The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. is back in operation after a five-year hiatus.
The return is led by a group including Ramon Day; Katie Ross, a JCCI alumnus; Jacksonville attorney Joni Poitier; Bennett Brown, Jacksonville president of The Heritage Bank; and civic leader J. F. Bryan IV, who was JCCI’s board chair in 2013.
Day was chief of staff for the late U.S. Rep. Charles Bennett of Jacksonville.
“We’re going to get it cranked up and going again,” Day said March 30.
Day said he filed new incorporation papers with the state in early March. There is an organizational board meeting scheduled April 6, where he expects an 11-member board will be seated and a chair will be elected.
The organization has a website under construction at JacksonvilleCommunityCouncil.org where more details will be available after the board’s first meeting, Day said.
The nonprofit JCCI was established in 1974, with the initial mission to identify the priority issues to improve the quality of life in the community.
Over the following 40 years, JCCI published 80 reports on issues such as education, city finances and mental health. The studies and implementations were led by volunteers and involved thousands of participants.
JCCI’s largest project was JAX2025, a 100-page report released in 2013 based on months of public meetings and input from more than 16,000 business and civic leaders and residents, that laid out a 12-year vision for Jacksonville.