Episode 40 Drayden Dunn - ”Shreveport-Bossier: My City, My Community, My Home”

Drayden Dunn, Entrepreneur and Community Leader, sits down with Jeffrey Goodman, Director of Marketing and Development for the YMCA of Northwest Louisiana, to answer the following questions:

 

0:41 1. Drayden, you are an entrepreneur and community leader. I don’t want to spend too much time introducing your background and bio as I’m confident we’ll cover a good bit as we go through today.

 

As I prepared for today’s discussion, I came across some excellent quotes by you and I’d like to use those as jumping off points for the majority of my questions.

 

Let’s start here:

 

“If you do aspire to be an entrepreneur, own a business, first thing period is you just got to eliminate fear. The thing I can guarantee is that you’re going to fail. My Ls I can write a whole list of Ls. I’ve done lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, period. But every time I took an L, you learn something from it.”

 

Talk to me about your philosophy around entrepreneurship and the way you view starting a business.

 

10:53 2. You are a leader in this community and heavily involved. The next quote of yours I’d like you to talk about is the following. You said,

 

“It is hard to change the mentality of a community….It doesn’t happen overnight. And it may not even happen for us to see. I don’t know. I just know we need to move it forward.”

 

What do you see as your role and/or responsibility to our community?

 

17:46 3. My next question is just leaning on you for a second for some guidance.

 

Every resident of this area has been in this situation at one time and will inevitably encounter it again. You are at a dinner party or around friends and someone starts putting down or bad mouthing Shreveport-Bossier.

 

What's the right way to react if we hope to correct that type of behavior moving forward?

 

28:00 4. You are the owner of Envision Media and Marketing, a local concierge media and marketing company. Tell me about your company. When it started? How it came to be? Where you’re located and some of the services you offer?

 

36:52 5. Let’s now go back to a couple of quotes of yours. When you bought 709 Texas Street to house Envision Media and Marketing, you said:

 

“I want people to be inspired by this. I want people to invest in downtown, invest in the city. Those who do should be celebrated.”

 

You have been a longtime advocate and supporter of downtown Shreveport. Why is downtown Shreveport so important to you?

 

46:24 6. Lastly, let’s talk race for a second in our community. Your wife Brittney, who was recently our guest, serves as the Chairwoman of the Shreveport African American Chamber of Commerce and you have both been deeply involved in working to mentor, lift up and advocate for other African Americans in our community.

 

You once said,

 

“Shreveport is a predominantly black city. It wasn’t always like that.”

 

As Shreveport evolves from African-Americans being the minority to being the majority population, talk to me about steps you see we can take to improve our race relations. In other words, what do you see as the white population’s responsibility in dealing with the race issue? And what do you see as the black population’s responsibility in dealing with the issue of race in our community?