Movers & Shakers: Lisa Lane, Tolerance in Motion

Lisa Lane, Tolerance in Motion

Title: CEO

Age: 49

Lisa Lane will oversee development of a "mobile museum" that explores the consequences of prejudice as CEO of Tolerance in Motion, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization.

The educational experience is set to travel the Upper Midwest beginning in 2016, Lane said.

The first step toward that goal is raising corporate seed money to create exhibits and curriculum, aimed largely at middle and high school students, and to outfit an eighteen-wheeler to house and transport the presentation, Lane said.

Exhibits will examine the civil rights movement, genocides and the Holocaust. The project also aims to involve local law enforcement, elected officials and community leaders.

"We're going to bring this rig that opens up into an entire museum and classroom to communities where it otherwise would be cost prohibitive for them to see this history played out in front of them and to challenge them to work in their communities," Lane said.

Lane, who has a journalism degree from the University of Iowa, has worked in the nonprofit sector since 1995. She previously has worked as director of resource development for Hennepin Theatre Trust, vice president of resource development for the Neighborhood House, foundation director for the Phillips Eye Institute, founding director of Tolerance Minnesota and development director for the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Tolerance in Minnesota is an initiative of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Q: What is your mission's appeal to potential sponsors?

A: The message is that we're moving tolerance forward and we're doing that by addressing kids on the ground. [Sponsors] are going to be on the grass-roots level of reaching out to these communities. Their name is going to be on a rig that's going to drive across the Upper Midwest.

A: The idea of being part of working with students in communities and impacting civil rights and how people integrate diversity and new groups of people into communities and how student learn about that process was fascinating to me. I grew up in a family that was very civil-rights oriented. My parents took us to civil rights demonstrations in the '60s.

Q: What drew you to a career in nonprofit organizations?