Six months ago, we began the pursuit of creating an additional name – a parent brand – for all that the Bainbridge Graduate Institute has become in over a decade of growth. As we look forward to completing this important process over the next six months, I’d like to chart the important milestones we’ve achieved and those yet to come.
Begun as a dream and launched in Gifford and Libba Pinchot’s Bainbridge Island living room, BGI was born with the ambition of changing business, and business education, for good as one of the world’s first sustainable MBAs. The vision, mission and values are as fresh today as they were then. Who would have guessed a decade later, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business would include sustainability in its accreditation requirements?
BGI has grown up, and the world around us has changed. Maintaining the position of a disruptive, entrepreneurial, transformative, humanitarian, resilient and practically visionary institution of higher education requires constantly keeping your eyes on the horizon. We are pursuing our strategy of expanding our graduate programs with new partners, such as OSR. Lessons learned with graduate students are now being practiced in communities of need through the Center for Inclusive Entrepreneurship. And construction is imminent on a new digital studio in the basement of our Pioneer Square campus.
Our age and success has suggested a bigger vision – a bigger view than the initial hopes of launching a single graduate business degree. Thus our pursuit of a parent brand, an identity that could stand for our unchanging vision, mission and values, but on a bigger stage, and in a way that invites in more of the ever-evolving world.
We’ve collected and considered more than six months of the BGI community’s thoughts, concerns, ambitions and hopes as the new parent identity has been incubated. We’ve discovered it can’t be one that supplants our history and current brands, but must provide a brand and communication platform capable of celebrating our legacy into a new and higher orbit.
We are ready to share our work and progress to date. Later this month, on January 30, as we celebrate over a year in our new 220 and Change community with Impact HUB and SVP, we invite you to a special viewing of our work, the new parent brand – and its look and feel. With your help and advice, we’d like to begin sharing it with the world over the next six months.
Thanks for making the BGI community what it is – a maturing, growing, thoughtful and ambitious group of students, alumni, faculty, staff, friends and partners. You made the past possible and shaped our future. I look forward to working together in our tasks yet undone in nurturing a truly bright tomorrow.
Regards, John
John Gardner
Provost and Dean of Academic Affairs
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This is the first installment of the Countdown to Commencement. These regular posts are part of a campaign to celebrate this year’s remarkable BGI and OSR graduates by reflecting on our collective past and discussing our promising future. Please direct any questions to gerod.rody@bgi.edu.
