The vision for this effort is to lead the bold and ambitious charge needed to transform America
This project will focus on creating the first teaching city in the world focused on systematic racial economic equity.
In medicine, a teaching hospital is a hospital or medical center that provides medical education and training to future and current health professionals. Teaching hospitals are often affiliated with medical schools and work closely with medical students throughout their period of matriculation, and especially during their internship years. In most cases, teaching hospitals also offer graduate medical education/physician residency programs, where medical school graduates train under supervising (attending) physicians to assist with the coordination of care (where students are authorized to methodically practice on patients under the supervision of physicians as part of their education). In addition to offering medical education to medical students and physician residents, many teaching hospitals (especially university-affiliated teaching hospitals) also serve as research institutes.
Durham Global Teaching Center for Equity
Using the teaching hospital concept as a template, the vision undertaken now, is to transform the City of Durham into a global teaching city for equity. This first of its kind global teaching city will be anchored by the world’s first Equity Education Research and Development Park. Utilizing the university-affiliated teaching model, Durham’s North Carolina Central University (NCCU), the country’s oldest publicly-supported historically black college HBCU), will be the intellectual anchor of this undertaking. As a result, NCCU would become the first HBCU to anchor a global intellectual and educational cluster.
Durham would serve as a model city for other municipalities across the United States, and eventually the world.
Durham as the model and mentor city
It would serve as the model and mentor city, and Node Zero, in an effort to create other teaching cities across America – where racially equitable economic development can be learned and applied. This Hub and Spoke strategy would centralize, but not bound, the global racial equity ecosystem. This would create a more efficient and effective network of innovative collaborators in the pursuit of an equitable American landscape.
The political partisanship at the federal level ensures that any meaningful movement must be heavily enacted at the local level and include public, private, and philanthropic partners, as well as the communities most impacted by society’s negative consequences, at the center of the change. We, as a society, must stop nibbling at the edges of racial economic equity and inclusion, if we aim to achieve racial equity at scale and sustainably.
What if social innovators and entrepreneurs and those committed to racially-equitable impact investing could come together in an environment which aggregates innovative strategies to address society’s greatest challenges – including racial inequity?
-DGEP TEAM