Lorna Cochrane grew up in a rural area of Saskatchewan, Canada, an area that is filled with farms and all types energy from potash and diamond mining to oil and gas production. Prairie life was simple, secure and the big unobstructed skies and sunsets inspired many dreams of travel and adventure.

 

She started her career as a nurse and later got a psychology degree. She has taught psychology and psychiatric nursing at the university level and worked as director of a forensic rehabilitation facility. She is a Professional Assault Response Trainer which led her to do her master’s  thesis on violence prevention. For the past twenty or so years, she has been a consultant.

 

She met her husband, Daniel St. Cyr, while on a vacation to Mexico.  At the time, she was working in Canada running a long-term care facility. Daniel was in the Canadian military and frequently changed locations. As fate would have it, they stayed in touch and eventually their paths crossed again while Lorna was in Montreal earning a PhD in cognitive psychology from McGill University and Daniel was stationed in the Montreal area.

 

In the early 1990s, Lorna was appointed to a provincial healthcare board whose mission was to make the system more efficient by centralizing some services such as human resources, administration and dietary.  In this role, she worked herself out of a job. With a long-term interest in improving professional and organizational performance, she co-owned AXDEV, an international research and educational consulting group focused on change management for big pharmaceutical, medical and state health organizations.  Her consulting work took her away from home on long extended periods so in 2009, she sold her shares of AXDEV started her own firm, Cochrane Connections. She continues to be involved in Global Violence and research.

 

As a principal of AXDEV, she started a U.S. based subsidiary which brought her to this country on a green card. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the green card process slowed down. She discovered that since she was a long-term resident of the United States, she couldn’t vote in Canada even though she owned a home there.  Since she wasn’t an American citizen, she couldn’t vote in this country either.  Since she likes to be involved, Lorna applied for American citizenship and became an American citizen in 2010. The judge during her U.S. citizenship ceremony emphasized the obligation of new citizens to give back to the country which now offered so many benefits. Volunteering and community service reinforced her new membership in the Rotary Club of Norfolk.

 

Daniel’s job with the Canadian military brought him to Norfolk where he was associated with NATO and later was under contract with the State Department. With a heavy travel schedule, Lorna didn’t really get to know Norfolk. Even though she developed friends within the military community, they would be transferred after three years. One of the people she knew was Captain Gary Hatton with the Canadian military who was a member of our club. Lorna joined Norfolk Rotary in 2009 and is a Paul Harris Fellow.  This year, she is the co-chair of our major fundraiser, Suds & Buds.

 

Lorna is loves to golf, run marathons and enjoys water sports. When she lived in Canada, she was also on the ski patrol. She also enjoys making valor quilts for military personnel and veterans and playing bridge. She and Daniel also enjoy travel and are looking forward to a trip to Australia. One of her favorite trips was to India, and she also loves Istanbul, Turkey. With a love of travel, she has been active in the Norfolk Sister City organization. 

 

Lorna also loves to paint. When she was in college studying psychology, she was also working a full-time job and a mother of two small children.  One of the courses she decided to take was  painting.  One of her paintings depicts an elderly woman in a rural scene complete with a fence that did not look like the standard fence in her home area.  Years later, on an ancestral trip to Ireland, she looked out and there was the view that she had painted complete with the fence. How?

 

Lorna has three children, all of whom live in Canada.  One son is involved in the oil industry, one daughter lives in Calgary, and another daughter lives n Ottawa. She enjoys her three grandsons who come to Norfolk for an extended stay from Calgary in the summers. 

 

She is a cancer survivor times 3.