Maggi Bienvenu uses experience at Disney to make magic in Acadiana

Maggi Bienvenu is a Lafayette native and the manager for Workforce & Policy Initiatives at One Acadiana, Lafayette’s Chamber of Commerce and the regional economic development organization for the nine parishes of Acadiana. She holds three degrees from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette including a Master of Arts in Teaching and a doctorate in Educational Leadership. She has worked for Lafayette Parish School System as a paraeducator in adult education and special education classes and has served as an adjunct professor at UL.

Bienvenu worked for nearly a decade at Walt Disney World in roles that included guest relations, resort operations and management, tours and training and development. She is a graduate of the 2012 class of Disney’s Emerging Leaders Program. Before returning to Lafayette in 2015, she “took the long way home” by circumnavigating the globe on an 8-month trek through 20 countries on three continents. She lives in downtown Lafayette with her husband Rusty and is the proud “bonus mom” of two pretty amazing teenagers.

In your role at One Acadiana, what kind of problems do you work toward solving?

One of the biggest challenges in economic development is that companies can’t be here if they don’t have the staff they need. I can’t solve that problem on my own, but I can help make connections between education and industry. 

My work requires a lot of figuring out where the gaps are and filling in the missing pieces. There’s a lot of gray area. Going out and talking to people to identify the gaps, even in educational curriculum, is a part of what I do.

I get to build on the great relationships I’ve developed in education and showcase educational programs directly to employers. I also help employers understand the issues in education — and work to help create programs for students to find better employment. 

Your career path has not been a straight trajectory. How did your work experience at Disney lead you to make the decision to come back home?

This is the job that I didn’t know I was training for my entire life. The good thing is that all of the different experiences I’ve had help me discern possible solutions from a variety of angles. 

Disney has an openness to let employees explore. I got a chance to do a lot of my what-ifs at Disney — to be a tour guide in Europe, to be a hotel concierge, a housekeeping manager, to manage a hotel front desk and so much more — sometimes at the same time.

The allow employees to do several jobs at once. At one point, I was working at the Disney Institute, but I could pick up shifts at a hotel front desk occasionally. One day a month, I would go to Disney University and welcome new cast members. It satisfied a lot of my needs to try a lot of my what-ifs and learn what I was good at and actually make a career path. 

And you decided to come back home?

I came back to Lafayette as a boomerang. I advocate for students to be able to have the kind of experiences I did — to try things and have exposure to career opportunities in a way that they might choose to have a fulfilling career here at home.

How did your Disney experience change you as an employee?

Getting to work with people from every corner of the globe, from every level of education changed me. Not only was I serving people from all over the world, but I was also working alongside and, at times, learning how to lead people from different cultures and perspectives. I got a lot of education seeing problems from different standpoints.

One of the biggest things I learned is to listen and figure out what was at the heart of the problem. 

For example, a guest might be upset about something like a cake in the park. Disney taught me that what the problem seems like on the surface might not be the problem you need to solve.

You have people who have put all their hopes and dreams to have a magical experience. When something goes awry, money is not going to fix that. You have to get creative and use the resources and find another out-of-the-box way to solve the problem could help make things better.

If the issue is a cake that went wrong, I could call a restaurant and see if they could make a special dessert to help reclaim the moment that was lost. No matter what the problem was, I realized there were at least five ways to fix it. A lot of my job here is similar.

Sometimes it’s the out-of-the-box relationships I have that I brought into this role that help.

You serve businesses and educators both?

And students too! I like that I fit in the very personal side of economic development. The whole idea is that we want our people to prosper here. As an organization that serves businesses, we want the organizations to thrive, but we also want students to have the best pathways toward success and happiness. 

Have you had any light bulb moments?

The biggest thing is understanding how we have to operate as an ecosystem. For all of the stakeholders in this pipeline, a company is going to be thinking about what serves the company. A school is going to be thinking about what are the programs people want and how to promote the school. Students are looking for the best opportunities.

I get to ask, “How do we help the whole ecosystem?” 

We get industries together to have regular conversations. These are people who don’t always converse with each other. Maybe they see themselves as competitors or as a competition for talent. Maybe they don’t think they have anything in common, but we create a space where they can have real conversations.

One of my light-bulb moments happened when we had an IT forum conversation. One of the guys there owns a small company that maybe only employs 10 people. He said, “We need the larger tech companies here so that I can find the talent I need. The jobs I have are all mid-career people. I don’t have job for entry-level tech folks.”

In a world where nobody stays at the same company for 20 years, you’ve got to have a strong system that can feed different people at different levels of their career. We provide a forum where those conversations happen. We do it in a way where we also have our education providers in the room listening to the conversation. Afterwards, we can talk about how to fill those needs within the education system. It’s neat to create the room where it happens. 

Do you work with all levels of education?

Yes, my job is cradle to career, even second or third careers. We want to have multiple entry points for careers. While there are record low unemployments, we also have people who have stepped out of the workforce. There are not enough people looking for jobs in Louisiana right now to fill the jobs that are open — not even taking into account the mismatch of skill levels or transportation issues.

We have to look at ways to pull people off the sideline. The vast majority of those people are women who are providing some kind of care for children or older adults. You can’t pull those people in without addressing systemic issues. We need better transportation in Acadiana because our businesses need it because people need to be able to get to work. We need better child care systems. Not only to get their caretakers back into the labor pool, but to make the children themselves have a better shot at better careers later on. There are a lot of pieces to having a strong economy. It’s our job to advocate for solutions to make this the best place for businesses and people to thrive.