Joe Craver came to Carolina in 1959 from Shelby High School in Shelby, NC. His nomination described him as “one of the finest students ever to attend Shelby High School” and “a fine leader in the making.”

Leadership soon became synonymous with Craver at Carolina. He co-captained the football team, received the Frank Porter Graham Award for Excellence and the Patterson Medal, and was inducted into the Order of the Golden Fleece. While a student at UNC School of Medicine, he received the A. Price Heusner Award and was elected to ΑΩΑ.

For 31 years Craver was a cardiothoracic surgeon and professor of surgery at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. He made a difference to more than 12,000 patients and their families on whom he performed corrective, open-heart surgery, as well as in the lives of 93 cardiac surgical fellows who trained under him. His professional success and personal commitment to teaching led the Cravers to establish the Joseph M. and Amelia Wilson Craver Teaching Excellence Awards and Professorship at the UNC School of Medicine in 2004 and 2006.

Now Craver brings his leadership back to the place that encouraged its development: the Morehead Foundation. He is the first Morehead to combine his talents, hard work, and deep feelings of gratitude to make a planned gift of over $1 million to the Morehead Scholarship Foundation.

When Craver and his wife considered their retirement plans, he realized they were not as dependent on his IRA/401(k) funds as he had always expected them to be. However, Craver worked hard to build those funds and still wanted to see them grow. Even more, he wanted to see this well-earned asset make a difference in someone’s life and not be largely lost to taxes. His persistent research led to a creative idea.

Craver purchased a commercial annuity within his retirement fund and named the Morehead Scholarship Foundation as a charitable beneficiary. The assets designated for the Foundation have a value of $1 million. Upon Craver’s death, the proceeds will be added to the Morehead Scholarship Foundation’s permanent endowment. After the principal is received by the Foundation, the annual payout from the new endowment funds will support additional awards for Scholars. Craver also purchased a life insurance policy to protect the value of the future principal distribution to the Foundation.

Craver hopes to live a long and happy retirement life with his wife, Missy, and family, especially with their five grandchildren. They plan to enjoy their gardens, quail woods, and farm. But he recognizes that the Morehead Foundation needs funding now to reach more Scholars. To provide operational funding now, he intends to activate his bequest by making a $25,000 annual gift from the highly taxable income provided by the annuity he purchased. This will not only immediately fund one additional Morehead Scholarship at UNC each year, it will also completely offset the tax consequences.

A son of teachers, Craver enjoyed teaching young surgeons during his career at Emory. He has said teaching is a way to “extend one’s life’s work exponentially.” He is now taking that legacy of teaching to new levels by showing others how to be a philanthropist through heart, creative planning, and action. Craver will indeed have an exponential — and permanent — impact on the lives of Scholars, the Morehead Program, and the University of North Carolina.

Joe Loveland enjoys reconnecting with old friends and colleagues as well as a younger generation of Moreheads in his new role as chair of the Morehead Annual Fund. But there’s a higher reason behind his decision to take on the new responsibility.

“The Morehead experience was exceedingly important to me in terms of my education,” Loveland said. “It represented an extraordinary investment in me by the Morehead Foundation — it’s the least I could do to provide a return on the investment.” He invites other Alumni to reflect on that same investment that was made in each of them at the start of their college careers.

Loveland, a senior litigation partner at King & Spalding in Atlanta, is grateful for the contacts the Program provided him. “The Morehead brought me to Chapel Hill,” he said. “It gave me a smaller network within the University community that was important to me in terms of friendships — some that have lasted for 37 years now. Several of my closest friends today are people who were Moreheads with me.”

After his time at Carolina, Loveland attended Harvard Law School. While appreciating the Ivy League experience, he observed a distinct quality that Carolina and Morehead Alumni brought to their careers after the undergraduate experience.

“Chapel Hill tended to instill a level of balance in folks among academics, athletics, extra-curricular activities — that may not be unique to UNC, but it’s certainly broader and more balanced in my experience than I saw in folks coming from a number of other undergraduate programs. ”

However, with an increase in the number of merit scholarship programs modeled after or similar to The Morehead, other universities are competing for such bright students who also exhibit excellent leadership abilities.

Loveland hopes that Alumni support for the Annual Fund will not only maintain, but bolster, the Program’s efforts to provide students the opportunities to develop as leaders through coursework, campus life, and the Summer Enrichment Program.

If you ask Robin Berholz today about her Summer Enrichment Programs, she'll tell you her Outward Bound experience probably had the greatest impact on her life. If you ask her to further compare her college summers, she'll add that Outward Bound was the summer she was dreading most.

"I felt like I slipped through the Morehead selection process when it came to athletic ability," said Berholz, who considered herself fit but had never played sports in her Ontario high school. "It sounds trite, but it definitely left me with the feeling of 'I can do anything.' Outward Bound was a great way to overcome my fears, and, you know, spend the summer being uncomfortable," she said with a laugh. Berholz took the added confidence with her after graduating UNC — she has since climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and completed two marathons.

Each summer after her time in the Utah wilderness affected Berholz's development differently. For Public Service, she taught at a boarding school in Hawaii through Summerbridge.

"The power of having that impact in front of a classroom, designing your own curriculum, figuring out how to most help these kids — it was incredible." Berholz still keeps in contact with one of her students who graduated from college this year.

In an effort to maintain her Spanish-language immersion from a spring semester study-abroad program in Spain, Berholz studied Incan culture and history in Peru and Bolivia. Finally, she began her interaction with the Alumni network during her Enterprise summer by interning with Brent Inscoe '96 at a management consulting firm in Washington, D.C.

Although Berholz enjoyed her time in Washington and gained experience working in the corporate world, she learned she wasn't interested in a career in consulting. A political science and communications double major, Berholz became fascinated with organizational behavior and corporate training. With the help of director Chuck Lovelace, she contacted a Morehead Alumna visiting UNC to recruit investment bankers for Goldman Sachs. After clarifying that Berholz was interested in the recruiter's job and not investment banking, she was quickly placed in Goldman's selection process and earned a job in the firm's training and development department.

Berholz, who left Goldman Sachs to get an MBA from Harvard and pursue a career in corporate philanthropy with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Toronto, said she is grateful for the support of Morehead Alumni and hopes to repay the favor by helping current Scholars interested in charitable work in the private sector.

Overall, The Morehead opened options for Berholz she had never considered while growing up in Canada.

"I never thought I would go to school in the States; I didn't think I would be able to go someplace where I didn't know a soul," she said, but was glad she made the decision. "All around it was like nothing we have in Canada. The American college experience and the spirit of Carolina are distinct. I feel coming from Canada multiplied all the impacts The Morehead has on a person's life."

Berholz adopts the "pay it forward" mentality when reflecting on her Morehead experience and, as a young Alumna, has supported the Morehead Annual Fund.

"Most Moreheads would agree that we were given a true gift that wasn't just a check," she said. "The gift was a whole experience that shaped our lives. Moreheads want to ensure other deserving candidates get that gift, so you can start by giving what you can and continue to give over time."

And after attending the triennial Morehead Alumni Forum in April, Berholz saw proof of this gift.

"The warm and positive feelings people have toward Morehead were evident. You saw the diversity in things people were doing with their lives and how successful they were — it showed you what a launching pad Morehead has been for all of us."

Commander Ken Epps never understood Tar Heel Alumni.

“Everyone I knew who had graduated from Chapel Hill would always be overly enthusiastic about the school, and I didn’t get it.” 

Epps, who graduated on a Naval ROTC scholarship from Vanderbilt in 1990, received a military fellowship to pursue an MBA at any program in the country. Focusing on East Coast schools, Epps had Kenan-Flagler on his radar and visited the University.

“And then I got it.”

A 2002 graduate of Kenan-Flagler, Epps was very impressed with his classmates, but he says a few of them particularly stood out in his memory.

“There were a few folks that really knocked my socks off,” he said. “They were rock stars.”

After learning more about his classmates’ backgrounds, Epps discovered that they had “a common denominator”: the Morehead.

“The more I learned about the Program, the more I became intrigued by it and fascinated by the people it attracted.”

And thus a lifetime friendship with the Morehead Foundation began.

While living in Washington, DC, and working in the Pentagon, Epps became active in UNC alumni events. For one gathering, he was in charge of selecting fellow Tar Heels speakers. Epps was impressed by David Gardner and Jim Tanner — whom he later learned were also Moreheads.

Finally, Epps’ sister worked at independent schools in Michigan and Richmond, Virginia and always spoke highly of the students the schools were sending to Carolina on Morehead Scholarships.

“That really cemented it for me.”

With all these Morehead interactions, Epps deduced that while Carolina attracts a talented student body, Moreheads bring “that extra layer of cream.”

Today, Epps is a Commander in the Naval Supply Corps, working in logistics and financial management. He makes giving to the Foundation a priority because of the quality of students it attracts to the University.

“They take the charter of the Morehead Program very seriously and are natural leaders,” Epps said. “They’re the movers and shakers on campus. Every day they’re making Carolina a better place.”

Epps has also included the Foundation in his will — at age 39, Epps said he likes to plan ahead.

“As I started to accumulate more assets, I thought, where would I like to see them put to best use?”

He knows the investment will be a profitable one.

“The Morehead casts a wide net and helps us attract a concentrated pool of dynamos who will make a disproportionate impact on the world. This is something I get really excited about supporting.”