Julia and Rebecca Lord, daughters of Eleanor Lord (1929-2024), have recently made a bequest of $1 million from their mother’s estate to The Eleanor Lord Fund at Berkshire Taconic. With this gift, they can sustain and significantly expand upon their mother’s dedication to helping her community with a fund she established in 2012. Eleanor’s giving focused on the issues she was most passionate about: women’s rights, the arts, environmental protection, immigrant support, healthcare access and affordable housing. 

A Life of Listening, Learning and Service

An artist and social justice activist, Eleanor was naturally curious, creative, and responsive to her times. Her daughters describe her as someone who was simultaneously soft-spoken and equally committed to speaking out about issues she cared about, at a local or international level. In the seventies, Eleanor attended marches in support of civil rights and women’s rights and against the Vietnam war. She was an accomplished scholar, with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Vassar and a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University. In New York City, she wrote the international column for the Morgan Guaranty Bank newsletter. 
 
Eleanor’s education and experiences provided fertile ground to build upon when she reached the Berkshires. Originally from Connecticut, she and her young family moved to Egremont in 1957 and finally settled in Stockbridge in 1959. It was in the Berkshires that she found great personal satisfaction in volunteer work with several women’s organizations. This enabled her to further develop her feminism and hone her areas of focus for social justice work.  
 
Eleanor was a founding member of the Elizabeth Freeman Center, an organization devoted to protecting people from domestic and sexual violence. She was interested in doing the hands-on, challenging work that required compassion and sensitivity. At one point, she answered the women’s crisis hotline at the center. She personally assisted women navigating the process of getting help and accessing crucial services. Inspired by her example, her daughter Rebecca went on to volunteer and march in EFC’s “Take Back the Night” event. 
 
In the late nineties, Eleanor was proud to be asked to serve on the board of The Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts in its first stages of development. She was drawn to its comprehensive perspective on advancing gender equity and its collaboration with community nonprofits.  

Later in life, when her children were grown, and after decades of service to her community, Eleanor discovered a passion for painting. Her daughters saw her dive into artmaking like “a duck to water.” Eleanor worked in oils and watercolor and then found her niche in vibrant pastels. A fellow artist and mentor described Eleanor’s artwork as brave and confident. The Berkshire landscape was her favorite subject, in all seasons. She exhibited her work in art shows in Berkshire County and in a gallery in Hudson. She was thrilled to take her place in a community of other artists.   

Bringing Eleanor’s Vision into the Future

Rebecca and Julia are deeply grateful to their mother for empowering them to make a positive difference in their own community. They feel that her trust in them to realize her vision and steward her fund into the future is one of the greatest gifts their mother could have given them. 

Taking their mother’s lead, they are embracing their personal values and developing a plan of action for the future of the fund. Both have personal connections to people in their community that are becoming more and more vulnerable on various fronts. With the conviction that “safety nets” need to be shored up, they will use the fund to fortify food security (local farms, food banks), immigrant support, healthcare resources, literacy and housing. In addition to financial support, Rebecca, a social worker, and Julia, a literary agent, are taking steps to free up more personal time to devote to local organizations. They find this is the most valuable and gratifying way to gain insight into what people in the community need most.