Terri Dennison’s work creates ripples.
As Bladen Community College Small Business Center Director and Bladen County America 250 NC Committee Chair, creating ripples involves connecting clients and Bladen County to larger frameworks that foster growth and awareness.
After tiring of the long winters in Pennsylvania, where she raised a family and ran a state heritage site, Dennison jumped at an opportunity to work for Elizabethtown and the Elizabethtown-White Lake Chamber of Commerce in 2019. She began her Bladen Community College role in February.
BCC’s Small Business Center is part of the North Carolina Small Business Center Network that funds 60 small business centers, including a center at each of the state’s 58 community colleges. The centers help clients start and grow businesses and their work ladders up to additional entrepreneurial resources offered by the state, creating what Dennison calls a “web of support for small businesses.” All of the center’s resources are free, which Dennison says is the biggest secret about her work.
A typical workday looks like helping clients find the right class, working with entrepreneurs on business plans, researching course instructors, networking with financial institutions that could assist clients, and more.
“I think my favorite part of my workday is really when I can talk with a client one-on-one, figure out what their need is, hear their dream. It’s really something when you meet a small businessperson who’s so passionate about what they want to do and then helping them move towards that,” she says.
Dennison is also a Homegrown Leaders alumna. She enrolled in the leadership course because it was an opportunity to network with people from outside Bladen County and also allowed her to gain a new job credential.
She sees her work, and the work of Homegrown Leaders, as connective points that ripple outward just as one action or connection that begins in your home or office can ripple outward to your town, county, region, and your state.
To put it into perspective, she shares how Bladen’s America 250 Committee’s work feeds into other storytelling efforts that connect and expand all the way up to the nation’s 250th birthday celebration next year. It all starts from asking, “What can I do here at the college I work at and what can we do as a college to celebrate it? What can the county do now? What are we doing as a region?” The ripple keeps expanding all the way to events next year in Washington.
And it’s through asking questions like that that allows Dennison’s work to ripple outward, as she helps clients and Bladen County both find places of growth and connection.