We were honored to welcome Jean Case of the Case Foundation to campus on February 8 as the closing keynote at our annual Sustainable Business and Social Impact Conference. In a fireside chat with CASE i3 Director Cathy Clark, Jean spoke about building movements by inspiring, educating, and activating. Second-year MBA student Alejandra Rossi highlighted takeaways from Jean’s talk on the CASE blog. While in town, Jean toured the city of Durham and wrote a great piece in Forbes reflecting on her day and how economic, intellectual, and cultural growth can be driven directly by citizens. In her words:
We also saw the kind of leadership that propels Durham’s growth at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. In the afternoon, I joined Cathy Clark, Founder and Director of Duke’s CASE i3 initiative on impact investing, at the Duke University Sustainable Business and Social Impact Conference, one of the premier social impact conferences in the country. The conference brings together individuals from the private, public, and social sectors to discuss innovative ways to create lasting social and environmental impact. But my enduring memory of the day will be the time I spent with next-generation students from around the world who are passionately focused on using their time and commitment — and their elite education — to make a difference in this world. It put into perspective the views one local citizen leader expressed earlier in the day — that Durham holds the potential to become the geographic hub for impact investing due to the types of companies that are being incubated in Durham and the intellectual leadership that Duke is offering.”
Read that full article in Forbes here and view the keynote below.