A Jackson, MS native who turned two decades of federal, private, and corporate IT experience into a practice built on seeing what's coming next.
"A futurist," he says, "is just a dope term for someone who cares about the future enough to plan for it."
Dr. Burse grew up in Jackson and came up through Jackson Public Schools, getting an early start in civic life as a member of the Jackson Mayor's Youth Council. He grew up in the same Jackson neighborhood where Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963 for fighting many of the same battles Bemae fights today — a proximity to that history that shapes how personally he takes this work.
He earned his degrees from Mississippi State University and an MBA from Harding University — the academic groundwork for everything that followed.
He started as a Network Engineer, then moved into IT Project Management for the Mississippi Department of Information Technology — hands-on, on-the-ground technical experience that most strategy consultants never pick up.
He moved into the C-suite as CISO at MINACT, Inc. — rounding out a career that now spans more than twenty years of federal, private, and corporate IT experience.
A doctorate in Strategic Foresight from Regent University gave a name to the instinct he'd been building for years: the ability to read what's coming and plan for it, not just react to it.
Dr. Burse founded Bemae Group around four pillars — Technology, Strategic Foresight, Education, and Policy & Advocacy — because he didn't see a firm combining all four, so he built one.
Alongside the Jackson Medical Mall, he became the Foresight Instructor for the Young Futurists Project, folding strategic foresight and technology into a STEAM curriculum for grades 3rd through 12th. More than 625 Jackson youth have come through it since.
"I get pure joy by seeing returning students start implementing those concepts" once they're done with the curriculum.
Dr. Burse's work has been featured in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's national report, The Futures We Create, and he was named to the 50 Under Fifty: Mississippi's Top Urban Elite Professionals list. He currently serves as Chief Information Officer for Ellucian at Tougaloo College and sits on the board of The Bean Path, part of Jackson's growing JXN Tech District — all while still running Bemae. He's also a graduate of the Mississippi Economic Council's Leadership Mississippi program, a graduate and former board member of Leadership Greater Jackson, and a graduate of the Mississippi Black Leadership Institute.
Breaking the barrier between the known and the unknown matters most for communities that have too often been left without the resources to plan long-term — introducing those concepts is the linchpin. "It's the great equalizer."— Dr. Creston Burse, in RWJF's The Futures We Create
See how it turned into the Young Futurists Project — six years, 625+ students, and a national feature.
Twenty years of IT experience and a doctorate in foresight, pointed at your specific problem. Let's talk.