User:Keithgct

I was born in New York City and raised in Greenwich, CT. Graduated from Washington College on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with a bachelor's in English, and received my MA in English from Bowling Green State University. I moved to New Orleans in 1979, where I put my education to good use as a bartender (which is a great way to get to know a new place). I worked doing music promotion for a while, then expanded into general business writing. After a two-year stint at the local office of the Shelley Berman Communicators advertising agency, during which I rose to the role of Creative Director, I returned to self-employment as a writer and producer of business communications. Among my specialty areas were mental health care, banking, radio advertising, and retail, especially consumer audio. In the mid 1990s I began doing a good deal of work with the New Orleans City Planning Commission and developed a fair amount of knowledge of planning (I later started a Masters in Planning the week before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, but that is another story). When the original Committee for a Better New Orleans (CBNO) was founded in 2000, I served on the consultant team as the chief writer, and wrote most of the text of that organization's Blueprint for a Better New Orleans. In 2001, CBNO merged with the Metropolitan Area Committee (for which I had also written in the past), and for a while used both names -- Committee for a Better New Orleans/Metropolitan Area Committee. At that time, full-time staff was hired, and I was engaged as Vice-President. A year later, the name was shortened to the much more manageable Committee for a Better New Orleans. I succeeded Sandra Gunner as President in June of 2004, expecting to spend about two years on the job. When the levees failed after Katrina in August 2005, that plan went out the window, and I remain in this position. My personal priorities are ensuring that New Orleans implements a strong, permanent, formal, inclusive civic engagement structure; that we develop meaningful participation capacity throughout our city, including grassroots leadership; that we create true partnership between community and government, as a way to ensure effective and accountable governance; and that we implement best water management practices as a way to reduce flooding and subsidence in New Orleans while creating a new, vibrant economic sector. My other interests include high-level competitive tennis, music, the ancient world, whales and dolphins, travel, and people.