Nearly 25 mostly young people hoping to make a difference in Baton Rouge attended the first virtual meeting Tuesday of the civic group A6, which announced last week it is getting back together after more than a decade of dormancy.
The Zoom gathering was billed as the first of several online training sessions for volunteer project leaders, who, as envisioned by A6 organizers, will take the reins on planning and helping to implement a wide variety of civic improvement projects.
A6 co-founder Mike Polito says those who participated in the session were mostly younger and more demographically diverse than he could have hoped.
“I was thrilled and, honestly, shocked,” he says. “I thought we would have maybe 10 people. We had 22 or 23—about 40 percent minority and more than that women. There were a couple of us old guys but people of all ages, mostly young.”
Now that A6 has an interested cohort of volunteer leaders—a number Polito hopes will continue to grow—the group will start focusing on a handful of signature projects it will tackle.
Polito isn’t ready to discuss what those projects will be but mentions two likely initiatives: attracting a grocery store to a food desert in north Baton Rouge and helping develop a master plan for Florida Boulevard.
A6 as a group doesn’t raise money and it boasts of being apolitical, so how will some of these ambitious projects that so far have eluded the public and private sectors get done?
“There may be projects that require money but that doesn’t mean A6 will put up the money. It may be that the project will be raising money and we will support it by providing access, opening doors, giving guidance and sometimes getting in the middle of it with them,” he says. “Some of these will just require getting enough people interested in something to help push it forward.”
A6, which originally stood for the Austin 6, was created by Polito, Michael Trufant and several other business leaders following a 2003 canvas trip to Austin, Texas, sponsored by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. Then in their late 30s and early 40s, the group’s leaders formed the organization to focus primarily on quality-of-life issues in Baton Rouge.
Its signature achievement was the creation of term limits for those serving on governmental boards and commissions.
The group hopes to announce a list of projects later this month.
