Rotary Club of Crowley hears about Project Front Yard

It was an afternoon of “new” at the Rotary Club of Crowley’s Tuesday meeting.
A new president, Pat Miers, took over the club for the year, and the club heard of a new parishwide initiative that looks to improve its façade and attractiveness to new businesses, new residents and more.
Project Front Yard, which got its start in Lafayette about three years ago, has since expanded into other areas of Acadiana, and as announced recently, is making its way into Acadia Parish.
“This is not a OneAcadia program,” said Laurie Suire, president and CEO of OneAcadia. “We support it because of the impact it has on economic development, the impact it has on community pride.
“It is a community program.”
The program, in a nutshell, looks to improve the “front yard” (a city or parish’s gateway).
“Our symbolism is that, in our backyard in Southwest Louisiana we do really well – our music, our festivals, our food, we do really well,” explained Katherine McCormick of Project Front Yard (Lafayette). “But, collectively, our front yard isn’t.”
Both Suire and McCormick were on hand for Tuesday’s Rotary meeting to better explain the program and what it means for Acadia Parish.
As McCormick explains it, Project Front Yard got its roots from organizations like the Rotary Club of Lafayette and Kiwanis Club already doing their own thing; business leaders and media members complaining about Lafayette’s littering problems and the community presenting 450 action items for a comprehensive plan including 40 regarding beautification.
“What we heard in that process is that the residents of our city really care about what our city looks like,” McCormick said.
“What we did with Project Front Yard was really come up with an umbrella group that supports these other groups that are already working in our community and gives them some leverage and some momentum. A win for our Garden Club now becomes a win for our whole Project Front Yard (group).”
From the onset, McCormick and Project Front Yard organizers never wanted the program to be limited to only Lafayette and are happy to have community partners like the Iberia Chamber, St. Martin Parish and now Acadia.
Project Front Yard has three main focuses – cleanliness, beautification and education.
For its cleanliness projects, Project Front Yard of Lafayette is focusing on litter enforcement in the Hub City, has reorganized its “Adopt A Road” program into “Embrace A Space,” has a decal program and is creating and getting the community to participate in cleanup activities.
For beautification, it is looking toward the public art sector, calling on artists to help beautify the most mundane things like rain collection water barrels or trash cans. It is also creating community partnerships and creating gateways into public spaces.
Outside of the Bayou Paddle Trail project and media commitments, McCormick was most excited about the school participation portion of the education sector.
She told the story of educating the students of Lafayette Middle School about plastic bag littering and recycling and had the school collect roughly 40,000 bags over a month. Those bags were later recycled into a bench that was recently installed at the school.
She also told the club of a 5-year-old girl who had written to Lafayette City-Parish President Joey Durel’s office about wanting to help with the effort. After visiting with the little girl, the girl, her mother, her teacher and McCormick — at the request of the girl — interviewed various people for what turned into a 30-minute documentary that will launch this fall.
For Acadia’s part, Suire is urging all to get involved by starting small, whether it’s “Ten on Tuesday” (picking up 10 items every Tuesday), or continuing beautification projects at home or the office. She also encouraged anyone looking to get fully involved to help be part of a steering committee, of sorts, to continue to get the ball rolling in Acadia.
Earlier in the meeting, Rotary International District 6200 Governor Ezora Proctor was able to enjoy her final day as district governor with her home club of Crowley.
She presented the club the Presidential Citation for “actively working to ‘Light Up’ Rotary.”
However, she was also made to be the presentee as District Executive Secretary Kat Crappel and Assistant Gov. Harold Domingue, presented a bouquet of flowers to Proctor as well as the photo that hung in the district office all year — a photo of the Proctors with Rotary International President Gary C.K. Huang and his wife.