I can’t add much to the many moving tributes paid to Greg
Dees at the memorial
event held on February 11th at his beloved Center for the Advancement
of Social Entrepreneurship. I've watched
much of the video, read many of the blog posts, written my own, and remembered
the sweet and brilliant man I knew far less well than so many others.
I do, however, have one question: What would it take to name CASE in his honor?
Speaking for absolutely no one but myself, I ask this for two reasons. First, and most obviously, because it was
Greg’s labor of love and genius. Second,
because I am indebted every day to the extraordinary work that emerges from his
descendants.
I’ve had the great privilege and tremendous fun of
guest-teaching Cathy Clark’s class in social entrepreneurship, and I’ve gotten
to know many of her gifted colleagues.
But as someone who makes a substantial part of his living keeping up
with the prodigious scholarship in the field, I can attest to the singular
brilliance of the work coming out of CASE.
To mention just two of many examples, their work on scaling
social impact is second to none, and their “Impact
Investor” collaboration with Pacific Community Venture’s InSight (Ben
Thornley) and ImpactAssets (Jed Emerson) is nothing less than seismic.
None of this would have happened without Greg. Now, Ed
Skloot might be right that social entrepreneurship itself “is the legacy he
left which we now can assume.” But I’m
not so confident that we’ll always remember how we got here.
And so I ask, could we have the J. Gregory Dees Center for the
Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of
Business, in deserved honor of the man who really was the better angel of our
nature?
