found inside the laser lab in Salem Hall creating laser tools to study ultrafast photochemical and photophysical reactions in sustainable materials.
These complex photochemical reactions are initiated by light and are hard for scientists to visualize because they occur in what’s called femtosecond time (a millionth of a billionth of a second).
With the funding from the foundation, Ghadiri will be able to find out more.
This is the second time within the past year that Wake Forest University professors have won the prestigious NSF CAREER Awards. In April, the University announced three faculty members received the honor: chemistry professor John Lukesh, math and statistics Professor Abbey Bourdon and engineering professor Erin Henslee.
On the Move
Ronda Cooper and Paul Whan have joined Blue Door Group Real Estate, a real estate firm headquartered in Winston-Salem, as affiliate brokers.