Durham has a significant place in American history, a city deeply involved with the Civil Rights Movement. Today Durham is growing another movement with the community at the center, and its newly established hub is Bull City Forward.
Bull City Forward, or BCF, has its hands on the pulse of social innovation in Durham. It is a physical office space for aspiring social entrepreneurs and a community of people thinking about and taking action in their communities—leaders both elected and grassroots, from business or educational institutions. And that also includes you, Duke students!
We had an opportunity to sit down with Christopher Gergen, Cecily Durett, Alison Dorsey and Elizabeth Linzer at Bull City Forward's recently launched 11,000 sq.-ft. social innovation campus in the heart of downtown Durham. Gergen, the director of Duke’s Enterprising Leadership Initiative through the Sanford School of Public Policy’s Hart Leadership Program, is an active member in the Durham social entrepreneurship scene. He is part of the founding team that has made Bull City Forward a reality, alongside recent Duke graduates Dorsey and Linzer.
Durett, an entrepreneur in the communications field, is one of the 21 entrepreneurs currently sharing office space on the campus. She told us that she saw collaboration in action in just one week of involvement in BCF. Durett. who moved back to the area after a long hiatus, touted BCF's ability to put a “new frame around Durham.” BCF helped her plug in to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, in her words "a community of interested organizations and people who want to work together to help those businesses thrive as they make the communities they serve stronger."
Individual development, recruitment and retention, organizational development, capital and scale-up, impact measurement, policy and advocacy, campus expansion and community outreach are the eight prongs that form the core of BCF's comprehensive mission. Gergen explained that some cities have taken many of these approaches at one time or another, but never all in symphony. First-mover advantage goes to Durham.
A comprehensive approach like BCF’s recognizes the many facets that affect the amount and success of entrepreneurial activity. BCF has set out to prove that a social entrepreneurship model for economic and community growth is viable and effective for any city. There is definitely potential for the work of Bull City Forward to revolutionize the way entire cities understand community and economic development.
A critical piece to BCF is putting the right metrics in place to measure outcomes and impact. BCF is working with relevant organizations to collect baseline performance indicators to track how their work may contribute to an economically and socially sound Durham a few years down the road. It is not important to Bull City Forward to carve out their work for others to applaud and praise. They simply want to open the gates and spawn more opportunities and connections for Durham. What is most important is the greater movement of social innovation.
Ultimately, Gergen hopes that BCF can integrate itself into the brand of Durham. Bright-eyed prospective students visiting Duke often point to DukeEngage as a draw— BCF hopes that talented and innovative individuals and companies will also be drawn to Durham in a similar manner.
Durham can become the spot for social entrepreneurs. The buzz that has been generated around this community-led effort has made it possible for the work of BCF to spread quickly through word-of-mouth. Durham is a special place because of the deep sense of community here. Organizations, leaders and residents want to connect and collaborate. Gergen, Durett, Dorsey and Linzer all echoed this sentiment. "Bull City Forward is like a co-operative, you can buy a piece of the social innovation movement," Linzer explained.
A challenge, as well as a window of opportunity, for Bull City Forward is to effectively engage those who are not vibrating at the same frequency. It is easier to energize people who are already passionate about entrepreneurship and social impact. Can BCF collaborate with skeptics who may not immediately buy into the social innovation lingo?
Only then can social innovation be viewed as something that ought to be incorporated into all aspects of business. After all, as Durett said, “Doing good is good business.”
Lina Feng and Cami Ratliff are Trinity seniors. Their columns is an online exclusive.
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