From Inside the Rest of Louisiana Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash The Four C's Governance Framework is a diagnostic tool. It does not measure whether a community was harmed. It measures whether a community was governed and whether the structures that claim authority over a place were actually accountable to the people living there. The four conditions are: Community, Clarity, Consent, and Choice. Together, they form a baseline for what meaningful participation in governanc

From Inside the Rest of Louisiana Credit: Industrial Balance, Grand Bois, Louisiana, 2004 (Monique Verdin) Before March 1994, Clarice Friloux had never been to a parish council meeting. She was a 32-year-old homemaker and mother of two with a quiet temperament, and the kind of woman who, by her own account, had no reason to think that government concerned her. The Houma have lived in south Louisiana for generations and have not historically had much reason to trust that the s

From Inside the Rest of Louisiana Grand Bois was too small to appear on most maps. In the early 1990s, journalists and researchers who made the trip there described it like this: a stretch of aluminum-sided houses along State Route 24 in the black-marsh country of south Louisiana, about an hour and twenty minutes south of New Orleans. Live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Bayous thick with alligators, catfish, and crawfish. Inhabited by about 250 people, most of them of Nati

The argument underneath this series is simple: investing in and improving Louisiana means investing in and improving the rest of the country.