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.