Christopher Gergen
Speaker Bio
Christopher Gergen is the CEO and co-founder of Forward Cities – a national learning collaborative of 33 cities focused on building more inclusive innovation economies that also helped launch InnovateNC – a similar multi-city learning collaborative in North Carolina.
He is also a founding partner of HQ Community, the largest entrepreneurial co-working community in North Carolina including HQ Raleigh, HQ Greensboro, HQ Charlotte, Think House and Duke TeachHouse as well as the founder of Forward Communities, a non-profit that has launched community-based efforts to develop and scale high-impact social entrepreneurs including Bull City Forward in Durham, NC, Queen City Forward in Charlotte, NC, and Moore Forward in Moore County, NC.
Additionally, Christopher is a fellow and faculty member with Duke University’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship initiative, co-author of the nationally acclaimed book Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, an alum of Leadership North Carolina (class 24) and a 2013 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.
Other entrepreneurial endeavors for Christopher include co-founding SMARTHINKING, a venture-backed on-line tutoring company that grew to over 1,000 universities before being acquired by Pearson in 2011, and Café Nunoa – a bar, restaurant, live music venue in Santiago, Chile that Christopher started when he was 24.
He lives with his wife and two children in Durham, NC.
Speaker Talk Schedule
| August 03, 2018 - 7:00 AM - 8:15 AM | Driving an Inclusive Economic Empowerment Strategy in our Nation’s Cities: How Four Cities are Making it a Reality |