City Year marks a Baton Rouge milestone with its spring gala

It’s been two decades since City Year’s first corps members, bedecked in signature red bomber jackets and fueled with idealism, began donating a year’s worth of their time to making Baton Rouge better. More than 1,000 alumni have completed the national service program, impacting thousands of children and youth in East Baton Rouge Parish.

Now focused solely on education, City Year can be a godsend to beleaguered classrooms. Last fall, the Baton Rouge affiliate placed 45 young adult AmeriCorps members in six public and charter schools, where they work side by side with struggling students.

“Our AmeriCorps members tutor students in English and math,” says Lori Halvorson, City Year Baton Rouge’s executive director since 2013. “They’re also serving as mentors and are supporting students if they have attendance or behavioral issues. They’re that constant source of support that a student gets used to seeing every single day.”

Baton Rouge is one of 29 nationwide City Year sites, all of which aim to improve the inequities that still menace public education, Halvorson says.

The program planted roots in Baton Rouge back in 2005, when civic leader Jennifer Eplett Reilly pushed to open a south Louisiana location following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Reilly was part of the team of young civic entrepreneurs who had founded City Year in Boston in 1988.

The typical two-year process of opening a City Year site was condensed to 90 days, demonstrating local support, Halvorson says. The program was later split into dedicated sites in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Corps members once addressed a range of community issues, but the national program narrowed its focus to education in 2011.

“They said, ‘Let’s pick one thing and do it really well,’” Halvorson says. “It’s the Raising Cane’s model, if you will.”

City Year’s participants, known as student success coaches, are mostly new to education, but they’re supported by City Year staff and engage in regular professional development, Halvorson says. Their presence seems to be paying off. Kids and teens who have access to City Year’s student success coaches are three times more likely to be proficient in math and twice as likely to be proficient in English on state assessments, she adds.

Most City Year Baton Rouge student success coaches are local—many from the very neighborhoods they serve. “It’s helped us to have a strong sense of the community,” Halvorson says. “There’s a deep connection that can’t be manufactured.”

City Year’s 20th Anniversary School House Rock Gala

The organization celebrates two decades in Baton Rouge with a roaring ’20s-themed celebration at The Executive Center on the evening of April 23. Get tickets at cityyear.org/baton-rouge.

This article was originally published in the April 2026 issue of 225 Magazine.