It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

Ask anyone in Louisiana, or any other state, and they’ll tell you that two of the greatest problems today facing the average American are access to affordable housing and access to quality affordable healthcare.

Despite billions in federal funding and policies intended to help, the need continues to grow.

On this episode of Out to Lunch, Stephanie talks with two local entrepreneurs who are taking matters into their own hands to fill the void and make things better.

Wendy Green Daniels is President and CEO of Beechwood Residential, a Baton Rouge-based real estate development and consulting firm that specializes in multifamiy affordable housing. Wendy founded the firm in 2012, with a mission to enhance the lives of residents and revitalize communities through the creation of high-quality, socially impactful housing.

Before venturing out on her own, Wendy, who grew up in Baton Rouge, spent more than a decade learning the ropes from other successful nonprofits, including Mercy Housing and Columbia Residential in Atlanta. Over the years she has overseen the development of more than 4,500 mixed-income housing units.

Sandrine Nkouga is the founder and CEO of the El Shaddai Family Clinic, a new primary care clinic in Prairieville that specializes in family medicine and also treats patients for behavioral health issues, weight management and chronic disease.

Sandrine is a native of Cameroon, Africa, who came to the US as a young child and grew up in Virginia. She received her doctorate in nursing from Touro University in Nevada, and after moving here with her family for her husband's career, opened her Louisiana clinic in 2023 to help address the demand for more primary care providers and to make it easier for uninsured or underinsured patients to receive quality care.

Wendy and Sandrine's businesses are both great examples of a recent trend in business, a kind of for-profit activism. These types of businesses combine entrepreneurship and social activism, harnessing the power of the capitalist economy for the good of all of the community, not just the wealthy, powerful, or fortunate. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard.

You can find photos form this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For most of the 35-thousand years or so that humans have roamed the Earth, we were able to represent what we see and hear through art and music. But we were not able to capture images and sounds and replicate them until - in the grand scheme of things - relatively recently when the inventions of the industrial revolution brought us rudimentary photography and phonographic recordings.

Imagine how that changed the world. Not only the way we see and hear ourselves and others, but the way we think about reality. In the nearly two centuries since, technology has created unlimited creative opportunities for people in the audio and visual fields and given rise to some exciting new possibilities.

On the forefront of changes in the audio world for the past couple of momentous decades, Bill Kelley has been a Recording Engineer at the LSU school of Music and Dramatic Arts, a century old school on the LSU campus with more than 400 students and two dozen majors.

Bill produces 300 or so recitals a year for students and faculty, and supports them with their various creative projects. Bill also has several creative projects of his own: he's a musician and has also created an audio production tool, The Rhythm Tickler, that makes it easier to build digital loops that musicians can use to create new compositions.  

On the visual side of the ledger, Kristen Soileau Freeman is a Baton Rouge-based wedding and lifestyle photographer with an approach that is at once spontaneous and organic on one hand and artful, and studied and beautiful on the other.

Kristen hung out her shingle, Kristen Soileau Photography, in 2010, while she was still a student at LSU, where she majored in fine arts. In the years since, she has grown her business into one of the city’s most in-demand wedding photographers, which is no small thing in an era when brides must have the Insta-perfect photo from the moment of the proposal til end of the wedding reception – and everything in between. Kristen is a native of Lake Charles, who came to Baton Rouge in 2009 to attend LSU.

Both Bill and Kristen are great examples of the wisdom of the piece of advice often directed at people looking for career guidance: "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." They've both turned creative passions into careers that enable them to capture the beautiful sights and sounds of the world around us. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can see photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than half a century, American educators and policymakers have been grappling with a problem that just keeps getting worse: A lot of American children don’t learn how to read, at least not very well, and despite new programs and curricula, the literacy gap keeps growing. In Louisiana, the problem is particularly acute – studies show that more than a quarter of our population has a low literacy rate.

Baton Rouge author Susie Shepherd is working to change those statistics. She is a children’s book author, with eight titles to her name, who volunteers her time promoting reading and literacy among children.

Susie is a retired teacher from Baker with more than two decades’ experience working in special education and also has a masters in autism spectrum disorders, so is particularly keyed into the needs so many young learners have.

In addition to her children’s books, Susie also has published a collection of poems. 

Literacy is just one of our many challenges in Louisiana, and while Susie is focused on helping young people learn how to be better readers, Yolanda Robertson - better known as Yogi Rob - is focused on helping them lead healthier more well-balanced lives, because Louisiana is not exactly the healthiest state in which to live.

Yogi Rob is the founder and creator of an online platform, called variously The Yonk or OrganicMePlease, dedicated to helping customers on a journey to self-healing and well-being through a wide range of services and resources to support holistic healing, including homemade organic skincare products and holistic healing advice.  

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite what statistics show about fewer people getting married and more people getting divorced, Americans spent more than $50B on weddings last year, and the numbers continue to grow.

Venues, food, liquor, music, gowns, flowers, cake, photographer – and that’s not counting bachelor and bachelorette parties or what’s involved if the big day is a destination wedding in another state or country.

Call it the wedding industrial complex. Or call it good fun. Either way, local entrepreneurs know all about it and are capitalizing on the opportunities to meet ever-growing demands of couples who want more than a courthouse ceremony.

Ramsey Roberts Sims is one of Baton Rouge's wedding authorities who knows as much about brides (and probably grooms) as anyone in Louisiana. Ramsey is owner of I Do Bridal Couture, a boutique that specializes in designer bridal gowns at its two locations in Baton Rouge and Covington. Ramsey started the business in 2012, a few years after shopping for her own bridal gown and becoming frustrated with the lack of high-end inventory and personal service.

I Do Bridal Couture bills itself on offering that type of exclusive inventory and personal customer service. In recent years, Ramsey, along with her husband, has also started an online children’s boutique with her husband, somehow juggling both businesses with their three young children. Ramsey, thanks so much for joining m eon out to lunch.   

Once you've decided to get married, you need a place to hold the ceremony and celebration. Mary Skinner is CEO of Oak Park Events, a local events firm with two venues – Oak Lodge in Baton Rouge and Parc 73 in Prairieville, which specialize in wedding receptions, and also play host to a variety of other special events, parties, and gatherings.

Oak Park Events was founded by Mary’s parents and she worked with them as manager from 2009-2012, back when there was just one venue, Oak Lodge. Mary helped oversee the design, construction and eventual expansion of Parc 73 then she left the business to spend several years in commercial real estate, which is what she was trained in, rejoining in 2016 as CEO. Her parents recently retired so now Mary is running the company.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For as long as humans and pre-human ancestors have been on the planet -- roughly 2.6 million years or so, we have been eating meat. In fact, recent studies have suggested that had it not been for our carnivorous consumption, humans would not have evolved the way that we did.

Over the millennia our tastes have changed but not our love of meat. These days consumers - who spent more than $122B in 2023 on meat - are seeking out high quality, artisanal, organic and sustainable meats. Which is good news for local entrepreneurs cashing in on the craze.  

Ross Brown's company, Bougie Bologna, specializes in making an all natural bologna using smoked pork shoulder – and if like a lot of Ross’s customers you grew up thinking of bologna as a luncheon meat from Oscar Mayer think again. Ross describes his meat product as Cajun smoked sausage in sandwich form.

Ross founded the company in 2022, after nearly two decades in the oil business, because he believed in the product and wanted to be his own boss. Bougie Bologna has proven to be a hit. There are currently three varieties sold in grocery stores from Lafayette to New Orleans, including a deal with Rouses Supermarkets that will put the products in 70 locations across south Louisiana.

Ross, aka The Bougie Man, is a native of Lafayette, who is still getting used to running a demanding business that is growing faster than he could have imagined. 

Derek Stuart is co-owner of The Meatatory, as in meat and laboratory, a craft butcher in Prairieville that specializes in craft burgers and sausage recipes, high end Wagyu and specialty beef cuts, as well as local staples like Boudin balls and barbecue.

Derek and his wife, Laura, opened the Meatatory in 2022. It is both a retail storefront and a catering business with a menu that includes charcuterie boards, sides and desserts.

Like Ross, Derek grew up in south Louisiana, Ascension Parish, specifically, and developed a  passion for food and cooking meat early on. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you subscribe to an online news service, you’re used to getting notifications about news stories the algorithm thinks might impact you. In Southeast Louisiana, you’ll pretty regularly see variations on the headline, “Sea Level Rise Threatens Coastline” or “Louisiana Loses a Football Field of Wetlands Per Hour.”

If you’re like most people, you keep scrolling. Or, maybe you read the article, shake your head at the dire situation, but shrug it off because, well, what can you do? 

The reason you can afford to take a laissez faire attitude toward our disappearing coastline and wetlands, is because there are people who don’t. There are people working every day, here in Baton Rouge, to preserve our piece of Planet Earth.

Darius Bonton is the founder, owner and principal of Bonton Associates.

Bonton Associates are an engineering company focused on designing and implementing infrastructure and transportation systems that allows us to build what needs to be built, and get where we need to go, without destroying the environment in the process.

To the contrary, Bonton is all about delivering solutions to water and transportation issues that do more than just comply with environmental regulations, they actually improve our existing way of life.

If you’re looking for an organization whose name doesn’t pull any punches, how about the Coalition To Restore Coastal Louisiana.

“The Coalition” the title refers to is a wide range of organizations and people who partner to do an even wider range of activities to save our coast - from planting grasses in marshlands to giving expert advice to local, state and federal organizations.

The Coalition is Louisiana’s first statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to coastal restoration. They started out in 1988, and since March 2024 Ethan Melancon has been their Advocacy Director.

In 1789 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a poem called The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. You might not be familiar with the poem, but you probably know a line or two from it. Namely, “water water everywhere / Nor any drop to drink.”

The poem is about a sailor stranded at sea, ironically, dying from dehydration while being surrounded by water. The theme of the poem is nature’s indifference to human suffering.

Whether or not nature is indifferent to us, we humans continue to do our best to adapt to the elements, and even downright defy them.

We owe our very existence in Southeast, and Southwest, Louisiana to past generations’ willingness to drain swamps, build levees, and bounce back from hurricanes.

In our current generations, it’s the work of companies like Bonton Associates and organizations like Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana who are continuing to organize, design and execute strategies for containing the power of nature that allow us to remain here, and hopefully will for generations to come.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. Jim Engster sits in as host for Stephanie Riegel. More info about Out to Lunch Baton Rouge is at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arts and music are essential elements of any real community. They unite us, bring out the human spirit and remind us of the incredible gifts and talents and good things we can do when we let our creativity fly.

Baton Rouge isn’t particularly known as a high brow kinda place as far as the arts are concerned but there are plenty of hidden gems, and you don’t have to scratch the surface hard to find outlets and venues that are showcasing the best of the musical, visual and performing arts.

Jason Langlois is Executive Director of the Manship Theater, which opened in 2005 on the ground floor of the Shaw Center for the Arts. The building was transformative for downtown Baton Rouge and the theater was its anchor tenant, bringing new cultural offerings to the heart of the city that include musical performances, dance, poetry, plays and movie nights. 

Jason grew up in Austin and New Orleans and has lived in Baton Rouge since 2001 when he was a student in the EJ Ourso college of business. He has been at the Manship since 2009, started their Films at Manship program and more recently the standup comic series.

Over the years Jason has helped grow the theater and put it on more stable financial footing, bringing in new audiences with ever more offerings. 

Raudol Palacios is Artistic Director and cello and ensemble teacher at Palacios House of Arts, a local family run nonprofit that offers lessons in the musical, visual and performing arts to people of all ages – and regardless of their ability to pay.

Raudol and his parents, Gloria Ruiz and Manuel Palacios, started the Palacios House of Arts in 2018, as a way to bring their love of music and arts to the community. The family is originally from Cuba and in 2015 the family moved to Baton Rouge, when Raudol was studying music at LSU. Today, he is a professional musician and also helps run the school with his parents, teaching classes, organizing events and programs and other cultural activities that engage community participation.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. YOu can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Louisiana ranks last in a lot of lists but one area where the state is pretty close to the top is in the number of lawyers per capita. That’s right, Louisiana is 11th among the 50 states in terms of the number of attorneys in the state. While that means you won’t have trouble finding someone should you need to file a lawsuit or negotiate a contract or divorce your spouse – it’s probably a safe bet that they’re not necessarily all good lawyers or happy lawyers because, let’s face it – it’s a difficult, stressful and challenging profession that requires a lot of expertise.  And in matters where expertise is required, more is not necessarily better.

Lexlee Overton is a Baton Rouge attorney who has found a way to help her colleagues be better, perform better for their clients and feel happier in their profession. Lexlee is a seasoned lawyer, executive leadership expert and peak performance specialist. And melding all this together, Lexlee has created a coaching method, for lack of a better term, that she calls Mind Over Law.

Mind Over Law offers team building workshops, one-on-one counseling and training sessions, coaches legal teams, and leads a national leadership program for women.

Lexlee developed this method after spending more than two decades in the legal profession and experiencing the kind of burnout she now tries to help her clients overcome. 

While Lexlee is coaching lawyers, Lauren Temple is coaching people on how to maximize their fitness and physical performance – which brings mental well-being along with it – through her two boutique fitness clubs.

Lauren's two fitness clubs, which are both on Perkins, are called Tone BR. The two clubs are a merger of what used to be Tread BR and Pilates Plus.

Lauren is a native of Baton Rouge and single mom, raising two daughters, who experienced a terrible injury and had to learn how to walk again. After overcoming those challenges, Lauren was determined to run her own fitness studios. In the years since, she has grown the clubs into successful and growing businesses  in a market that is notoriously competitive for gyms and fitness club operators. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Baton Rouge often gets a bad rap for being a belt and suspenders kind of town, where people eat in chain restaurants and go to movie theaters and don’t do the kind of interesting, unique things – be they related to food, music or festivals – that are so characteristic of some fo sthe state’s other big cities. But its’ simply not true! And bright young entrepreenuers are taking risks to dispel those misconceptions.

Bread

Steven Gottfried is owner of the St. Bruno Bread Company, a commercial artisan bread bakery in Baton Rouge that delivers fresh bread daily to local restaurants and more than a dozen grocery stores.

St Bruno is a wholesaler and doesn’t have a storefront. And that's intentional, in furtherance of Stephen’s mission to raise the standard of daily bread and elevate the experience of eating everyday foods.

Steven is a native of Baton Rouge who learned the craft from chef Gary Darling in Covington before spending several years honing his skills first in San Francisco and then at Bellgarde Bakery in New Orleans. He went out on his own in 2017, originally in New Orleans, but the COVID pandemic changed those plans, and since late 2021, St. Bruno has been based in Baton Rouge.

The upside of Covid is that we in Baton Rouge can now get a variety of St Bruno breads including sourdough, French baguette and po-boy loafs. 

And now, the Circus!

Laura Siu Nguyen is an event planner and communications professional who is also the founder of Night Market BTR, a new annual event that celebrates Asian American history in the style of a Lunar New Year festival.

Laura created Nigh Market BTR to celebrate culture, community and creativity in Baton Rouge and brings people of Asian American heritage together. Laura is a native of Honduras, who came to Baton Rouge more than 15 years ago to attend graduate school and never left. In the years since, she has been involved in helping launch and promote a variety of events and activities – including her own. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show on itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Safety in the workplace may not be the kind of thing most people think about, but if you work for a company with more than a handful of employees -- and particularly an industrial or construction company that involves heavy machinery or dangerous chemicals -- safety is paramount to what you do every day and is top of mind of important people in your organization. In fact, it's so important, there are whole categories of employees who do nothing but safety-related stuff and finding them and hiring them has spawned a cottage industry that is proving lucrative for one local entrepreneur.

Safety

John Cambre is president of ResponsAble Safety Staffing, a Baton Rouge Company that  provides trained safety staff on a contract, temporary or permanent basis to clients in the oil and gas, construction and general industrial sectors.

The company was founded by John’s father, Darryl Cambre originally as a safety consulting company in 2007. John, then fresh out of college, joined the firm and quickly realized that the greatest need their clients had was to find qualified employees in the safety field so he built out their expertise and changed the company’s brand in 2010.

In the years since, he has grown ResponsAble Safety Solutions into a national company with clients across the country. 

Skills

While safety is important in an organization so is performance, especially if you’re talking about a team or competitive organization. But a lot of people get caught up in the pressure of performing, or may not be maximizing their potential, which is where Aaron Pearson came in.

Aaron is the owner of iDeveloped Skills Academy, a training program that that works with athletes to help them identify areas where they can improve and develop their skills and potential. Aaron founded the company in 2010 and has since developed several spinoff ventures -- Elite by ECW, an athletic clothing brand that makes custom-jerseys for local sports teams; and, EazyTicks, a digital ticketing and operating platform for area schools. 

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs On the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show at itsbatonrouge.la.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.