North Carolina Rising
NC Rising: Tar Heel Made
Tar Heel Grown looks at how farmers are finding new crops to help revitalize communities.
North Carolina Rising identifies and highlights the many success stories of North Carolina's rural areas that once thrived on crops such as tobacco but are now transitioning into a new global economy. This in-depth project has spanned several years. In August 2010 UNC-TV began a weekly series of reports on North Carolina Now, UNC-TV's flagship public affairs series. The reports feature unique economic development projects happening across the state and seek to raise awareness of effective revitalization efforts so that they might be replicated in other areas of the state and beyond.
This project is funded by the Golden LEAF Foundation, a nonprofit corporation created in 1999 to receive one-half of the funds coming to North Carolina from a master settlement agreement with cigarette manufacturers. In turn, the Foundation is helping North Carolinians make the transition from a tobacco-dependent economy through grants and investments that will positively affect the long-term economic advancement of the state. Golden LEAF gives priority in its grantmaking to tobacco-dependent and economically distressed counties.