Join Joy Bailey-Bryant on October 1 at 12pm (CST) for Memorial Park Conservancy’s State of the Park, a virtual event celebrating the past year’s advancements and the community of support that enables the Conservancy to care for Houston’s largest urban wilderness and recreation park. Shellye Arnold, President & CEO of Memorial Park Conservancy, will provide an update on the Memorial Park Master Plan and associated Ten-Year Plan projects, including the newly opened Eastern Glades and the Land Bridge and Prairie, opening in 2022.

Panelists include Adrian Benepe, Senior Vice President and Director of National Programs at the Trust for Public Land and Catherine Nagel, Executive Director at City Parks Alliance. The panelists will discuss the power of parks to bring communities together, offer refuge and respite, and provide healing and peace during times of trouble.

September 28, 2020, 16:30

The Creative Bureaucracy Festival 2020 is just around the bend — a weeklong festival full of bureaucratic imagination. The programme is jam-packed with new ideas, fresh insights, and pride in what the public sector can accomplish. The goal is to create spaces for exchange, to show examples of bureaucracy at its best, and not least to help people have fun — not in spite of being bureaucrats but because of it.

Soft power is the ability to impact behaviour through influence, persuasion and agenda-setting. Countries tend to build walls while cities build bridges, especially in our current period of mass migration. Gail Lord, founder of Lord Cultural Resources and leader of the soft power movement, interviews two pioneering public servants who understand how soft power works and bring it to life.

During the Fostering Leadership online talk, Gail Lord discusses the impact the current crisis situation had on the global trends in culture, what lessons we learned and what we should take with us to the future.

In this video, we discuss the steps and process that organizations move through in responding to inquiries and feedback. In pulling back the curtain, we will look at PR, Human Resources, and Social Media roles in responding to crisis and controversy. Conversation will also seek ways forward in transparency towards answering to public and staff questions.

The partnership of Lord Cultural Resources and the Association of African American Museums (AAAM) is accepting letters of interest (LOI) through September 18th, 2020, at 11:59 pm ET for Fellowship 2020, a new initiative for Black Americans in Museums, Arts, and Cultural Spaces.

This month’s Cultural News features the Newburgh Arts and Cultural Commission and the City of Newburgh, which are undertaking the city’s first comprehensive inventory and assessment of its diverse arts and culture ecology. An hour’s drive north through New York’s Hudson Valley, the Kingston Arts Commission has also launched a Master Arts and Cultural Plan to serve their city of 23,000.

In these, and many other cities around the world, cultural planning has been completely upended in the past year, with new willingness — and need — to reckon with systemic racism, pandemic effects, economic upheaval, and other potent disruptors. Who creates cultural experiences? Who participates in them? How do they promote inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility? Lord Cultural Resources is facilitating the Newburgh Cultural Plan and the Kingston Arts and Culture Master Plan, helping them navigate these uncharted waters.