Butch Roussel, the founder of the 24-Hour Citizen Project, joins Discover Lafayette to discuss his passion for empowering others to make our community spaces great. He opened the show by speaking of his most important passion ever, his family: his lovely wife, his two children, and a third on the way!

The 24-Hour Citizen Project connects citizens with expertise and financial backers to make community-focused ideas a reality. The organization is responsible for nearly $130,000 in private funds toward almost 30 public projects including Downtown’s Lafayette sign, Krewe de Canailles, the Musical Instrument Library, the Eyes of the Sun poetry mural installation, and more. 

The project was a dream of Butch Roussel’s and the inspiration occurred when he was traveling too much for work, on the road in Cincinnati, Ohio, and realized he wanted to make a difference in his own community of Lafayette, Louisiana. He was asked to make a pitch at TedX and came up with an original concept he called the “48 Hour Citizen Project” which was inspired by the 48 Hour Film Project where friends and colleagues work creatively to make a movie in a weekend. Of course, the project evolved and was renamed The 24 Hour Citizen Project which has been empowering our locals to make a difference in our quality of life for the past seven years.

This year, applications for citizen-driven projects will be accepted beginning in June 2023. All ideas of worthy of consideration.

Butch Roussel, founder of the 24 Hour Citizen Project, and Kate Durio, co-founder of ReCover Acadiana, merged their two organizations in Civicside.com as a more effective way to engage citizens to enact change. The two are good friends and longtime civic activists.

“I always think about the impact of our work. We’ve been doing this for seven years and it can be difficult to do the same thing over and over and maintain your love of the work. The thing that keeps us going is the idea that we rely on citizens to do the work on their own ideas. It is a very people-powered concept. All we’re doing is project management and putting people in touch with folks that we know and watching people do the work.”

Butch is a graduate of UL-Lafayette and Johns Hopkins University where he finished in Biotechnology Business. Since 2011, Butch has managed clinical trials for government, pharmaceutical and small biotechnology companies through his company, Vivo Research, LLC.  He has worked through the Best Pharmaceutical Children’s Act to help expand drug labels for pediatric populations and worked on numerous epilepsy, opioid abuse potential, cardiovascular stroke, and gene therapy trials.

For more information, email info@24hourcitizenproject.com or visit https://24hourcitizenproject.com/ or https://civicside.com/projects