2014 Green Plus Sustainable Enterprise Award Winners Recognized

Durham is going green! All across town there are businesses that are making sustainable decisions and encouraging others to take care of the planet.


Green Plus, a program focusing on certification, education networking & recognition for green and sustainable businesses has announced several Durham winners of the 2014 Sustainable Enterprise Awards.

• Green Plus Sustainable Enterprise of the Year - Cocoa Cinnamon. Cocoa Cinnamon is a two-year-old coffee shop that prides itself on its community outreach, and sources the majority of its coffee, chocolate, milk, and pastries from local and sustainable businesses, and provides employee benefits and a living wage to both full and part-time workers.

• Green Plus Innovator of the Year - Bull City Forward. Bull City Forward is a nonprofit organization that supports local businesses and entrepreneurs that practice triple bottom line sustainability.  While socially innovative itself, Bull City Forward acts more as a conduit for other Durham-based businesses, encouraging innovation in business and helping businesses in the region improve their social capital.

• Green Plus Sole Proprietor of the Year - Food FWD. Food FWD, a startup run by married entrepreneurs Sarah and Noah Marsh, that partners with restaurants for large-scale collection of food waste.  The food waste is brought to a local composter, which is then re-sold to the public.  Food FWD also sells compostable serviceware.

• ​Green Plus Champion - Chris Carmody

This recognition isjust one more indication that Durham is home to an innovative and entrepreneurial community of businesses and citizens. The Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau was the first organization of its type in the nation to be certified Green Plus and just the second in Durham.

Great Minds Get Back to Work

Durham is home to one of the country's fastest growing creative class workforces, and this community is determined to keep them coming.  

As the country looks for opportunities to stimulate job growth, all eyes are on Durham after President Obama's recent visit. Jeff Immelt, the head of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and CEO of GE, said Durham was selected because "it's got a lot of interesting businesses, and it's pretty much a cross-section of America in many ways." The President spoke at Cree and the rest of the Council went on to tour American Underground and McKinney. In Durham, President Obama pledged to focus on job creation and encouraged businesses to have the confidence in the investment environment and to put money to work by hiring more people.

Well, great minds think alike. The month of May saw non-traditional recruitment events from two of Durham's start-up heavy hitters. Bull City Forward presented their Social Venture and Start-Up Job Fair while Chris Heivley of LaunchBox Digital organized Tech Jobs Under the Big Top. The Art Institute of Raleigh-Durham also put on a job fair geared toward connecting recent grads with creative jobs. Fox 50 and the Durham JobLink also recently partnered to host the 2011 Career Expo, a free event designed to boost professional development and recruitment.

Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau has also launched a tool to support the growing hiring needs of the hospitality industry. Durhamhospitalityjobs.com not only serves lodging and food service, but all businesses related to hospitality, visitation and tourism.

These Durham-wide efforts to boost hiring are just the latest sign of a recovering economy, and further proof that Durham is creative, entrepreneurial, and where great things happen.

Accion Emprendedora to Serve Hispanic Micro-Entrepreneurs

Durham's community diversity is one of this place's most valued attributes - right up there with being entrepreneurial.  So the announcement of a new source of support to the Hispanic community is pretty big news in the place where great things happen. 

Durham is already home to several business incubators.  Bull City Forward, American Underground, Startup Stampede and more recently The Cookery, provide the necessary support to bring new business ventures and social enterprises to life. Through this network of innovators and social change makers came a empower an underserved set of entrepreneurs – Acción Emprededora, an incubator targeted to assist Hispanic micro-entrepreneurs.

Under the direction of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business Graduate, Alenjandro Snachez  and with the support of Bull City Forward, El Centro Hispano and the Latino Community Credit Union,  Acción Emprendedora will help entrepreneurs in the Hispanic community achieve some major goals.  The non-profit is dedicated to developing the Hispanic small business sector through trainings, technical assistance, networking and support through the process of obtaining financing.

Acción Emprendedora’s mission is to overcome poverty through entrepreneurship - they will launch their first round of classes in September.

The Cookery joins Durham Food and Entrepreneurship Community

The newest addition to Durham’s food and entrepreneurship communities opened its doors to an eager crowd of local food enthusiasts on Thursday night. Visitors got a first look at The Cookery, a for-hire commercial kitchen space which will operate both as a commercial kitchen for food trucks and catering businesses, and as a small food-business incubator.  Culinary entrepreneurs will be provided the tools they need, both intellectual and practical, to start and run their operation. Clients contract use of the facility on a monthly basis or by the hour where the kitchen is open 24 hours per day and 7 days per week.

Durham is routinely considered the Silicon Valley of the South Eastern US with incubators such as American Underground and Bull City Forward, and the Start Up Stampede as drivers of the growth.  Durham is also one of the country’s most vibrant and celebrated food markets and was on the NY Times list of the top 41 places in the world to visit in 2011 with its food culture highlighted as a component. The Cookery’s business model serves both markets by fostering creative culinary minds as they set out to become the next Durham’s local food scene success story.

Durham Companies Recognized

In 2010, Durham’s The King’s Daughters Inn was recognized as Green Plus’ Sustainable Enterprise of the Year in the national contest recognizing organizations for the examples they set in advancing triple bottom line sustainability. Can Durham claim the winning company two years in a row? It is possible with Durham's Counter Culture Coffee as a finalist for the 2011 award.

Also up for awards this year are Bull City Forward and The Scrap Exchange in the Green Plus Non-Profit or Social Enterprise of the Year category. Winners will be announced February 25 at the North Carolina Research Triangle Park Foundation headquarters in Durham.

In addition to these Green Plus finalists, Durham’s Washington Duke Inn and Golf Club was awarded the 2010 Model Diversity Campaign Award given by the United Way of the Greater Triangle. This award is given to a company that best effectively addresses the company’s diverse employee population.

These recognitions are just one more indication that Durham is home to an innovative and entrepreneurial community of businesses and citizens.

The Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau was the first organization of its type in the nation to be certified Green Plus and just the second in Durham.

The Latest Iteration of Being a Startup Hub

Durham has always been a hub for startups...even before 1865 when Washington Duke came home after the Civil War and started in the tobacco business.  Seems to have worked out for him since with that modest start, Durham proceeded to lead the industrial revolution in the south with both tobacco and textile empires thriving here for the century to follow.

Now, in some of the very same buildings that housed those former manufacturing giants, Durham is again expressing its entrepreneurial nature as a massive influx of creative and business minded people come here to get their ideas off the ground.

The last several years have seen the startup landscape flourish in Durham, and the future is looking more lush every day.  With the recent opening of Bull City Forward as an incubator for social enterprises, and the impending opening of American Underground as a similar environment for tech companies, Durham is fast-tracking its growth in this direction.  Click here for a recent article on the subject.  Even the local blog Bull City Rising now has an editorial series devoted to this subject and a new correspondent focused on this beat.

"To call it exciting is an understatement.  We've always been a technology and innovation hub--after all RTP started here in 1959--but now we're seeing opportunities for small operations to call Durham home in a new way," said Shelly Green, President and CEO of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.  "The fact is that more than 80% of relocating executives come to Durham as visitors first and then decide to move here.  We're now seeing the natural evolution of that with a previous generation setting the stage for newcomers to get their concepts off the ground here.  Durham is a place where great things happen, and we're hoping these businesses will stay in Durham," she added.

BCF and AU are only part of the picture.  There is a startup subculture in Durham, a place that often wins accolades for various aspects of its population.  See a searchable database of those here.  A new website, http://www.downtowndurhamstartups.com/, sponsored by shoeboxed.com, is a great clearing house for information on new businesses getting underway in Durham, but also in the surrounding area.  Their blog can be seen here.

Pursuant to being attractive to a younger demographic, Durham has an exciting dining scene with more than three dozen nationally celebrated restaurants, bakeries and food trucks for near round the clock options.  There is even a website devoted entirely to coffee shops and bakeries that rates them based on various criteria.  There is also a fare-free bus, The Bull City Connector, that services downtown Durham as some immediately adjacent parts of town including Duke and North Carolina Central Universities.

A visit to the official website for Durham's marketing agency sums up the current culture pretty well, "Durham is a colorful, creative, and entrepreneurial community and is the proud home of Research Triangle Park, Duke and North Carolina Central universities."  Sounds like startup mecca.

Hub-ub in Durham

The words "Durham" and "innovation" have been inextricably linked for more than two hundred years. With yesterday's announcement of American Underground at the American Tobacco Campus, Durham expands its role as a place for start-ups and entrepreneurialism. Durham is already the number one Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) for percentage of workforce in the creative class, into which many of these companies fall, and is already home to another business incubator, Bull City Forward, and entrepreneurial advocates like SJF Advisors. Bull City Forward's goal is to assist social entrepreneurs in getting their ideas off the ground, and SJF helps with funding and other aspects of development.

The Council for Entrepreneurial Development, Launch Box Digital, and Joystick Labs are the initial tenants of the shared space environment of 26,000 square feet of previously unused space at the American Tobacco Campus, which includes private offices, a 60-person classroom, and even an arcade.

Start-ups that are accepted to receive guidance at American Underground will come to Durham for up to 10 weeks at a time from around the country.

As home to the undisputed tech hub of the Southeast, Durham's Research Triangle Park is a hot spot for these positions. Openings for IT jobs in NC jumped 12.8% in June and are nearly triple what they were a year ago. The arrival of American Underground further solidifies Durham's position now and into the future as entrepreneurs are further enticed to this nexus of creative and diverse energy and a fast-emerging destination for start ups.

The American Underground is scheduled to open October 1, 2010.