Students Spend a “Day in Durham”

DURHAM, N.C. August 28, 2004 - On the Saturday before the official start of classes, nearly 80 MBA and MPP students gathered in Geneen to hear from one of Durham’s finest business and community leaders before heading out into the community to learn firsthand about issues and opportunities to get involved.

CASE Managing Director Beth Anderson set the stage for the day, highlighting the intersection of three themes: leadership, community, and business. She noted that the Day in Durham event hoped to build on the ILE experience and extend the conversation to focus on community leadership and the role of business, business leaders, and business skills in addressing community issues. “In the past few years, I’ve seen Fuqua students exercise plenty of leadership in the Fuqua community. But typically there has been little interaction with the community beyond, whether at Duke or in Durham. The first step in becoming a community leader is getting to know the community – the people, the organizations and the issues.” In an afternoon, the Day in Durham organizers hoped to whet the students’ appetites for getting involved in the Durham community during their two years at Fuqua, for seeing the relevance of their MBA training and skills when tackling social problems, and for embarking upon careers in business with an understanding of and commitment to business community leadership.

Anderson then introduced keynote speaker Richard Furr, COO of National Commerce Finance Corp and President of Durham-based Central Carolina Bank. A former chair of the Duke-Durham campaign, Furr has served in a wide range of community leadership positions, and CCB has been a major supporter of downtown Durham’s revitalization efforts. Along with a senior executive from BB&T (a chief CCB rival based in Raleigh), Furr was named Business Leader of the Year in 1997 for leading the merger of Wake, Durham, and Orange County United Ways into a regional Triangle United Way. He drew on these experiences to share his perspective on business community leadership.

Before discussing the value of community involvement at both a firm and personal level, Furr emphasized that “the single most important thing you can do is to do your job well.” He pointed to studies that both Duke and CCB conducted to demonstrate their impact on the community. According to Duke’s most recent study, the University has an estimated $2.6 billion economic impact on Durham. Having a successful company can do more for a community than most any other activity. At the same time, Furr observed that community involvement is important to a firm because having a healthy, growing community increases the probability of having a successful company. In his words, “you can’t leave people behind.” Thus, community leadership is an expectation at CCB – it’s discussed with new employees and included in performance evaluations. Not only does the personal involvement yield great individual satisfaction, but it provides visibility, builds friendships and trust, and also increases awareness of business opportunities. But most importantly, Furr stressed the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.

Furr also encouraged students to be selective about their involvement, to take leadership positions, and to avoid overcommitting (wise advice for anyone entering the first year of business school and faced with the abundance of opportunities for learning, leading, and having fun). When asked how to evaluate opportunities for involvement and avoid getting overextended, Furr admitted that there’s no simple answer. But he did have a few words of wisdom: pursue things about which you are passionate; be willing to take a risk and take responsibility, knowing that you cannot and will not make everyone happy; and make sure that you understand the “value proposition” – that it makes sense, you can communicate it and you want to be associated with it. He used his experience with the Duke-Durham campaign as an example. As a UNC graduate, Furr might have seemed an unlikely candidate for leading a Duke fundraising initiative. But he believed in the cause – Duke University leveraging its resources to improve the Durham community. Every dollar raised goes directly to Durham through the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership Initiative. His passion for the cause and ability to communicate the opportunity led to Furr’s success in raising significant dollars for the campaign, even from those Carolina fans who accused him of going over to the “dark side.”

After a lively Q&A session, students headed out into the community. One group took a tour of Walltown, an urban neighborhood just one block from Duke’s East Campus that is experiencing some revitalization while still trying to address issues related to crime, drugs, gangs, and access to quality education and health care. The tour culminated at St. James Baptist Missionary Church, where students viewed a video on the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership and participated in a panel discussion with leaders from Duke’s Office of Community Affairs, Northgate Mall, Walltown Children’s Theatre and St. James Church.

Another bus dropped students off on East Main St. in Downtown Durham, where they walked from one end of the street to the other visiting local nonprofits, including El Centro Hispano, Latino Community Credit Union (LCCU), Self-Help Credit Union and SeeSaw Studio. LCCU CEO Luis Pastor shared how he ended up at the credit union when he moved to Durham as a Fuqua partner (Ana Valverde-Vidal, ’02), and recent Fuqua graduate Ozlem Tanik shared her experiences as a financial analyst at Self-Help. At each stop, organization leaders expressed their enthusiasm that Duke had made the effort to get out into the community and come downtown, and they presented opportunities for students to volunteer their time and skills to help their cause.

The final itinerary took students to Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA), a two year residential therapeutic community that focuses on helping recovering drug and alcohol abusers to change their lives. As part of its mission, TROSA operates several businesses that provide both valuable vocational training for its residents and financial support for its therapeutic program. Students heard moving personal testimonies from a number of residents, met Fuqua alumni and TROSA employees Keith Artin and Na’eem Salaam, and toured the main campus as well as the moving company. Along the way, they saw numerous neighboring homes in various stages of rehabilitation by and for TROSA graduates.

Day in Durham was hosted by Fuqua’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) and the Social Impact Club, with generous financial support from General Motors (GM) and in collaboration with the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership Initiative.