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Reclaiming knowledge from Chattanooga Venture to engage and mobilize community members for inclusive, positive, sustainable change.

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Chattanooga Venturing Speaker Series: Rick Montague

Name: Chattanooga Venturing Speaker Series: Rick Montague
Start: 2025-08-21T13:00:00.000-04:00
End: 2025-08-21T14:30:00.000-04:00
Location: Bessie Smith Cultural Center and Chattanooga African American Museum

Chattanooga Venturing Study Group

Bessie Smith Cultural Center and Chattanooga African American Museum

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Past Event

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About Event

The Chattanooga Venturing Study Group presents something you haven't seen before. It's not a speech. It is not Q and A. You might call it interactive storytelling. Rick Montague, urged on by Eleanor Cooper, will tell stories about what really happened back then. None of the books about Chattanooga's Renaissance have come close. Some of these stories are hilariously funny; some are deadly serious, but one thing is for sure—you have never heard it before.

Rick Montague was first Executive Director, then President, of the Lyndhurst Foundation from 1977 to 87, was charged with trying to figure out what the foundation should do. He was jointly appointed by the City and County to head the Moccasin Bend Task Force, which came up with the idea of the Tennessee RiverPark. He and Jim Franklin created the Urban Design Studio, which brought Stroud Watson and a myriad of students of architecture and new visions to Chattanooga. He engaged pioneering real estate developer James Rouse who inspired the idea of CNE. And, he set the stage for Chattanooga Venture under the leadership of Mai Bell Hurley.

Like in the story of Stone Soup, Rick Montague stirred the vast creative cauldron of our community for ten years, and we have feasted from it ever since.

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