Gary Esolen and Valeri LeBlanc, the principals of PLACES Consulting, were each born and raised in distinctive places, which they loved: Esolen in the foothills of the Catskills on the New York and Pennsylvania border, and LeBlanc in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Each of them chose separately to move to Louisiana, in both cases lured by a genuinely different culture.
Esolen founded Gambit, a weekly newspaper in New Orleans that became an influence in the modern rebirth of New Orleans culture. He became involved in New Orleans tourism in order to stimulate economic growth in a city faced with a near depression in the early 1980’s, and he led a program to sell the city based on its unique indigenous culture. The media campaigns for New Orleans tourism pioneered the use of long-form television, and were richly rooted in the character of the city, including its music, food, architecture, and ambience.
LeBlanc is a television producer, photographer and a technical consultant on media, a four-time Cable Ace award winner, whose shows have been syndicated into more than a hundred markets. She created a network of local cable television channels in Pensacola Florida, Mobile Alabama, New Orleans Louisiana, Baton Rouge Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi.
Together Esolen and LeBlanc founded PLACES Consulting. Their goal was to combine disciplined thinking with deep feeling and artistic creativity to understand and promote places – and to use their skills in community building to tap into the hidden strength of the places where they work.
They tested their ideas by interacting with other professionals—planners from Cornell University, the international tourism promotions team for Aruba, developers and hotel owners in Mexico City, and destination clients: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Route 6 along the northern tier of Pennsylvania, and destinations in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. They worked with restaurant and food businesses, hotels, arts and cultural organizations and events, municipal managers, and architects. They are satisfied that these concepts have stood up to significant scrutiny and will continue to prove useful in helping all of us to live better lives in better places.