Tax Credit Program

 

The Atchafalaya National Heritage Area has been a great place to live, work, and play for centuries. In crafting a livelihood, inhabitants turned to the Atchafalaya's abundance of natural resources and formed a lifestyle and culture tied intimately to the land.  Traditional skills and crafts abound:   weaving fishing nets, making crawfish traps, building pirogues, carving bird decoys, making Spanish moss dolls, grinding sassafras leaves for filé 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 marriage of the region's raw material and native talent has cultivated a framework for growing the economy from within.  The entrepreneurial disposition of the region's people may offer the truest characterization of the Atchafalaya and the best hope for its future.

Through the Heritage Area Tax Credit Program, we encourage entrepreneurship that captures the traditions, customs, beliefs, history, folklore, lifeways, natural resources and wildlife in the heritage area.  We are committed to the creation and enhancement of new economic development opportunities that are compatible with cultural traditions and the environment, and that will enable our children to stay and live comfortably here in the Atchafalaya National Heritage Area.

 

Additional help

for businesses preserving our historic, cultural and natural resources can be found at: