Catalyze

Jamie DeMent Holcomb ’01 on how saying ‘yes’ led her to success as a museum CEO, venture capitalist, writer, chef, and farmer, with scholar host Benny Klein ’24

Episode Summary

Jamie DeMent Holcomb ’01 stopped by the Foundation in March 2022 to speak with host Benny Klein ’24 of the Scholar Media Team during her campaign for North Carolina Senate (District 23). Jamie shares about growing up in Franklin County, North Carolina; watching the Duke vs. UNC game during her final selection weekend; spotting Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino on the Universal Studios set, and her love of science museums.

Episode Notes

Jamie DeMent Holcomb ’01 stopped by the Foundation in March 2022 to speak with host Benny Klein ’24 of the Scholar Media Team during her campaign for North Carolina Senate (District 23). 

Jamie shares about growing up in Franklin County, North Carolina; watching the Duke vs. UNC game during her final selection weekend; spotting Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino on the Universal Studios set, and her love of science museums. 

Jamie is CEO of the Kidzu Children’s Museum in Chapel Hill, where she seeks to increase access to science for youth in fun and engaging ways. The alumna is also a managing partner at the North Carolina Venture Capital Fund, a firm that invests in innovative startups throughout the state and Southeast writ large.

Music credits

The intro and ending music for this episode is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul. 

The music featured mid-episode is by scholars Asher Wexler ’25 and Emmaus Holder ’23, with voice-over by scholar Tucker Stillman ’25. 

How to listen

On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed.

Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode Transcription

(Benny) 

Jamie, thanks so much for talking to me today.

(Jamie) 

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here in Chapel Hill on a beautiful spring day.

(Benny) 

I know. We’re sitting out here in the garden overlooking the Foundation, and it’s just beautiful. It couldn’t be better.

(Jamie)

It’s perfect. Chapel Hill in the springtime is magic.

(Benny)

So you spent your childhood in Louisburg, North Carolina, in a small farming town with just over 3,000 people?

(Jamie)

Yeah, small place.

(Benny)

What was that like growing up there?

(Jamie)

It was wonderful. I mean, my family has been in Franklin County as far back as anyone can remember. And so it was one of those childhoods where everyone knew me. My mom was a schoolteacher and my dad was an EMT. And he also, he was wild, he owned a nightclub. Everyone in town knew them. And I used to joke that my mama would know I was in trouble before I did because if I was chewing gum in the hallway at school, she would know it before I actually got written up for chewing gum where I wasn’t supposed to. But in general, it was great. Both my sets of grandparents were really close by. I had a great-grandmother until my senior year of college, and they were all incredibly active in my life. And just the kind of greater community in Franklin County was a huge part of my upbringing, which gave me this kind of phenomenal base. And it helped kind of inform my desire to live a life of public service, which has looked different at different aspects of my life. But I learned that from my parents, from my public school teacher mother to my dad, who was an EMT, to my firefighter grandfathers, and so many members of my family who served in different ways.

(Benny)

Very nice. And have you gone back? Do you spend much time there?

(Jamie)

I don’t get back as much as I would like to. My father passed away a few years ago, and my mother moved here to be closer to us. So I don’t get back as often as I’d like. But when I do, it’s always wonderful. I have a four-and-a-half-month-old daughter now. And so we had one of our baby showers back in Louisburg, and that was really nice because my whole family was there, but also my fifth-grade teacher and my seventh-grade teacher. So it was just really nice to revisit my old life. 

(Benny) 

Right, at all the spots. 

(Jamie)

Yes.

(Benny) 

So tell me how you end up at Chapel Hill? What was that process like for you?

(Jamie)

It was not what I thought it would be. I thought I would leave North Carolina. I worked really hard growing up, especially in high school. I wanted to make the best grades and be at the top of my class and do all the things all Morehead Scholars do. You know, I had a trajectory that everybody who applies for the Morehead has. And so I thought I would leave North Carolina. I thought I would go to one of the Ivies and kind of leave North Carolina and never look back. And I guess I’m a perfect example of what the Morehead-Cain is all about, which is bringing talent to North Carolina or keeping it here. And when I came for Finals Weekend, it was a perfect Chapel Hill spring. Carolina beat Duke in basketball. It was beautiful. Then a week later, you get a, “Hey, we want you to come here, and we’re going to pay for it all, and we’re going to let you travel around the world all summer.” It’s like, “Well, how can you say no to that?” Pack your bags. Head to Chapel Hill.

(Benny)

I know we are really excited for the chance to spoil Coach K’s last game at Cameron.

(Jamie)

I hope it’s an awful night for him.

(Benny)

So tell me about your first couple of years at Chapel Hill. Where did you live, and what was it like adjusting to the college life?

(Jamie)

I think it was a pretty typical adjustment. I’m from Eastern North Carolina, but I was lucky that my parents were really supportive. I traveled a lot growing up, and I had already spent every summer doing the things overeager, talented high school students do. I’d been in college dorms every single summer of high school, so adjusting to dorm life wasn’t that hard. I lived in Granville Towers, which was very different. It was different than the dorm life I was used to experiencing because it was, like, right there in the middle of Greek life. So that was a little unusual, but I had a great time. I mean, I made my best friends in life. The people that are still my best friends today are the people that I met the day I moved in. Like, literally the first person that I greeted as I got off the elevator when I was moving my stuff in on the hottest day of all time in my whole life, they are the people that are still my best friends.

(Benny)

The temperature has been a common theme with our interviews with the summer move-in heat.

(Jamie)

Yeah, it wasn’t fun. I think my parents thought of just leaving me in the parking lot and driving back home.

(Benny)

Yeah, that’s what someone else said. So I know you studied southern history and African American studies. I’d love to hear more about maybe a favorite class you took, and also what stressed you out as a student, what kept you up at night, and what made your mind wander?

(Jamie)

So my favorite classes were with Joel Williamson and Chuck Stone, actually. So I was very lucky to be here at a time when there were some powerhouse professors who had been here for quite a long time. Chuck Stone was a legend, not just at the University of North Carolina, but nationwide. He was the first African American White House Correspondent in the Kennedy Administration. He had such incredible experience, boots on the ground during the Civil Rights Movement, that working with him—and he was in the Journalism School here—and working with him with a minor in African American studies was incredible because he had so much firsthand experience, and he was so willing to share. And he was just one of the kindest humans I’ve ever known. And then Joel Williamson was my advisor and probably the professor I took the most classes with, and he was just an incredible human. He wrote a book about William Faulkner and race in the south and how Faulkner novels are kind of a microcosm of southern history. He later did an academic biography of Elvis Presley, and I was actually his research assistant on that. And my job for that was to watch every single Elvis movie like a dozen times.

(Benny) 

That’s not a job. 

(Jamie)

It was something. I mean, my brain melted a little bit.

(Benny)

Did you learn the dance moves?

(Jamie)

I may have known the dance moves already. My dad did own nightclubs, you know. So that was really interesting. And I learned so much from both of those professors that I carry with me today. And I drove past Joel’s house coming in today into Chapel Hill. He’s passed away now, but I have such great memories of him. And what kept me awake at night? When you’re in your late teens, early 20s, I think that so much of what you worry about is what’s coming next. And if I could talk to the 19-year-old version of myself, I would say, “Oh, girl, take a deep breath. It’s going to happen. You’re going to be fine. Enjoy every single magical thing you’re doing right now in Chapel Hill, and stop worrying about what’s next. It will happen, and you’ll survive.”

(Benny)

Easier said than done.

(Jamie)

Yes, I hear you. I mean, I need to tell my 42-year-old self that.

(Benny)

Right. So I know when you left Chapel Hill, you went to Capitol Hill.

(Jamie)

Yes, one Hill to another.

(Benny)

Exactly. It’s a different experience. I’m curious what the bureaucracy and political scene was like back then, and what it taught you for your endeavors now?

(Jamie)

Yeah. So working on the Hill in the early 2000s was incredibly different than the political climate today. It was actually pretty collaborative. George Bush was president, but the Democrats were in power in the legislature, so it was different. But you saw bipartisan participation on a regular basis. At the time in North Carolina, there were 13 members of Congress from all the different districts. If you were working on a bill that was really important for your district, but you needed support from other members across the state, you would just reach out to other staff members and say, “Hey, we’re sending this to your colleagues around. We need you all to sign on to it.” And they would say, “Oh, yeah, we’ve got another one coming up that is naming this bridge. Will y’all sign that?” And you would say, “Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we’ll see you at the softball game later, okay?”

(Benny)

Right.

(Jamie)

I won't say that it was always delightful, but things got done, and there wasn’t this horrible partisan bickering that seems to be happening at every level now. So it was a great experience. And actually, I’ve said this since basically my first month that I worked on the Hill. I wish it was required for every American citizen to work in a state legislature or in D.C. at some point, whether it’s in college or whatever, just because you really understand how the sausage is made, and it might make you terrified for the future, that like a giant amount of our laws are written and developed in the brains of underslept 22 year olds. But it’s an incredible experience, and it really does kind of help you understand maybe why there is so much red tape and why bureaucracy can be such a slog.

(Benny)

And you worked for Legislative Representative . . .

(Jamie)

I worked with Congressman Brad Miller, another UNC grad, yeah.

(Benny)

Very cool. So you came back to North Carolina to work with the Museum of Natural Sciences.

(Jamie)

Yes.

(Benny)

I'm curious why you chose that endeavor and how you had confidence in taking a pretty drastic leap from the political world?

(Jamie)

Yeah. So they’re actually very connected. I met the director of the Museum of Natural Sciences when she came to D.C. to seek funding for a major project for her museum. So we represented the district where her museum was, and she came to D.C., as many constituents do, to meet with us, and introduce her project to us and say, “I need federal funding before I’m going to get state funding for this. Can you help me?” And I happened to be in a hearing a couple of weeks later where someone said, “We’ve got a half a million dollars that needs to end up with a museum in the southeast, and it needs to check all these boxes. Does anybody does anybody know of anything like that?” And I was like, “Oh, I do, I do.” And so we got the first federal funding for what is now the Nature Research Center, which is a state-of-the-art hands-on research facility in downtown Raleigh, actually directly across from the legislature, that, when it was built, was literally one of a kind in the country. And now it’s become an international model for hands-on citizen science.

And so when I moved back to North Carolina, I didn’t quite know what I was going to do, but I called the director of the museum that I made friends with on the Hill and said, “I’m heading back. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I feel called to come back to North Carolina. I’m not really sure where I’m going to land.” And she was like, “Can you start Monday?”

(Benny)

Right.

(Jamie)

And I said, “Well, what will I do?” And she said, “I have no idea, but come.” And so I took this great leap of faith. And Betsy Bennett, who was the museum director at the time, basically became one of my life mentors. And I’m working with her today in my role as executive director at Kidzu here in Chapel Hill. So it was interesting. I took this crazy leap of faith, and it literally is what—it was the domino that revealed the rest of my life.

(Benny)

Interesting. Why has science museums become a common theme in your life? What is the importance in education to you, and how has that played out also in your political world where I know education is a big tenet of your campaign?

(Jamie)

Yes, I think that museums, especially museums that are state museums and public funded that are free, end up being equalizers. They are ways that we can get education to the public and make it fun and interesting without shoving it down people’s throats. We can bring children into a museum, whether it’s a science museum or children’s museum or an art museum, and we can present things where they’re learning and their brains are absorbing. And we are literally, like, helping them develop their lives in that moment without them having to sit behind a desk and feel preached at and talked to and feel like we’re trying to ramrod things down their throats. In museums, they can come in, and they can absorb organically, and they can experience, and they can play. And it literally makes learning so much more accessible, especially when you can do it with state and federal funding that helps make it free, so that we can literally bring every school child in North Carolina into that museum, and that regardless of where they’re from or socioeconomic status, they get to see that dinosaur. They get to look at those whale bones. They get to watch the little seahorses give birth, watch the daddy seahorses give birth, which is the thing that blows every kid’s mind. It's amazing when you're watching these incredible Aha! moments and to know that you can provide it for every school child in the state.

(Benny)

My favorite days at school were definitely the field trips to the museums. And I think I spent so many afternoons at the Life and Science Museum, which was ten minutes from my house, and mom and dad could drop us off and know we’d have a good day.

(Jamie)

And know that you’d be taken care of, and you’d see a big giant concrete dinosaur outside, and you’d be thrilled about it

(Benny)

And the rocket ship, or they’ve got something . . .

(Jamie)

Yeah, it’s like a real NASA rocket ship.

(Benny)

Exactly. So tell me about your passion for farming, and how you end up getting involved with that. And then I’ve got a lot more questions to follow about that.

(Jamie)

Sure. One of the dominoes that happened when I worked at the Museum of Natural Sciences is that I met my husband there. He was one of my board members, and we met in a very meet-cute way. He’d just bought the farm that we now live on and was opening a restaurant with one of his best friends. And Betsy, the museum director, and I had gone to eat at the restaurant because we knew that he was joining our board, and we needed to be polite. And so we went and had lunch there, and it was delicious. And we had these incredible collard greens, like, really delicious collard greens. And a few days later, we’re having this board event. It’s a cocktail party to welcome our new board members. And I was talking to someone. I don’t even know how the conversation started, but we ended up talking about collard greens. And I said, “Well, I had the most incredible collard greens I’ve ever eaten in my life—which is saying a lot for someone from Eastern North Carolina—last week at this new restaurant in Raleigh.” And they asked me what it was, and I said, “It's Zely & Ritz.” And behind me, this person goes, “Oh, I grew those collard greens.” And the rest is history. That was 18 years ago, and here we are.

(Benny) 

And that's at Coon Rock Farm.

(Jamie)

Yeah, Coon Rock Farm is our farm. At that point, Richard had just bought the land and was growing a few things here and there for the chef at the restaurant. And when he and I started dating, and things started to get serious, we had this kind of moment where we looked at each other and said, “If we can’t do this for real, if we can’t dedicate our lives to trying to make this a huge, sustainable endeavor, who can?” So we both left our professional careers at that point. I left the Museum of Natural Sciences. He had founded yet another software company and had gotten it off the ground, and he hired another CEO, and he stepped away. And we dedicated ourselves to running this organic farm and participating in the community around it. So it wasn’t just growing our farm, it was growing local farmers markets. We helped found several farmers markets in Raleigh and Chapel Hill. And then from there, we opened a second restaurant in Durham. We bought an online farmers market because it became very obvious that farmers markets in parking lots weren’t actually serving as many people as there was demand. So our online farmers market, we drive the local meat, produce, and artisan goods directly to your house.

(Benny)

I know the online farmers market might answer this question that I’m about to ask, but with sustainable initiatives and climate change being such a key issue today, not only in the political world, but just everywhere, everywhere. It’s on my mind, it’s on my friends’ minds, we’re all worried for the future. But sometimes it’s hard when you’re doing something that you know is helpful, but it might feel marginal. And I’ve been involved in clubs or initiatives that I know the work is good, but I don’t see the product of the labor or something along those lines. So I’m curious how you stay positive and how you stay on task and excited about the work when you don’t see the fruits of your labor. 

(Jamie)

Right. Well, I mean, I’m lucky that most days I do see the fruits of my labor. They’re like literally in my garden. But there are days that are absolutely demoralizing. There are days when it’s 20 degrees outside, and you have worked all day, and you look out, and the pigs have gotten out, and they have eaten the entire broccoli crop that’s supposed to go into a CSA box that’s supposed to go to 300 homes the next day. And you just sit on the ground and maybe you cry for a minute, or maybe you say, “Screw this.” But then you go inside, and you get an email from a customer with a picture of their four year old eating eggs for the first time because they’re eggs from your chickens. And the parent says, “Oh, well, now my kid won’t ever eat anything again because they’ve tasted this perfect pasture-raised egg that’s orange, and they’re amazed by it. For us, it is always: farming is hard. And running any kind of sustainable food business is hard. Margins are tiny. You’re always dealing with people issues because you end up with itinerant staff. But you have to find joy in the small things. And you have to know that at the end of the day, it really does matter. I do think with things like climate change and just sustainability issues in general, we have to make huge, massive changes. But we also have to make incremental, tiny, grassroots changes. And because the big, giant infrastructure changes that we’re going to have to do to truly address climate change, those aren’t going to work unless we have a groundswell of people that are making tiny changes every day. And you have to know that even if you don’t see the fruits of your tiny change every single day that they’re iterative, that one day all of the efforts that we’re all doing collectively are going to add up, and they’re going to make a difference.

(Benny) 

How on earth did you get into the celebrity cooking circuit?

(Jamie)

Oh, Lord, we should pour a drink for this one. So one of the funny things that I learned through this whole process of owning a farm and a restaurant is that to a lot of people—it’s not funny, it’s tragic—people have gotten so disconnected from their food. A lot of what I do is I do a lot of teaching on college campuses and even in elementary schools. And I was appalled at how very little people know about their food anymore, that kids don’t know that beets grow in the dirt, and that people don’t understand that if you're going to make a cheeseburger, you start with ground beef most of the time. So, as part of what we were doing, going to farmers markets and running these farm-to-table restaurants, I started teaching classes, like cooking classes, not just like, “Let’s sit in a classroom and talk about things.” So I started teaching cooking classes, first all over North Carolina, then all over the southeast, and then eventually all over the country that were just basic. Like, here’s what you do if you have fresh ingredients and how to quickly and easily turn it into a delicious meal, so that your family is not going to be like, “Eww, spinach.”

When you do these cooking classes, people want to take your recipe home with them, which was a surprise to me, I will admit, because I am not a recipe cook by nature. I am a throw it all together, and it will taste good because, honestly, if you are working with fresh ingredients, you don’t really have to do a lot. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. So I had to start writing down recipes, and I had to start testing them and figuring out, “Am I putting a quarter teaspoon of salt in here, or am I loading this up with a tablespoon? What is happening here?” So I started writing recipes for these classes that I was teaching. And eventually I had a lot of recipes, like more than a thousand. And I had this idea that I was going to put them in a cookbook, and it was going to be this huge cookbook. And thank goodness, a friend of mine introduced me to two gentlemen in Charleston, South Carolina, Matt and Ted Lee, who are James Beard Award-winning cookbook authors and just total badasses. And they have a cookbook boot camp. And I went to their boot camp in Charleston, and they basically like, they took a look at my pile and said, “Oh, God, Jamie, nobody’s going to buy that thing, let’s figure this out. Let’s work together.” And so they helped me curate my pile of recipes into something that was palatable as a cookbook. And I started shopping it. My first cookbook came out from UNC Press, which was kind of, it was perfect for me as a child of North Carolina and a graduate of the University. Having my first cookbook come from UNC Press couldn’t have been more natural or more lovely. And it’s kind of a cookbook and a memoir. It’s about cooking with the seasons. It has four chapters that are kind of robust chapters, but each is about cooking in summer, in fall, in winter, and spring, and it tells stories about our life on the farm and why I think it’s so important that you cook with the seasons and preserve with the seasons.

(Benny)

Well, if you’re cooking with other ingredients, if you go to the store, there’s going to be fresh tomatoes all year round, which doesn’t always make sense to me. But when you use locally sourced from places like your farm, then you might need to adjust to the seasons.

(Jamie) 

You do, and it’s a learning curve, honestly. And I talk about that a lot in the cookbook, that you have to readjust yourself to thinking that, “Maybe I shouldn’t be eating tomatoes in January because did they get on an airplane in Mexico and travel to me? And they were picked unripe, so that means they’re going to be a weird texture and they’re going to taste funny?” I mean, a tomato you eat in January tastes nothing like an August tomato.

(Benny)

One of the coolest things I’ve learned about tomatoes is that in the top five most important aspects for growers and tomatoes, taste is not in the top five.

(Jamie)

Yeah, that’s one of my husband’s favorite tidbits. Taste is not included when you look at the requirements for . . . it’s like, squareness and shippability and firmness. I would like it to taste good. I don’t care what it looks like. I want it to taste delicious.

(Benny)

So I’ll let you actually continue and tell me how you get to the cooking, to the celebrity cooking.

(Jamie)

So then I wrote another cookbook, and in the process of selling cookbooks, they want you to go places. I did a book tour that went all the way all over the country selling the book, and after an appearance—it was a book signing somewhere—someone approached me about starting to do cooking demos on television. And so I said yes because it sounded like fun. And I was invited to go to LA to film at Universal Studios. And when I was first invited, I was like, “Dear Lord, that sounds crazy. I don't know if I’m ready for primetime, because I’m totally not.” But it was amazing! The first time we went, I was so starry because you film at Universal Studios, literally like you’re under the Desperate Housewives set, and the old set for Little House on the Prairie—that was the set used for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—is right around the corner . . . so we saw, one day I was filming, there was Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino right there. But you can’t speak to them. You stay in your set, they stay in their set, and you just kind of like, stand over to the side, like, “Hey, guys, we’re friends now.” But yeah, so I ended up back and forth to Hollywood every six weeks for a few years. It was incredible and such a phenomenal experience and totally out of the world and not like my normal life, but I had a great time. The people were wonderful, and I learned a ton. And then COVID kind of changed all that. It changed how all the studios run and a lot of shows shut down. And so the show that I was on shut down during COVID, mostly because of testing requirements. It was insane.

(Benny)

Got ya. I’m curious if, at any point, whether it was transitioning to growing an organic farm and running that as a full-time job to hitting LA, did friends or family ever go, “What are you doing?” Or did anyone say anything? And how did you deal with that? 

(Jamie)

Well, the transition to organic farming, from my trajectory of being at the museum to leaving that to go and live on an organic farm with an older man with four children, there was a whole lot of, “Jamie, what in the world?” I ran into Chuck Lovelace, the former director of the Morehead-Cain Foundation, at a farmer’s market in Chapel Hill, and he saw me at the farmer’s market and was like, “Jamie, what are you doing?” And I said, “Oh, this is my farm.” And he said, “What? I thought you were at the museum.” I said, “Oh, no, I’ve left. I’ve got this farm.” And you could see the look on his face as he was trying to connect the dots of how in the world I had made that step. But sometimes you just kind of have to ignore the naysayers and the people who question you, and know that what you’re doing is right. And it was right. We’ve become one of the larger organic farms in the state and have mentored over 200 people who have come and worked with us at our farm. And it was absolutely the right decision for me. And it’s one of the things I am most proud of in life. It’s been my life work. The LA stuff, no one questioned that. Everybody was like, “Oh, cool. Heck yeah, Jamie! Go to LA. Have fun.”

(Benny)

I’m so thankful that, in the transitions of directors of the Morehead Program, that I got to get to know Chuck, and I can visualize the face that he gave you, stumbling upon you at the farmers market.

(Jamie)

Yes, I’m sure you can.

(Benny)

So in this campaign, I know that women’s health is a big issue for you. The Supreme Court has been awfully politicized recently in the past decade, especially over this issue. And so I’m curious, what does women’s health mean to you in this campaign, and what are the next steps for you, and how do you feel about that in general?

(Jamie)

If by women’s health, you’re talking about reproductive rights . . . ?

(Benny)

Yes, ma’am. 

(Jamie)

I think it’s a major crisis for our nation, and then it’s a major crisis for every woman everywhere. I have a four-and-a-half-month-old daughter at home, and I am running because of her for many reasons, and one of them is that with the balance of the Supreme Court where it is right now, it is very likely that the question of reproductive rights ends up in the state legislatures. And I think we need to make sure that we have as many Democrats in office and state legislatures across the country to protect our reproductive rights, because I want my daughter to always be able to control her body and her life. And so anything I can do to advance that and to champion that cause, I will do it. It’s a sword I will fall on.

(Benny) 

I didn’t even realize that the states were going to get more power or could possibly get more power in that issue.

(Jamie)

If the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, it’ll have to go to the states to be completely struck down.

(Benny)

And how about education? Why is public education such a big issue in this campaign for you? And what are the first steps you’d take in office?

(Jamie)

I think that public education is one of those things that kind of needs to be reexamined nationwide, and especially in North Carolina. We’ve created new segregated systems, and not necessarily, in some cases racially segregated, but it’s become a socioeconomic issue. The district that I’m running for state senate in has Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools, and then it has schools in Person County and Caswell County. And they could not be farther apart in resources and in standards and in testing scores. And it’s because our resources are not allocated equally. And it means that we are not addressing the needs of our students across the state in equal ways. And the same thing happens on university campuses. It happens in pre-K. That’s one of the other big holes in our educational system is that we’re ignoring that babies are born learning. And there’s a lot of early childhood initiatives like More at Four. More at Four is not enough. We need More at Birth. We need more for those mothers carrying those babies. We literally have to think about education as this holistic, whole-life thing, and we need to address it from birth all the way through colleges and community colleges and postgraduate learning and reeducation.

When you’re looking at these rural communities where business and industry have shut down, we’ve got to address education there because we have to reeducate people. We have to get people ready for a new workforce. And so it’s not just like, “Are we giving enough crayons to our kindergartners?” It’s “Are we educating our entire citizenry from birth to death?”

(Benny)

And it becomes even more difficult. Let’s say you are working two jobs, and you can’t be there for your two year old to read to them at night or whatever it may be, and it just becomes a cycle that’s tough to break. So are there actions that you’re getting ready to take or things that you’d like to do?

(Jamie)

I think that we need to look to other states and look at programs in other states that are successful. I think we need to look at virtual models.

(Benny)

I know we’re both friends of Brad Rathgeber [Morehead-Cain ’01] . . . 

(Jamie)

Brad Rathgeber, he’s amazing. He has created an entire virtual world of school that’s doing incredible things. But for that to be successful in North Carolina, we have to address rural broadband issues. And we have to make sure that if you’re offering virtual programs, that they are truly accessible, that every home can get them, and that it’s not . . . I mean, there were issues across North Carolina during COVID where you have teachers who are trying to teach virtual school, and they know that over half of their students aren’t there because their students live in homes and in areas where they have no access to internet. And so it’s either those parents take off their job, and go and sit in a car somewhere in a parking lot at McDonald’s so that they can get internet—they can steal internet from McDonald's—or we have to figure out ways to get broadband in rural places, which may be rethinking that whole system and letting municipalities control broadband access instead of letting big behemoths like Spectrum control the game.

(Benny) 

What has been the toughest campaign question that you’ve gotten asked , and how do you respond to it?

(Jamie)

I mean, I feel like people ask campaign questions all the time that are like, “What will you do on day one?” Day one, I’m going to move into my office, I’m going to learn the lay of the land, and I’m going to try to be polite and make friends on both sides of the aisle because with North Carolina becoming redder every day, I’m going to have to cross the aisle to get anything done for my district. So in general, that’s the question I hate about, “What are you going to do day one?” I’m going to drive to Raleigh, and go to my first legislative breakfast, and move into my office.

(Benny)

I hope I didn't slip that phrase in there. Maybe I did.

(Jamie)

Yeah, I don’t know if you did, but it is the hardest one because day one, you can’t do anything. You can introduce yourself, and you can make connections, and you can hope that the path you’ve traveled getting there and that the connections you’ve made along the way are going to help you build relationships in a new office. But it’s hard to assume that you can make incredible, lasting change as soon as you land as a freshman member in Raleigh.

(Benny)

Sure. What are your strategies? You’ve worked in fundraising before, but how are you going to get this campaign down the finish line? And what do you need more, what’s been stopping you from getting . . . ?

(Jamie)

So campaigning is always a little weird. It has been incredibly strange this year because of the kind of redistricting crisis. The maps that came out of the Republican-led legislature the first round were a total joke. And so it took months of back and forth for us to get where we are today. The current maps also aren’t that great, but we’re moving ahead with them. And so that’s kind of slowed the whole campaign process down, which means that I filed two days ago, and I’ve basically got two months and two weeks to make my campaign happen, which means I have to do the bulk of my fundraising; I have to do the bulk of my outreach; I have to knock on doors; I have to call; I have to do an entire campaign in two months and two weeks, which is kind of insane, but I’ll make it happen. And I’ll figure out the fundraising game. And part of it is just you reach out to every single person you know, and you hope that they step up and support me, and the hope is that they reach out to people that they know, and that you end up with this kind of organic movement of support.

I think that my ties to North Carolina and to the University of North Carolina will help my race. This seat is the highest ranking seat in state government, other than the governor, that represents the University of North Carolina. And so it’s a very important position, and I hope that people that are on the outside looking in understand that a candidate who understands the University and has a lifelong tie to it is a stronger candidate than one who moved into North Carolina as an adult and has no affinity or ties to the University, because I think that representing the University and helping make it the progressive light in the nation in public education that it once was, we need to do that again. And that has to start in our alumni community, and it has to end at the legislature.

(Benny)

Absolutely. So what advice would you give to students today? One of the questions that I’ve said before, and I’ll continue to say every episode probably is in doing this, I’m looking to find how our incredible alumni base has made the impact that they want to and found ways to find a career that allows them to make their change. So what advice would you have for students today to decide, “Hey, I’m going to go start an organic farm,” and take them where that place is similar to where you’ve been.

(Jamie)

Yeah. So in general, my advice on that is to always don’t be afraid to follow your gut. Very seldom are our instincts totally wrong. I mean, you might have an idea to do something, and it might be a miss, and you might technically, in that moment, fail. But at the end of the day, failure is just another step. One of the things you learn in development is that you have to be totally unafraid of a no. You have to be able to walk into a meeting and say, “I need five million dollars from you.” And know that that person might say, “Oh, you are crazy, but I’ll give you five hundred thousand.” And so I think that in general, you need to approach life and job decisions and everything in that way. You need to not be afraid to fail. You need to not be afraid to get mud on your face, and you need to follow your gut and trust yourself. My other piece of advice to scholars now and to recent graduates is to not be afraid to reach out in this network. Morehead and Morehead-Cain Alumni are some of the nicest, friendliest, most accessible people you will ever encounter in life. And they remember being where you are, and they want to help. We all want to help. Call us. Email us.

(Benny)

I've really enjoyed sending out emails and booking guests for this podcast because it's allowed me to do that, where I get to meet people that I wouldn’t have met and hear their stories. So I’m trying to follow that advice right now. One of my last questions for you, I know that you were a managing partner at North Carolina Venture Capital Fund, how does that play a role in what you do today?

(Jamie)

So my role at the venture fund was mostly fundraising. That’s my background. So I did a lot of the fundraising for the fund. The venture fund itself actually came out of a group of Morehead alums talking, figuring out ways that we can support each other more in the future. We are all at phases of our life where we’ve been pretty successful, and we want to be able to give back in different ways, and maybe not in a traditional, “Okay, I’m going to write a check to this charity.” We want to be able to support our friends’ businesses, and we want to be able to support companies that we see growing in North Carolina. And so the venture fund invests in companies that are in North Carolina, that have some tie to a university in the state. And our focus started as just UNC alumni and companies that came from UNC alums, but we had so many people that reached out, they were like, “Hey, I’m a Duke alum, and I would really like to be able to invest in companies that spun out of Duke.” So we expanded it. And the fund also has a charitable piece where the managers’ share, which is my husband and I’s share, each LP gets to donate a portion of that to whatever educational entity they want to. So like, most Moreheads who invested are donating it back to the Morehead Foundation. It gives back to the state in two ways. It invests in companies that are in North Carolina based and keeps them in North Carolina. It helps stop the brain drain of companies that are being formed in North Carolina, but that moved to Boston and the West Coast because they can get funding easier in those places. Because we are early stage money. We are like early and seed-stage money. So it’s those companies that are just getting off the ground that need that like that $250,000 dollar check just to get to the next level.

(Benny)

Got you. That sounds like a great initiative.

(Jamie)

I hope so.

(Benny)

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I wish you the best of luck on the campaign, and I’ll be following it closely. I know the whole Morehead-Cain community is cheering on from afar or close by.

(Jamie)

I hope so.

(Benny)

All right. Thank you so much.

(Jamie)

Thank you.