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OneRouge Community Check-In - Week 129

Updated: May 25





Week #129

Join us this Friday for OneRouge Week #129 at 8:30am via Zoom. This week’s call will feature a livestream panel conversation with our friends at MetroMorphosis during their inaugural C3 Summit. The panel will center around the results of five community conversations they’ve hosted throughout the year to understand what local citizens believe is the current state of their community, the challenges they face and who they believe is best-suited to create and sustain change. It will feature:


Fishbowl session

-Kaitlyn Joshua - Agree with all the statements

-Ebony Starks - Would add opportunity

-Trey Godfrey - Ecosystem - creating more of that because it’s necessary to create a thriving community. What is our shared collective goal? All of the different parts have different functions and are based on their own survival. When you look at what it takes to create thriving communities

-Christian Engle - If we work together we can create better communities. We are a volunteer based organization. The mistake some nonprofits make is what do we want to do vs what does the community need us to do.

-Ebony Starks - You can’t preserve places without preserving people. People make up the flavor of a community. It starts with people.

-Trey Godfrey - The people closest to a problem are closest to a solution - a quote from someone else. When it comes to the people side of it, not only is it preferable to have people in the community, it’s requisite to that process.

When asked who are the essential partners in creating this thriving neighborhood, the people across this city identified businesses and nonprofits as being their critical partner in correcting thriving communities. What do you all think about that?

Kaitlyn Joshua - Communities are waiting for churches to be at the forefront of social justice. No matter what part of town you’re in, the tone and tenor was the same. They want churches to be the extension of their households.

What does it mean for the people in this room that they have been identified as correctors?

-Ebony Starks - Speaking to the nonprofit - they are the lifeblood of what’s happening in these neighborhoods and in the communities. Now being part of the Wilson Foundation. They are working many hours with limited resources. Filling in the structural and systemic gaps that we should be filling to serve our communities. Nonprofits are the lifeblood and until we invest in them in a real way, the same way we do for businesses, we can’t see the impact we need.

-Trey Godfrey - It’s important to look at nonprofits as businesses as well. For us it’s the vision - that nonprofit and a church partnering together. That nonprofit and a business. We are engaging with the people we are talking about but that doesn’t always happen. We tend to “should” on people and we forget about the social service sector. It’s about everyone coming together to have one voice instead of a hundred voices.

Co-creation - Building thriving communities was a co-creationship. What should that nugget mean for the people in this room?

-Trey Godfrey - The co-creation aspect of this, do we all know each other? Does our work overlap? The one thing that has to stimulate this work is to know who everyone is and what they are doing. You have nonprofits doing the heart work of community advancement then you have government who plays their role. Then there’s the business community. I enjoy being disruptive in that business space. The business community is equipped to bare that brunt. I want to wake up the business organizations to those opportunities. HowI many of us are shoulder to shoulder. Where do we really want to go with this and then how do we facilitate doing that all together.

-Ebony Starks - I’m new to this community. I’ve been here for 5 months. But I’m not new to the work. Who has projects going on that are overlapping in target area or target population? Projects and work that may be similar in area and design are not always similar in intention or impact. I think there’s something to be said for intentionality. This projects are going to have an impact on communities.

Is it possible to be in a community and not part of a community?

-Everyone says yes.

-Christian - How do we advance the community?

Each of you will be invited to be part of the C3 Academy. It is the building of that incubator of important relationships. In so many different ways in these conversations people lifted up law enforcement in this notion of a thriving community.

-Christian - I moved here from two of the poorest communities in the nation. What law enforcement did was to have police walking and engaging in the community. They had high crime, high poverty, but the fact that those relationships were being built, it was no longer here’s that cop coming into our community. I think that’s one of the things that’s lacking.

-Kaitlyn - I found it refreshing to see that that was something everyone was longing to see. They want to look to them for community building. I think it’s achievable. We know there are pieces of the department that need to be dismantled. We need to have those conversations. I don’t see that right now.

-Trey - I’m going to be careful with what I say. There’s a migration of violent crime that used to be part of those communities that no longer is. Now we have a problem with the capitol region. As long as crime is on another side of town, it’s okay, but now that it’s over here it’s a problem. The business community has now woken up to these problems. It’s a business development issue. This conversation is in circles it ordinarily wouldn’t. I’m going to say public safety instead of law enforcement. There have been some sound bites applied to law enforcement that have been reduced down to soundbites and then that has been attacked. Defund the police is one of those.

Community members expressed an interest in earning and spending money in their own communities.

-Trey Godfrey - I was talking about traffic and we were talking about that being an economic development problem.

-Ebony Starks - Show me where you spend your money and I’ll show you what you care about. We take that opportunity away from our underserved communities. We don’t even allow them to show them where they care. A lot of what we are talking about are symptoms of poverty. They are symptoms of the wealth gap and all speak to the larger infrastructure. We can’t transform communities without speaking to that. There has been a differentiation for the allocation of resources.

The participants in the village chat said it’s impossible to do all of those things without talking about race.

-Christian Engle - It goes back to the first question - Are we with the community? I keep staring at Casey with the Walls Project. That’s where things get solved. We are going to throw out 100 wild things and maybe something will stick. They lead to things. It comes from a voice in the community. If you’re not embracing the culture of that community or where that community is coming from - I don’t think we do that enough. It has to be bottom up. Imagine if a grocery store moved into a YMCA. You already have this community entity, all these things become part of a community. As a white male I should not be determining what a black community needs

-Trey Godfrey - everybody has an entry point into the conversation but you can’t leave yourself there. The issues we face now were not created yesterday. The issues were created over centuries. Until we ground ourselves into a deeper shared understanding. We will never divorce ourselves from issues of race in Baton Rouge. Until we agree on that and we commit ourselves to that, we can’t go further.

-Kaitlyn Joshua- everything we talked to today extends from race and we have to get comfortable with that.

Community Announcements

Louisiana Book Festival Saturday, October 29th. 9 am - 4 pm

PREACH is celebrating their 25th Anniversary

The LORI Gala was spectacular!

Housing Summit Nov. 1 at 8:30-1 pm. register here. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/housing-stakeholder-summit-tickets-439688769947 Southeast Louisiana Legal Services (SLLS) is hosting an Heirship Know Your Rights and Legal Clinic session coming up on 11/5/2022 in partnership with Southern University Law Center and Louisiana Appleseed.







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