The Atchafalaya National Heritage Area has been a great place to live, work, and play for centuries. In crafting a livelihood, some inhabitants turned to the Atchafalaya's natural wealth, tilling its fertile lands, fishing its teeming waters, probing its verdant surface for buried oil and natural gas. Others capitalized on age-old practices, perhaps selling traditional seasonings, carving cypress knees, or making musical instruments.

Although most Heritage Area residents today hold jobs within the mainstream economy, for many years it was not easy to distinguish work ways from folkways in the Atchafalaya. Many people, regardless of their station, crafted seamless lives where one flowed into the other. This innate appreciation of the value of the region's raw material and native talent has cultivated a context in which a regional approach to true economic diversification is solidified by the heritage area framework and supported by a new emphasis on Louisiana's Cultural Economy.

To expand economic opportunity, we will focus on helping businesses expand in place, while facilitating start-up ventures, thereby growing the economy from within. This means achieving balance by adopting an approach that values traditional industries already proven to work in the Atchafalaya economy while taking advantage of technological advances and emerging sectors. Similarly, it means nurturing small community-based enterprises while tending to the needs of the Atchafalaya's multinational companies.

The entrepreneurial disposition of the region's people may offer the truest characterization of the Atchafalaya and the best hope for its future. The heritage area is committed to the creation and enhancement of new economic development opportunities-- opportunities that are compatible with cultural traditions and the environment, opportunities that will enable our children to stay and live comfortably here in this place called the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area.