64 Parishes Winter Issue Publication Party

Thursday, December 5, 6-8 p.m.

Salt Revival Oyster Co.

3420 Ryan Street, Lake Charles, LA 70605

This event is free and open to the public. No registration needed.

Join us on Thursday, December 5, in Lake Charles to celebrate the release of 64 Parishes’ winter 2024 issue! Presented in collaboration with Restore the Mississippi River Delta and Salt Revival Oyster Co., the winter issue release party will also highlight the southwest Louisiana region, in particular its changing populations and landscapes.

Lucie Monk Carter, author of “Making Room,” our winter cover story, will moderate a panel discussion on the ways advocates for Louisiana’s coastal cultures are planning for the state’s coming population shifts.

Panel participants include Hayley Blakeman, associate director of the at the LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture and author of Receiving Communities Report; Hali Dardar, a member of the United Houma Nation and co-founder of the Houma Language Project and Bvlbancha Public Access; Jonathan Foret, executive director of the Wetlands Discovery Project; and Jill Galmarini, director of civic initiatives for Just Imagine SWLA.

The party will take place at the new Salt Revival Oyster Co. in Lake Charles from 6 to 8 p.m. A new restaurant committed to the southwest Louisiana region, Salt Revival is making waves for deploying sustainable oyster harvesting and growing practices. Guests will be able to sample the restaurant’s oysters and other offerings, and beer and wine will be provided. This event is free and open to the public, and no registration is required.

This event is made possible in part by Restore the Mississippi River Delta.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Lucie Monk Carter

Lake Charles native Lucie Monk Carter has spent more than a decade writing about the innumerable facets of Louisiana culture. In addition to contributing a quarterly column on environmental humanities to 64 Parishes, Lucie works as the communications coordinator at Baton Rouge’s oldest architecture firm, Tipton Associates, assisting with urban planning, business development, and marketing.

Haley Blakeman, PLA, FASLA

As a landscape architect and planner, Haley brings various perspectives that enable her to be a creative problem-solver throughout her 25-year career. She has practiced in landscape architecture and multi-disciplinary firms and helped communities grow and build resilience in a leadership role at a ground-breaking mission-driven planning non-profit. Her career has focused on education – as a consultant creating planning and design best practices and now as an assistant professor and Associate Director of LSU’s Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture.  Her breadth of practice helps her relate to multidisciplinary collaborations, researchers and academics, administrators, students, emerging professionals, and private practitioners. Her research focuses on coastal adaptation to climate change impacts and community planning.

Hali Dardar 

Hali is an interaction designer, project manager, and creative storymaker. She enjoys developing long-term, creative engagements to improve organizational process and produce community affirming change. Her work supports process development, community-based design, language revitalization, indigenous media, and memory documentation. Dardar is the co-founder of the Houma Language Project, and Bvlbancha Public Access. From Louisiana, she is a tribal member of the United Houma Nation. She has previously led collaborative project management and design for Language Vitality Initiatives at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Shift Collaborative, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a BA in print journalism from Louisiana State University and an MA in Arts, Culture, and Media from the University of Groningen.

Jill Galmarini

Jill Galmarini is the Director of Civic Initiatives at the Community Foundation of Southwest Louisiana, a role she has held since 2021.

Prior to the Foundation, her professional career included financial services support, fundraising, event planning, marketing and project management for Edward Jones, the Cleveland Engineering Society, Make A Wish Foundation and the American Red Cross.  She spent 8 years with the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce as the director of ThinkTEC, an economic development initiative to support and grow the tech sector in the region, and Charleston Young Professionals, a workforce development program.

At the Foundation, Jill facilitates the Just Imagine 50-Year Resilience Master Plan for Calcasieu and Cameron Parishes.  She spends her days working with partners implementing the 11 catalytic projects.  She is an executive committee member for the SWLA Economic Development Alliance, a member of Leadership SWLA class of 2024, serves on the state community benefits advisory committee, and was recently selected to serve on the superintendent’s parent advisory council with the Calcasieu Parish School Board.

Jill and her husband, Tom, spend most of their free time in spirit wear cheering on their children – daughter Katie 18, a freshman softball player at Baldwin Wallace University in Cleveland, Ohio and son Riley, a sophomore cross country runner and basketball player at Barbe High School.    When you don’t see her out and about, you can find Jill with her nose in a book or on her 700^th rewatch of Gilmore Girls.

Jonathan Foret

As a native of Chauvin, Jonathan Foret grew up in a culture-rich environment from working on shrimp boats as a young boy to speaking Louisiana French with his grandmother.  He received his bachelor’s degree in English from Nicholls State University and taught English at Grand Caillou Middle in Houma, LA and later in Brooklyn, New York before he joined the Peace Corps.

He served in the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific for two years where he taught English as a second language, served as community development coordinator and taught the Tongans how to use a Louisiana cast net.  He returned to the States to work with several nonprofit organizations before leaving again to take a position with a disabled people’s organization in Bangladesh.  This work led him to work for the United Nations in the Asia Pacific region.

Upon completion of this work he returned to the United States to receive his master’s in Public Administration from the University of New Orleans.  He is proud to be working with the board of directors for the Wetlands Discovery Center to move the organization’s vision forward.