DAWN GILLESPIE is the governance manager for HGO, and as such it is her job to make sure that all the company’s bylaws are maintained and that the board is kept scheduled, organized, and looked after…no small task! She has been at HGO for three and a half years and has worked in the Office of the General Director for most of that time.
PERRYN LEECH: Governance is a highly complex part of the business and it is something very few people aspire to be when they are young! How did you get started? DAWN GILLESPIE: I was born in Dallas, but I moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, pretty soon after. My parents were college sweethearts from Bowling Green, Ohio, and ended up on the West Coast while my dad was attending graduate school at USC. He had taken a job with ARCO Oil and Gas Company as a geophysicist and they were in Dallas while he was undergoing training. Afterwards, they transferred us to Louisiana, and a few years later my brother was born.
Dawn (far left) strikes a Charlie’s Angels pose with Development staffers on opening night for Tosca, October 23, 2015.
So how long were you in Lafayette? We ended up living there for nearly seven years, and it was a wonderful place to grow up. My parents made great friends who we are still close with today. I remember having a lot of crawfish boils and zydeco dance parties. Since the public education system was lacking, my parents and their friends formed a cooperative that built The Community School, a bilingual school— English and French—where I attended kindergarten and first grade. During that time, my parents were fearful of being transferred, so they never put down roots and we constantly moved from one rental home to the next. They finally bought a beautiful, old, French home and then six months later my dad was transferred to Bakersfield, California, which was about as different from Lafayette as it’s possible to be. Our lives were H G O. or g
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