Bull City Forward: Changing the Fabric of the Community
I spoke with Bull City Forward founding Executive Director Christopher Gergen and Resource Manager Roshen Sethna, who convinced me that social entrepreneurship is where the next generation is headed and that Durham’s social innovative spirit is changing the very fabric of the community…By: Lesley Lammers
LL: How did you start BCF?
CG: In a nutshell, this is an extension of my career. I started my first entrepreneurial venture with a coffee shop/bar/restaurant in Santiago, Chile. Through that process, I ended up meeting a guy in Santiago who started a university with two classrooms that grew to 5,000 students. He introduced me to the concept of social entrepreneurship or what he called cultural entrepreneurship at the time.
I ended up launching a for profit education company coming out of business school in the late 1990s. But at the same time I also started teaching leadership and entrepreneurship to high school students. I really loved both being an entrepreneur myself and also helping to unleash this entrepreneurial potential of the next generation.
I also love being an entrepreneur myself. Four years ago I ended up co-authoring a book called Life Entrepreneurs, which looks at how people have been able to create extraordinary lives for themselves by embracing the entrepreneurial mindset.
As I continued to go down this path, I kept thinking about how could we create maximum change in the world? I got turned on by some work that folks like Henry McKoy, who is now the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development in North Carolina (he is a Durham leader) and what they were starting to say, ‘Durham is in the process of reinventing itself. Here is an opportunity for us to intentionally cultivate and create a community of innovation.’ I loved that concept.
My teaching assistant at the time, Alison Dorsey, was similarly excited about the idea. I was able to raise a little bit of money and we looked at best practice models around the world to try to learn from other communities that were doing some really exciting work to harness innovation. We looked at places ranging from London, Helsinki and San Francisco to Pittsburgh, Providence and Indianapolis.
We also looked at the assets that Durham already had against some of the models that we started to see. We were able to develop a bit of a theory of change, that here were the major levers that a community could pull to be able to build up a community of innovation. Then we said, now what kinds of resources do we have against each one of these interventions and we did some asset mapping on that.
We took all of that, went and raised more money and took it to a broader set of stakeholders. The city came in as investors, the Chamber of Commerce came in as investors and we said now let’s work through a community development process where we bring the community around intentionally home growing the next generation of change makers in your city. We engaged about 150 people in that process of developing what would also be a set of strategic recommendations. Then out of that work we came up with a strategic plan for BCF.
In parallel with that we also felt that we needed to get some early wins. So we branded the concept and we opened the co-working space we have in downtown Durham. We wanted people to see and visualize what this kind of community could be.
RS: I was the brought on in the first round of hires at BCF. I went to school with Alison Dorsey who was one of the co-founders. We went to Duke together and met freshmen year on a trip to Argentina working with a social venture called Nourish International. We worked on sustainable community gardens in a district an hour outside of Buenos Aires called Merlo.
We came back to Duke and started a chapter of Nourish, which started at UNC. Ours was the first non-UNC chapter and then it grew chapter-wise. They have about 23 chapters in different schools. I was really involved in that and that was my first official foray into social entrepreneurship, although I had always been a proponent of public sector/private sector collaboration. Social entrepreneurship was just a better way to define that for me.
I graduated in 2009 from Duke with Public Policy and Global Health degree. I moved to Houston to work for a year as a financial counselor for first time homebuyers. I kept in touch with Alison and Christopher while they were in the beginning stages of BCF doing a lot of asset mapping and community development research. I grew up in Durham so I was helping connect them to folks they should be talking to. I then moved back in the fall of 2010 to work with them officially. At that time, I was brought on as Resource Manager. I’ve been working the past year and a half building resources for our entrepreneurs, whether they are in our co-working space, our peer leadership groups or workshops. My background is largely also in nonprofit. I’ve done a lot of policy research and international development. I studied abroad in Switzerland and have traveled a lot.
LL: What is it about being a social entrepreneur or social enterprise that is appealing to you?
CG: I see it as a way of being able to get the best talent with the most innovative ideas, to give them the resources they need to be able to scale those ideas and create significant positive impact in the world.
I’m attracted to innovation, entrepreneurship and being able to create real value for a community. I’m also attracted to having a long-term positive impact in our community. My wife and I have two kids who are seven and four. What kind of world do we want to leave for them? This is the best shot I’ve got to make it a better place.
RS: I have a friend Jon Leonardo who did [co-founded] Triangle Entrepreneurship Week and he defined social entrepreneurship, which I thought was a great definition because it defines why people are so appealed to it, is that social entrepreneurs look at problems that other people think are unsolvable and say, ‘I know how to solve that and I’m going to do it.’
All the problems that social entrepreneurs are tackling are very tough. They haven’t been solved for a certain reason because the market doesn’t allow for the incentives to solve it. Maybe the problems involve a lot of different stakeholders, maybe the problems are in a resource-poor setting. Whatever the obstacles are, social entrepreneurs tend to work in fields that have a ton of them [problems] and feel like they have the solutions to those issues.
Increasingly, people don’t just want to go to work. People want to live really meaningful lives and they want to make a living at the same time. People are going into it saying, ‘How can I do both?’ I think social entrepreneurship is a really good place to do that. Plus, going back to resource-poor settings and disenfranchised settings, social entrepreneurs already exist in those settings. People grow up being social entrepreneurs because they have to. Out of life necessity they have always been social entrepreneurs.


