Lizzy Hazeltine is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a South Carolina native. Her experience as a Morehead-Cain Scholar and in NC Fellows, a four-year leadership development program, prompted her to stretch her concept of the possible. She believes that these two programs in tandem with UNC-CH’s dedication to public service reinforced her dedication to social innovation.

Lizzy’s exposure to entrepreneurship runs deep. She thought that everyone’s parents owned their own businesses until she was 6 years old. She encountered entrepreneurship everywhere, whether bringing lunch to her parents while they drafted elevations or watering annuals at her a friend’s family-run nursery. It wasn’t a big deal to take an idea and make it live, or so it seemed. She followed the many handy examples of bootstrapping and founded her school’s sailing team as a freshman. Later as an undergrad, she landed an internship at the Smithsonian Channel, the startup lovechild of the Smithsonian Institution and the Showtime Network, and served as the first Web Content Director for the Eve Carson Scholarship, a student-run merit scholarship for juniors at UNC-CH.

A summer living in the Andes of Peru working for Awamaki taught Lizzy the value of building human-level capabilities through dignified work, the value of experience and the need to combine thought with action. To that end, she masterminded an 18 month long independent research project on community journalism in Nova Scotia and Scotland, part of which resulted in putting 4,000 miles on her car in 30 days. The other part resulted in a 100-page honors thesis. She still debates which was more intense but knows the value of plunging into an experience head-first.