EMC3 on Building Culture
Standing at the intersection of cultures — artistic and institutional, civic and deeply personal, traditional and contemporary — is, for many people, a disorienting place to be. For Erin McDonald, it is home.
Erin is the founder and sole principal of EMC3 Consulting, an Edmonton-based practice built around three disciplines that mirror the breadth of who they are: culture, collections, and coaching. To understand the work is to understand the person behind it — someone whose curiosity spans centuries of heritage and the immediate pressures facing a leader mid-transition, and whose compassion is as present in a municipal strategy session as it is in a one-on-one conversation.
As a TEDx speaker, Accredited Personal Property Appraiser, and recipient of Edmonton’s Top 40 Under 40, the range of credentials reflects the range of the practice — moving between boardrooms and galleries, between a collection appraisal and a conversation about civic identity, with equal fluency in each.
Through EMC3, Erin operates as a cultural liaison — connecting arts, heritage, lifestyle, and community in ways that help people and organizations recognize the value already present in what they hold. “I am interested in helping people recognize the meaning already present in what they hold,” they noted, “whether that is a collection, a place, a story, a building, an artwork, or a way of gathering.” The work is less about imposing a framework and more about creating the conditions for something to be properly seen.
That conviction finds its sharpest expression in how Erin reads Edmonton. The city names certain kinds of excellence readily — the Oilers, the Gretzky years, the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, the Fringe — and rightly so. But there is a fuller Edmonton beneath those markers: the jazz rooms, the small theatres, the independent galleries, the craft community, and the people who keep showing up to build something without requiring a spotlight. “Edmonton does refinement in a particular way,” Erin said. “It is not always glossy. It is often thoughtful, practical, experimental, and a bit stubborn. We tinker. We revise. We make do until making do becomes making something extraordinary.” From the Royal Alberta Museum and the Art Gallery of Alberta to independent designers, makers, musicians, and restaurateurs, the ecosystem is richer than the city tends to claim. The question Erin wants to shift is a simple one: from “Is Edmonton enough?” to “What have we failed to notice?”
It is a question that brought them to the table with Dave Pavelich of Conxeppt, Edmonton’s appointment-only bespoke tailoring studio. On the surface, cultural consulting and custom suiting occupy different rooms. Erin does not see it that way. “Collaboration is not simply additive,” they explained. “It is structural and generative — it creates a space where two distinct practices can reveal something larger than either could produce alone.” What Erin recognized in Conxeppt was a shared language: both practices are concerned with value, identity, inheritance, presentation, and care. Together, the aim is to build something Edmonton has not yet fully claimed — culture as something lived, worn, collected, hosted, commissioned, and remembered.
Their invitation to the city is direct: “Let’s get suited, rooted, and curated.”