Expanding its footprint

At its latest round of meetings, the Ville Platte Rotary Club learned about economic development and retention opportunities around the nine-parish Acadiana area as well as ways the club can continue its efforts to eradicate polio around the world.
The guest speaker for the meeting on October 9 was Troy Wayman. Wayman is the new chief executive officer for One Acadiana which serves as a chamber of commerce for the nine parishes in Acadiana including Evangeline Parish.
“One of the things we’ve tried to do since we’ve become One Acadiana is build the relationships with our external partners throughout the region because those relationships are critically important,” said Wayman. “We want to build a relationship of trust.”
He continued, “We are not here to replace your chamber of commerce in Ville Platte. We’re here to accentuate that. We want the membership to grow and the chamber to be as strong as it possibly can. We are firm believers in that type of community involvement in all the areas. One Acadiana is critical to the success of the entire region.”
Wayman outlined some of the ways One Acadiana can bring about its desired successes in Evangeline Parish.
He shared, “What we want to do is pledge our help, assistance, and resources to help the efforts here with economic development to help grow the area here in Evangeline Parish and therefore grow things in Acadiana.”
“We are about growing the entire region,” he continued. “We are much stronger if we pull our resources as a region.”
The One Acadiana CEO then went over some of the projects done in Evangeline Parish. “We’ve worked on 14 different projects in this area that represents about 1,000 potential jobs for this area,” Wayman said. “That also represents about $533 million potential capital investment dollars for this area.”
Part of these projects in Evangeline Parish come from new job creation because of new businesses and industries coming to the parish and also business retention and expansion.
According to Wayman, the business retention and expansion is spearheaded at One Acadiana by Rebecca Shirley.
“We recognize the majority of our job growth in the region comes from our existing industries growing and expanding,” Wayman said. “It’s not all about attracting new comers. We want to make sure the existing industry gets the coverage they deserve and gets the help they need to grow and prosper and make our region prosperous.”
Related to One Acadiana’s efforts in economic development are its efforts in improving the region’s infrastructure. This work is done through its Infrastructure Task Force.
As Wayman explained, “We released what is called the RIVR. It stands for our Regional Infrastructure Vision Report. We sat down with stakeholders in each of the nine parishes in our region, and we talked about their infrastructure needs.”
He continued, “We came up with 90 different infrastructure projects that are perceived to have a regional impact. We narrowed those 90 down through multiple meetings and metrics to 21 projects.”
The completed RIVR, according to Wayman, will serve as a document given to DOTD that will show a “united front.”
Of those 21 projects listed in the RIVR are the four-laning of Highway 167 through Ville Platte and improvements to I-49.
Earlier in that same meeting, the members of the Rotary Club voted to ratify Peter Strawitz as president to complete the term of former president Richard LeJeune.
A week later, on October 16, the Rotary Club heard District 6200 Governor Gary Lacombe about Rotary priorities for the coming year.
According to Governor Lacombe, the priorities are membership, humanitarian service, and public awareness.
The focus of membership centers, as the governor stated, “on a couple of under represented areas under the membership umbrella.”
The first area is women in Rotary. The governor said, “The challenge is our workforce is 50-percent women, so how do you make your Rotary clubs look like your workforce.”
He added the second area is members under the age of 40. “Those are the people who will transform Rotary. They’re going to transform Rotary to make Rotary what it needs to be going into the future because what Rotary is today doesn’t look like it did 20-years ago.”
The humanitarian service is centered around the funding of polio eradication.
“Thirty-years-ago, Rotary told the world we’re going to eradicate polio from this planet,” said the district governor. “Originally, when Rotary started in this journey, we thought it would take five years and it would be done. It’s taking longer, but when we started there were 325,000 new cases of polio diagnosed every year. To date this year, we’ve had 19 in two countries being Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
He continued, “In Pakistan, right now, there are three cases in one particular spot. They just did a national immunization day. They went to every province around that spot and did about 10 million immunizations. That means we’re going to get polio, but it takes effort and resources.”
Governor Lacombe linked the priority of public awareness to increase funding of polio eradication. To do this, he signed up to run the Louisiana Half Marathon. “I signed up with a thought in mind that I would challenge every Rotarian in our district to sponsor me at $5.00 a mile for 13.1 miles towards polio,” he explained. “So, it’ll cost each Rotarian $70.00.”
“Bill and Melinda Gates matches donations to polio two for one, so your $70.00 just became $210.00,” continued the governor. “It costs 60-cents for the drops to immunize, so your $70.00 can immunize 350 children against polio.”
The public awareness aspect comes from the use of social media during Rotary Foundation Month in November and during the half marathon on January 20.
“For the race, we’ll hook up social media,” said Governor Lacombe. “I’m going to stop every three miles just long enough to say we’ve done three miles and that is enough for immunizations to immunize 150,000 children.”
No Rotary meeting was held on October 23 because of the club’s Fall Social held at Knob Hill. The next meeting will be October 30 at the Our Lady Queen of All Saints Family Life center.