Establishing the Wolfpack Student Initiative
Harold Pettigrew talks about creating the Wolfpack Student Initiative (later retitled Stafford Student Leadership Endowment) to honor NC State students with an annual scholarship based on demonstrated financial need and leadership in student organizations.
Interview on 2012-11-02 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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The biggest one that comes to mind has to be the Wolfpack Student Initiative, or what was called the Wolfpack Student Initiative.
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It was recently renamed the Tom Stafford Student Endowment, I believe. That was probably the biggest one and that took us a little time to develop.
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So during that time a couple of things came together. One, what's a way that we can create an avenue that students can be involved in the most pressing issue
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that we generally deal with, which is financial aid; two, how could we support and memorialize students that would have unfortunate scenarios happen during the year,
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those two things coming together. The third thing that kind of came together, at the time we had the chance to go to other campuses,
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and while I probably wouldn't speak glowingly of Georgia Tech in any other ways because of their involvement in the ACC,
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the level of student involvement there is tremendous. At the time at least they had a great model for how students were not only active
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in organizations but were very entrepreneurial and independent in how they operated. So seeing that experience coupled
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with the other needs and things that I mentioned, it really planted the seeds for what we created in the Wolfpack Student Initiative.
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The independence we saw at Georgia Tech-we were there for a conference, I think it was the ACC Leadership Conference-the amount of independence
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that we witnessed there and them just describing some of the programs, activities, and all of what they do, it really planted the seeds
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for what we did with the Student Initiative. So those things coming together, pulled together a group of students to help shape
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what the program would look like, from the name to working with the university advancement, to create a fund that was not simply something
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in student government but something that would be institutionalized within the university. So year in, year out, whether Harold was there or not,
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years after it would be something that could exist and continue to grow, so that's why we wanted to create
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an endowment versus just simply scholarship funds that we gave out every year.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
