mchen@heraldsun.com; 419-6636
DURHAM — Christopher Gergen and a host of Durham leaders are launching a new initiative that they see as being key to the area’s next economic engine.
Bull City Forward, an organization that will draw support from the city’s political, business and nonprofit sectors, will grow and support social entrepreneurs in a 30,000-square-foot “social innovation campus,” to be located downtown.
It will establish the Bull City as a national beacon for social innovation, Gergen and others said in recent interviews, in the way that Research Triangle Park put the region on the map for technology and research 50 years ago.
“We want to help people develop next-generation TROSAs, Burt’s Bees and others that are both financially high performers as well as have strong social impact in our community and the global community,” Gergen said.
Social entrepreneurs often adhere to “triple bottom line” approach in business, measuring success not only in terms of profit, but also in terms of positive impact in local communities and at the global level.
A social innovator is someone who looks at historic social problems and comes up with creative ways of addressing those problems. Social entrepreneurs address those problems with business tools and strategies.
Unlike RTP, which is more or less industry-specific and recruits well-established companies such as IBM and GlaxoSmithKline, Bull City Forward will take a more homegrown approach in bolstering social entrepreneurship. The organization will partner with schools to foster innovations from middle school on, and then provide support for nascent businesses through research and services provided on campus as well as community partnerships.
The initiative is still in “preliminary” stages of planning, Gergen emphasized. But it has already garnered the support of leaders across Durham.
The executive committee of Bull City Forward includes Casey Steinbacher, president of the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce, Greenfire Development founding partner Michael Lemanski, Durham City Manager Tom Bonfield and Triangle Community Foundation President Andrea Bazan, to name a few of its members.
“This collaborative will help birth the next generation of entrepreneurs in Durham,” Steinbacher said. “As a country, as we become more triple bottom line oriented, it’s better to engage that conversation at a very early stage. This campus and accelerator will help us do that quicker, faster, better.”
Gergen, son of prominent politico and Durham native David Gergen, had moved to Durham from Washington, D.C., this summer with his family.
Christopher Gergen had a part-time position at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy for a number of years and said seeds of the idea were sown about five years ago from conversations with Henry McKoy, CEO of Fourth-Sector Financial and a member of the executive committee.
Gergen is also director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative at Duke, has co-authored a book on entrepreneurs and started two successful businesses himself.
Work began on the initiative in the spring. As project manager, Gergen and his team have mapped out the social innovation and entrepreneurship trend in Durham to identify existing gaps, looked at what other cities have done and come up with best practices and a strategy for Durham.
“Significant building blocks are already in place throughout Durham…,” states a summary of the initiative. “But now is the time to intentionally and dramatically strengthen these building blocks while constructing a bold vision for Durham’s entrepreneurial future.”
The initiative is close to raising $100,000 to fund work for the next five months, which will include incorporating the project, finding a site and completing architectural plans for the campus, conducting a feasibility study and coming up with a business plan.
If all goes well, the campus could open in fall of 2011. As for the location of the campus, Gergen confirmed that Greenfire’s proposed Parrish Street office project at the Woolworth site (diagonally across from the bronze bull) is one of the front-runners.
Through his and others’ ties to Washington and the White House, Gergen said Durham has a good chance of getting national attention for the initiative. President Barack Obama’s administration recently formed an Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Department of Commerce. Extra attention paid to Durham has the potential for future funding, according to Gergen.
Bill Kalkhof, president of Downtown Durham Inc. and a member of the executive committee, said the presence of the campus would also further bolster downtown development.
“What’s most intriguing is the potential opportunity for building a campus for these entrepreneurs in downtown,” he said, “so we can find one place for a lot of like-minded, very creative, intelligent people working, exchanging ideas.”
McKoy, also a member of the executive committee, said he believes Durham already has a tradition of social innovation and would be well-positioned to be a national center for social entrepreneurs.
“What I like to see [Bull City Forward] accomplish is to plant a flag in Durham and say that we’re serious about the connection about social innovation and entrepreneurship,” he said. “If you’re an IT person, you want to be in Silicon Valley. If you’re an actor, you want to be in Hollywood. If you’re a social innovator, you want to be in Durham.”
McKoy and others pointed to Self-Help Credit Union, which lends to traditionally underserved borrowers, and TROSA (Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers), a substance abuse recovery program that also runs a moving business, as well-established models of social entrepreneurship that were founded in Durham.
A more recent example can be seen in the John O’Daniel Business Center, a business incubator founded by local entrepreneur Wendy Clark and developer Chuck Lewis in East Durham that opened this year.
Gergen said the Bull City Forward campus would be able to foster closer collaborations between entrepreneurs and be able to recruit and retain the brightest entrepreneurs around the world.
Entrepreneurs would be able to cut costs in their nascent businesses by sharing accountants, utilities, IT support and other services at the social innovation campus.
The initiative will have a “hub and spokes” model whereby space, investment, research and measurement and accountability tools will be provided at the campus, and opportunities for growth and community support will come in through external partnerships in policy, talent recruitment and education, and start-up financing.
In turn, the organizations that partner with Bull City Forward, such as the chamber, would also benefit from having a centralized location where they could work with such entrepreneurs.
“It makes my job easier, to be able to have a single point of contact where there is collaboration and expertise being laser-focused on producing businesses that are triple bottom line-oriented,” Steinbacher said.
McKoy said he sees social entrepreneurship as a lasting trend that will be crystallized by lessons learned in this recession.
“After this current recession, if you look back over the last decade, you’ll see that the idea was that profit optimization was all. You thought that as long as you made money, the community would be alright and it didn’t matter how you impacted the planet,” he said. “I think that idea has been discredited with what’s going on with this global recession.”
“All over the world, folks are trying to figure out how we drive forward the next phase of capitalism, and how you do that with a positive impact on the environment and the community,” he added. “I definitely feel that this is where the next great opportunity is and the communities that can stand out front and understand this, are going to be benefit.”
RTP recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, and Gergen said he hopes Bull City Forward will also be able to produce a substantial, measurable economic impact in 50 years.
“I hope that Bull City Forward will be able to have catalyzed an entirely new way of economic and community development,” he said, “and that you would see a very healthy and robust ecosystem of high-quality, large-scale social enterprises that are making a big difference in the local community, and the world beyond.”
