Turning the tide – Local couple launches a music festival to save Grand Isle and the Louisiana coast

One hurricane takes your homes and fishing camps. The next cuts down the trees and kicks four feet of sand in your garage, in your living room, in your face. Then one morning you wake up, and a leading oil and gas multinational is pumping crude at you at the rate of 4.2 million gallons a day. Then that awful morning turns into 57 awful mornings.

The people of Grand Isle—a slender 17-mile strip of land, Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island and its first line of defense against storms—ought to be forgiven if they feel they have been under attack the last several years.

Paul and Libby Foret, founders of Sign Express in Baton Rouge, have owned a vacation home on Grand Isle for more than 20 years. Paul’s father was so in love with it, he chose to spend his final days there on the edge of the Gulf after a terminal cancer diagnosis.

One last catch. One last sunset over the jetty.

In 2010, when the BP oil spill wrestled any immediate means of income away from the longtime fishermen and shrimpers of the island, Libby took the sudden economic blow as her call to action. In memory of her late father-in-law, she organized a one-day concert with six bands playing on the island’s Bridgeside Marina.

She called it Uplifting the Coast.

“There’s no place like it—nothing in Florida or Alabama or anywhere,” Foret says. “When you cross that bridge to Grand Isle, there’s just a peaceful feeling that comes over you.”

The event was a huge success and allowed the Forets to give scholarships to children of jobless fishermen and shrimpers as well as a sizeable donation to a disaster response fund operated by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

“I never thought I would do it again,” Foret says. “We raised the money, put it back into the community, and I thought that was it.”

But after the concert, the trickle of emails and phone calls the Forets had received beforehand turned into a flood of appreciative people asking when the next concert was going to be.

The message was clear: Keep going.

Libby began educating herself further on the issue of coastal erosion. Touched by the lives of her friends and neighbors on Grand Isle and alarmed by statistics that estimate 25-35 square miles of land loss annually, according to the Governor’s Office of Coastal Protection & Restoration, she registered Uplifting the Coast as a 501(c)(3) non-profit and devoted all of her spare time to the cause.

“It’s one thing to lose my home on the coast, but it’s another thing when my home home is in jeopardy,” Foret says. “And it will be in my lifetime if we don’t do something.”

Unfortunately, the second annual event on Grand Isle, a two-day affair, failed to turn a profit. The Forets covered the losses out of their own pockets.

This June, the Uplifting the Coast Festival returns, but in a new location. In order to expand the event and raise awareness of coastal erosion, Libby made the difficult decision to move the festival away from the people she aims to help the most.

“It was a hard choice,” she says. “But what better place to put this festival than smack dab in the middle of the state’s capital?”

Paul Foret hopes moving the three-day, weekend-long festival to Baton Rouge will turn the heads of state officials south toward the vanishing coast. “There’s so much political gridlock on this issue,” he says. “That’s why we want to raise money that will go directly to the organizations ready to use it.”

By keeping prices low and adding fair rides, local chefs cooking on the grounds, a vintage car show and more, the Forets hope to attract more than 5,000 visitors daily and earn more than $60,000 for coastal relief.

This year’s earnings will benefit the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and Coastal Roots, an LSU program that equips more than 2,000 students in 40 schools across 16 parishes to plant seedlings along the coast (click here for more information).

Chris LeBlanc Band, LeRoux and other popular live acts will perform.

“This is about all of us,” Foret says. “It’s about making those [politicians] ‘above us’ concerned about the coast. It’s about taking a positive approach to a negative situation.”

Uplifting the Coast Festival will be held June 8-10 at the Baton Rouge Fairgrounds on Airline Highway. Admission is $5. For complete details, visit upliftingthecoast.org.