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Furniture Hall of Fame Sets Growth Plan
June 15,
2010 by in UnCategorized
By Home Furnishings Business in High Point on June 16, 2010
The Board of Directors of the American Furniture Hall of Fame Foundation, High Point, has adopted an aggressive three-year strategic plan integrating four initiatives designed to preserve our heritage and history for future generations.
"As we continue to build momentum and implement the first part of our mission--to research, collect and preserve our cultural, economic and artistic history--it's critical that we, as a board, formally adopt a strategic plan to accomplish our vision," said Jeff Cook, president of the Foundation. "After conducting a strategic planning session in Chicago earlier this year, the Board has adopted the plan and has set priorities for accomplishing our goals."
The four initiatives are: expansion of the oral history and book publishing programs; preservation of our memorabilia; creation of a super website to provide original information; and creation of a comprehensive history and timeline.
"The key to all that we are doing is relevance," Cook said. "On some level, we all know that we should preserve the stories but no one has been doing it until now. The Hall, as I like to call it, is undertaking this challenge to present our history in useful and creative ways."
Details include the following.
Oral History and Book Publishing: The Foundation has conducted nearly 40 oral histories of our leaders and is in the process of publishing each in a hardcover book, complete with photos, for sale to the industry and public. They will also be made available online, by topic, through a search engine.
Call for Memorabilia: "It is critical that we do a call for memorabilia before it is lost," Cook says. "This will be a guided request for specific materials or digital scans of company history books, photographs, advertising and marketing materials, etc. for use by researchers and visitors to our Web site. An intern is now at work, cataloging our memorabilia with state-of-the-art software used by museums and historical societies."
Separately, the Foundation also will unroll a campaign for companies to preserve their own histories. Guidelines and suggestions for how companies can, and should, go about preserving their own stories will be distributed with a simple request that information be shared with the Hall of Fame.
Web site: FurnitureDealer.net(http://furnituredealer.net/) has donated its services to create a cutting edge Web site that will capture the furniture industry's stories in words and pictures.
"The information posted will have historic integrity and be prepared by professional historians, but will also contain the stories that we all love to hear, thus preserving our legacies," Cook said. "A fun part of the website will be the collection of stories, inspirational and humorous, that we will be able to gather and share online, and later publish."
History/Wall of Fame: "As an industry, we do not have a comprehensive written history," Cook said. "We are in discussions to commission this research in order to develop a timeline that includes innovations and developments in retail, manufacturing and marketing. We hope to illustrate this history with our new found memorabilia. All of this will then be shared with the industry and public in a historically credible exhibit as well as on our Web site."
"This is a big undertaking that will take years to accomplish, but we have to start somewhere and the Board believes the time is now," Cook said. "We are at a pivotal point. We must preserve our histories and the stories of our legends now before they slip away from us forever."