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The visitors’ bureau could easily award Melissa Mulkey a medal for her devotion to her adopted hometown of Prairieville.

“My friends all tell me, ‘Aw, you’ll be back to California,’” says Mulkey, a San Jose native. “Nope, I know all my neighbors. We do block parties. There’s a weekly pickup basketball game in our front yard. Just things you don’t have in California.”

The labor and employment lawyer for The Shaw Group has her hands busy overseeing all manner of issues surrounding the company’s 26,000 employees, from training human-resources staff on new policies to handling investigations into alleged violations.

Providing some balance to all that responsibility is Mulkey’s role on the advisory committee for the Baton Rouge International School, a language-immersion program that she says outdoes similar schools in the diverse Bay Area.

“It’s the best-kept secret in education in Baton Rouge,” she says of the English-French-Spanish school that also offers two days a week of Mandarin. The school is mounting a fundraising push on its 10th anniversary to develop a master plan and physically expand the premises and enlarge its community services, she says.

On top of that, Mulkey is president of the Baton Rouge Speech and Hearing Foundation, which she got involved in after her younger son was diagnosed with a speech-development delay. She says the foundation’s early intervention autism program is unique for the area, teaching young children skills that will help them be mainstreamed by school age.

“We have a very underserved community in regard to autism,” she says. “We can serve 20 kids in our program, [but] one in 150 children will be diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder.”

Originally, Mulkey left the Los Angeles area for New Orleans with her husband, Madison, and their two boys, but found the “lower Lower Garden District” too urban. “We had our minivan stolen twice in six months,” she says. “We had gunfire outside. That was not what I had in mind.”

What sold her on the Baton Rouge area? A visit for an LSU game, of course, when she decided, “Now this is what I thought of when I left California.”

Age: 38

How do you make yourself heard on the discussion 
of how to move Baton Rouge forward? “I think you just tell people how much you love it. You get involved 
in the community. And the causes that you’re passionate about.”

Click here for the complete list of 2009's Forty Under 40 winners.