The Forum featuring Rick Thurmond
THE FORUM
FEATURING rick thurmond
January 31, 2023 | 5:30PM | IN-PERSON EVENT
Please join us for the January 31, 2023 gathering of The Forum featuring Rick Thurmond." Rick is Chief Marketing Officer of Charlotte Center City Partners and former publisher and editor of Charlotte magazine. For over 25 years, he has helped shape the narrative of Charlotte, build a vibrant city, and lead teams of creative professionals.
In this forum, we will explore how "story and collaboration" is key to achieving any vision and to personal and community flourishing. We'll learn about how narrative is at the heart of leadership, how to draw the best ideas from people around you, and taking your shot. Our setting will be Community Matters Cafe.
Rick helps lead Charlotte Center City Partners, a nonprofit that works to assure Charlotte’s Center City is a welcoming, equitable, economically vibrant, culturally rich, and a beloved place for all. He provides enterprise-wide leadership, direction, and strategy for all CCCP brands (Uptown, South End, Market at 7th Street, Novant Health Thanksgiving Eve Parade, Charlotte SHOUT!, JoyRides, Music Everywhere CLT, Charlotte Rail Trail). Before assuming his current role, Rick served as Senior Vice President of Community Development at CCCP, charged with building community in Charlotte's urban core through organizing, advocacy, programming, placemaking, and visioning. Rick’s professional history includes 20 years in journalism leading Charlotte magazine, an award-winning city magazine, progressing from associate editor to managing editor to editor to publisher. During that time, Rick relaunched the magazine, taking it from a start-up to a media organization whose titles included Charlotte Home + Garden, Charlotte Wedding, Charlotte Parent, Where Charlotte, and Charlotte Health. Publications under Rick’s leadership earned more than 60 local, regional, and national awards for content excellence. Signature events included Best of the Best (BOB) Awards and Charlotteans of the Year.
Rick is a board member of the North Carolina Downtown Development Association, and has served as president of the board of Theatre Charlotte and on the boards of Charlotte Center City Partners, Charlotte Community Trust, and Historic South End, In 2017, he was named an Emerging Leader Fellow by the International Downtown Association.
Rick graduated from Davidson College with a B.A. in English and is earning an MBA from Wake Forest University.
Connect. Consider. Ignite. The program runs from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM including time for conversation, connections, and Q&A.
The Forum has a three-part structure:
• First third: Participants connect and build relationships in small break-out groups prompted by a question;
• Middle third: Participants consider a presentation that ends with the speaker posing a community-facing question;
• Final third: Participants discuss the question, igniting new ideas and interactions.
THE HUMANITIES | Languages | Literature | History | Philosophy | Religion | And More!
Participate in the important questions of our time. The Forum is a conversation and speaker series that brings people together to explore challenges and opportunities that affect human flourishing through the lens of the humanities and civic imagination.
