Christopher Gergen
Co-founder and Executive Director
Christopher Gergen is founding Executive Director of Bull City Forward, a non-profit focused on catalyzing sustainable enterprise in Durham, NC – an effort that is quickly becoming a model for other cities including the launch of Queen City Forward in Charlotte. Bull City Forward complements Christopher’s role as an adjunct faculty member at the Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative at Duke University within the Terry Sanford School of Public Policy’s Hart Leadership Program as well as his position as “Innovator in Residence” at the Center for Creative Leadership.
Christopher is also a founding partner of Life Entrepreneurs, LLC, a leadership development and consulting firm, and co-author of the nationally acclaimed book Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (Warren Bennis Leadership Series; Jossey-Bass). Furthermore, Christopher co-authors a bi-weekly column on social innovation for the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer titled “Doing Better at Doing Good.”
Christopher’s entrepreneurial credentials include co-founding SMARTHINKING which became the leading online tutoring provider in the United States—serving over 200,000 students from more than 1,000 universities, colleges, and high schools – before being acquired by Pearson Education. Other entrepreneurial ventures include starting a coffeehouse/bar dedicated to promoting the arts and music in Santiago, Chile and helping to launch the “Entrepreneur Corps”—a national service initiative sponsored by AmeriCorps*VISTA that placed 400 full-time business volunteers for a year of service in over 90 non-profit organizations across the country. Previously, Christopher started LEAD!, a non-profit leadership, entrepreneurship, and service program for Gonzaga College high school students in Washington, D.C. and is a founding board member of the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School also in D.C.
Further professional experience includes serving as Vice President of New Market Development for K12 Inc. and Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Business Development and Strategy for New American Schools. Christopher received a Bachelor of Arts with honors from Duke University, a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the George Washington University, and his M.B.A. from Georgetown University. He lives with his wife and two children in Durham, NC.
Roshen Sethna
Resource Manager
Roshen Sethna is Bull City Forward’s Resource Manager, supporting all of our ventures from seed to scale. She wears many hats, including facilitating and networking members within our community, developing resource and service provider banks, and strengthening partnerships and programming. Her passion lies in innovation and using the force of cutting-edge for-profit and non-profit organizations to drive healthy, sustainable development across the globe.
Roshen was born in India and grew up in Durham, graduating from Duke with a degree in Public Policy and a certificate in Global Health. After graduating, she packed up her car and drove down to Houston, Texas for a year long AmeriCorps stint as a housing counselor, consulting novice home buyers in everything from credit scores to financial mapping. Her background in international economic development and entrepreneurship as well as her love for the downtown eateries brought her back to Durham to join the Bull City Forward team. Her past includes everything from working in the public radio world to founding the Duke University chapter of Nourish International (http://www.nourishinternational.org), a social enterprise that uses business ventures to fund international community development projects. Her travels have taken her all over the world including St. Petersburg and Geneva for studies, Belize for research on coral growth, and Argentina to work on educational community gardens. She speaks a bit of Spanish, has a passion for documentary photography, and is always up for a game of pick-up soccer.
LC Coleman graduated from Duke in May OF 2010 (Go Blue Devils!) with a double major in Women’s Studies and Sociology. Both majors were infused with a social justice, activism spirit that nudged her in the direction of the non-profit sector. After graduation she moved to NYC and then Boston where she had the opportunity to learn more about the non-profit sector and to work with awe-inspiring young women of color to better understand the world around them, their place in it, and their ability to be agents of social change.
Although she has lived in 9 states and 15 cities in her 23 years, there is something about Durham that feels like home – maybe it is the siren call of ancestors who worked eastern North Carolina soil as sharecroppers not three generations ago or maybe it is the fact that she can buy delicious chicken and waffles on her way to the office in the morning – but whatever it is, she is bent on making this little slice of the triangle her own.
Feel free to reach out to her with any questions about Bull City Forward, the awesome work we are doing at the k12 and University level to help inspire the next generation of change makers in Durham or college basketball scores (but only if you’re a Blue Devil fan – otherwise it might get ugly)!
Avani Parekh-Bhatt
Community Manager
Avani Parekh-Bhatt is a first generation immigrant with entrepreneurship in her blood and a passion for all things people. She has worked for several international and non-profit organizations, including the World Bank, and worked in India for two years on an initiative to link diaspora Indians with progessive and interesting social entrepreneurs in India.
Post-India, she landed in Durham to work in the community development sector and re-discovered the vibrancy and resiliency of marginalized communities in North Carolina. She then helped to start an organization serving South Asian victims of domestic violence in North Carolina and worked to get it off the ground for three years. As a fellow with the organization Kiva in 2010, she worked with entrepreneurs in Kenya receiving microloans from the Small and Medium Enterprise Programme. Through her work in the US, India, and Kenya she’s seen how building support and community for people starting ventures focused on people, planet and profit can make a world of difference in the success of a venture.
As Community Manager at Bull City Forward she’s responsible for bringing on new members, working with the existing members and community events. She is excited to be a part of the Bull City Forward team, and hopes to have many critical conversations over cups of masala chai in the Bull City Forward space. When not at work, you’ll find her telling bad jokes, learning the art of Indian cooking, and vetting her latest creative idea for a social enterprise.
John-Paul Smith
Replication and Scaling Manager
John-Paul Smith was born in Winston-Salem, raised in Maryland, groomed in Charlotte and inspired at Elon University (2009, B.A. in History). He learned about his blessings in “La Tierra de la Primavera Eterna” and about human brokenness on a campaign trail in South Carolina. His goal is to help cultivate an environment in which people recognize their value and that in others, and he feels that Bull City Forward is quite a place to do just that. In his best dreams he’s a world-class composer. In reality he helps with BCF replication and scaling strategies, working within Durham and across communities to nurture entrepreneurial ecosystems for social innovators and entrepreneurs.
Lee Miller
Communications Consultant
Lee Miller grew up in three far-flung vertices that roughly circumscribe the Triangle—north of North Raleigh, Youngsville, and rural Chatham County—but never really gave much thought to Durham. Then Duke came calling and with it, the Bull City and all its quirky splendor. Lee graduated from Duke in 2009 with a love of the Duke Forest, a taste for La Vaquita and, incidentally, a B.S. in Economics. His longing for social justice and belief in community interdependence and reciprocity led him to Bull City Forward. This fall, Lee will return to Duke to pursue his Masters of Environmental Management from the Nicholas School of the Environment.
Not too long ago, Lee drove his rusted pickup to the outskirts of Raleigh twice in two days to pick up two identical broken copiers. By swapping all the working mechanical parts out of the copier with an electrical problem for the nonworking parts of the copier with a mechanical problem, and with a little blood, sweat and toner, he created “Frankencopier,” a machine that produces crisp, beautiful copies. The story of Frankencopier is a parable for his life philosophy and indicative of his commitment for social innovation in Durham.
Beth Bafford
Social Business Investment Fund Intern
Beth Bafford is helping Bull City Forward with special projects while attending Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. After attending Duke as an undergraduate, she has had a bad case of career A.D.D. She went to work for UBS Financial Services in NY and Zurich, quit to join the Obama for America campaign where she knocked doors and organized volunteers in NY, VA, RI, PA, and MI, and then landed in the Obama Administration at the Office of Management and Budget. After seeing the best and worst of the private and public sectors, (and reading The Blue Sweater), she decided that the social sector was the place for her. She is now pursuing a concentration in Social Entrepreneurship at Fuqua and learning as much as possible about the Durham social innovation space from the amazing folks at Bull City Forward.
