Black Enterprise Profile: Ed Dugger

Ed Dugger joined UNC Partners, a leading private venture fund, as an assistant vice president in 1974. He was 26 years old. By the time he was 28, he was CEO.

During his tenure as CEO, UNC has grown to become one of the leading sources of equity financing for acquisitions by entrepreneurs of color. UNC financial and advisory services have launched companies such as Granite Broadcasting Corporation, Envirotest Systems, Cybernetics Systems International Corporation, UNC Media Group, and Roxbury Technology that have grown to experience expansion, be acquired or publicly traded. The strategy for success is an innovative approach to identifying unique opportunities for extraordinary and experienced entrepreneurs. Dugger had the foresight to move savvy, equipped African American businessmen and businesswomen into non-traditional fields that created industry pioneers with impressive success stories.

UNC Partners is exceptional because of its 25-year history of socially responsible investing, with a self-imposed commitment to invest in support of entrepreneurs of color. “My notion grew out of the civil rights movement. It was about social justice. Our fund was focused on allocation of capital to an underserved market, persons of color. The markets weren’t doing the job. The whole notion of economic apartheid and the movement of socially responsible investing became formalized out of South Africa,” explains Dugger.

As a soldier to his calling, Dugger has been an important catalyst in the movement of socially responsible business development even beyond his leadership at UNC Partners. After working with The White House and Treasury Department to develop the New Markets Program that came out of the last two years of the Clinton Administration, he served as Director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, and was Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for six years. Pooling his finely groomed network of business and financial experts, Dugger spearheaded the dialogue that created the Massachusetts-based Business Collaborative, an initiative designed to help develop businesses of color. An outgrowth of the success of this project is the more ambitious Initiative For a New Economy, which launched in February of 2006.

In addition to his profitable ventures, Dugger has added capacity for working with the nonprofit sector when the cause supports his stalwart beliefs. Dugger has served as Chair of the Social Venture Network (SVN), a nonprofit network that connects, leverages, and promotes a global community of leaders for a more just and sustainable economy and a member organization of the Social Impact Leadership Coalition (SILC). “The magic of SVN is that it brings together like-minded entrepreneurs involved in all kinds of businesses that can create new avenues of opportunities and growth,” says Dugger. SVN members are CEO’s, founders and senior executives of some of the most progressive companies in the world such as Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc, Eileen Fisher, ShoreBank and Sylvia Woods’ Enterprises (owners of the famous Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem, New York).