Enter the Real Culture Before You Tell the Story
technique — attributed to Amy Calvert
When Calvert joined Visit Baltimore as SVP of convention sales, she insisted on completing a year-long city leadership program before she was fully operational in her role. Her stated reason: she needed to understand the real culture and history of Baltimore before she could tell its story credibly to convention clients. The Freddie Gray uprising happened while she was in the program. She watched a city she was paid to market reveal itself as something far more contested and alive than any convention bureau pitch could accommodate. The discipline she took from this: promotional narrative and civic reality are not the same thing, and the professional who does not know the difference will eventually get the difference wrong at cost.
Calvert's account of her time as SVP of convention sales at Visit Baltimore, during which she joined a city leadership program that ran through the period of Freddie Gray's death and the 2015 unrest.
cultural-competence, place, storytelling, authenticity