Book Club: A Conversation with Gail Lord
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Ron: The Louvre Abu Dhabi, Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights—it’s an impressive list. In addition to being humanist in perspective, these cultural institutions have in common that my Canadian cultural planning firm helped to develop each of them.
Gail: Although we’re a relatively small company—just 42 full-time and eight part-time employees —we’ve done cultural planning work in 57 countries—148 projects in the U.K. alone—from a home base in Toronto. My late husband Barry and I founded the company 38 years ago. We’d both been professors, but we wanted to work together, so we decided to leave that comfortable world and take a chance on starting our own company, one that would specialize in cultural planning. We founded Lord Cultural Resources on our firmly held belief that culture makes communities more livable and more economically vibrant. We’ve been busy ever since, and we’ve had some fascinating clients.
We’ve also written 10 well-received books on museum planning. They’re good brand-building tools for us as they’ve been translated into several languages and are used as the standard texts worldwide.