Adrian Fisher, a self-made businessman turned Democratic House Representative from Louisiana, is rapidly becoming a notable figure in the state’s political landscape since his election in November 2021. With a background as a licensed counsellor and the founder of Cognitive Development Center, part of Seaside Healthcare, Fisher brings empathy, integrity, and insight to his role. His commitment to improving the lives of his constituents, combined with a personal history marked by adversity and resilience, shapes his approach to governance.
A successful, self-made local businessman from Monroe, LA, by way of Tallulah, LA, who, since his election in November 2021, has been a Democratic House Representative, Adrian Fisher is a swiftly rising star in the Louisiana political firmament. With his name now firmly on the lips of those who frequent the corridors of power in Baton Rouge, it is evident that he is held in increasingly high esteem by his fellow politicians across the House, perhaps in no small part due to his genuine desire to tangibly “give back” to his community and facilitate the life chances of those he represents – itself touching, humbling and moving. In short, Fisher is definitely one to watch in his ascendancy as he moves from political neophyte to seasoned civic stalwart.
Adrian Fisher is the founder and president of Cognitive Development Center, a division of Seaside Healthcare, a behavioural health company that specialises in providing psychiatric care in the community across Louisiana and the Southwest Region of the United States. Fisher is a dedicated individual who focuses more on substance and moral integrity rather than seeking public attention or expressing his views without necessity. His background as a licensed counsellor and his understanding of societal challenges highlights his empathy and commitment to supporting those in need. His presence is marked by a combination of political insight, ethical values, and natural charm, alongside a notable sense of style.
Fisher has the ideal combination of qualities that voters appreciate in a politician – intelligence, strong beliefs, and a clear sense of right and wrong. He is honest and deeply committed to making Louisiana better, aiming to “heal with humanity,” as mentioned in his business’s slogan.
Parents
Fisher’s early life was marked by significant challenges and personal loss, which have deeply influenced his character and resilience. From a young age, he faced adversity, most notably the tragic loss of his father in a train accident when he was just four years old. This event, among others, taught him to navigate life’s hardships with determination and strength.
Growing up in a diverse family with a range of backgrounds and experiences, Fisher learned to understand and embrace different perspectives. This environment, coupled with the profound grief and loss from his father’s untimely death, has shaped his approach to life and his desire to help others.
Despite these early challenges, Fisher has not allowed himself to be defined by them. Instead, he has grown into a thoughtful, philosophical, and empathetic individual. He is committed to using his experiences to support others in dealing with their own difficulties, embodying a spirit of service and compassion.
Upbringing
Fisher had a rural upbringing in Tallulah, a small country town in northern Louisiana, close to the Mississippi border. Recalling one searing childhood incident which tragically demonstrates America’s pernicious, deeply toxic obsession with race, he uses it to illustrate the nature of the town where he was raised and its highly segregated, racially charged nature. One day being driven by his mum and aunt (who, because of their respective light complexions, could be mistaken for white), they stopped at a red light. Thereupon a truck, driven by “some young white guys”, pulled up alongside their car, and the occupants menacingly and belligerently asked Fisher’s mother and aunt through the open window, “What y’all doing with them two young niggas in the car with y’all.” As a matter of fact, devoid of bitterness, he states, “That introduced me to the differences in our community and in our societies.”
After his father passed away, Fisher and his mother relocated from Tallulah to Monroe, a bigger town in northern Louisiana, when he was twelve. He lived there until he went off to university.
Education
In Monroe, Fisher attended a predominantly black middle school, then left in his freshman year for St. Frederick’s High School, a Catholic – and predominantly white – school. As he relates, “I stayed there for one year, so I got a chance to meet other people and interact with more people in Monroe.” Mixing across the racial spectrum was indeed beneficial for Fisher, as it bolstered his sense of self, as well as his ability to communicate with folks from all backgrounds and demographics, something which would serve him well in politics in years to come.
The widespread trend of “white flight,” impacting many cities across America, also influenced Monroe and, consequently, Fisher’s early life. “The neighbourhood we lived in at the time was a majority white neighbourhood. Then, when black people started moving in, the white people started moving out. That’s just how it was. It’s a nice neighbourhood. That’s where I grew up, from middle school to college.”
Experiences of Racism
Despite it being a racially segregated milieu, given the ineluctable, nefarious history of the South, Fisher is nevertheless quick to assert that he himself never suffered “any truly, terribly bad experiences” of racism in Monroe during his childhood, besides that typically experienced by a young, black man growing up in the South. As he says with equanimity and an admirable degree of stoical resignation, not to mention an unerringly positive mindset, “What I experienced is common, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing violent.” He continues, “I’m sure there was a degree of racism, but we all experienced that, so I didn’t let that impact me too much.”
University at Southern
On leaving school, Fisher went to Baton Rouge to attend Southern University and gained a bachelor’s degree in accounting. One reason he enjoyed his undergraduate experience so much was that his father was originally from Baton Rouge, and he was thus able to spend quality time with his father’s mother (who lived to be almost one hundred) and his extended family in the city whilst at university. As he relates with palpable joy at the recollection, “I got a chance to see my father’s mother and also his siblings. I got a chance to see them and interact with them more. One time I even had a class with a cousin that I didn’t realise was a cousin until after the fact.”
While at Southern, Fisher took full advantage of the opportunities to do various internships and work placements, from which he garnered invaluable real-life experience that would help him when embarking upon the world of full-time employment. As he recounts, “I worked with BP America, and I had a chance to go to Cleveland, Ohio. I went there for two summers while I was at college because that was part of the scholarship.”
He continues, explaining why he chose to prolong his degree before graduating with another work internship, “When it was time to graduate, I wasn’t quite ready to leave school yet, so I took another internship, this time with IBM in Maryland. I went there for almost a year in my last year in college, then I came back to Baton Rouge and graduated in December 1993.”
Fisher also possesses a Master’s Degree in Community Counselling from the University of Louisiana in Monroe and still uses this qualification to work as a counsellor for his mental health company.
Return to Monroe
Despite his friends rushing to take up jobs in big cities like New York, Washington D.C. or Houston, seduced by the bright lights and plethora of glamorous opportunities, Fisher instead chose to head back to his hometown of Monroe after graduation, having had an epiphany of sorts. As he relates this decisive moment on his life’s journey, “I had an awakening. I remember being on Winborne Avenue, vacuuming out my car – the car I had when I was in school when something impressed upon me to go back to my hometown. I had wanted to go to DC, New York or Houston, one of those bigger cities because all my friends were going there, but I was led to say I needed to go back to Monroe. And that’s what I ended up doing.”
He adds, “So I went back to Monroe, and I took a small contract with a local healthcare agency just to learn a little bit.”
Business Career
Fisher duly wasted no time in exhibiting the full extent of his entrepreneurial flair, vision and ambition. Proud of his youthful accomplishments, he states, “Then three months later, I started my own company. I graduated in December 1993 and started my first company in April of 1994, so four months later.”
The desire to set up his own company came from something he experienced during an internship. Recalling the initial impetus, he says, “I just had this awakening about what I wanted to do. When I was doing my internship with BP, it was in Cleveland at their North American headquarters up at Lake Erie. I thought I wanted to go and have my tie and my briefcase, thinking that’s what I wanted to do. But when I got there, I realised that that environment was not for me, that that setting wasn’t a setting that I was made for.” He adds, with honesty and self-lucidity, “I just knew that wasn’t the route or the path I was supposed to go down.”
As he proffers, with an endearing self-deprecation, “I guess I just have that entrepreneurial spirit. So when I got back to Monroe, I spent those first two or three months understanding what was needed and also what I can do.”
Fisher’s first company – Life Coordination Services – was a social service agency for the mentally ill, founded when he was only 22.
Now, some thirty years later, with Cognitive Development Center, a burgeoning behavioural health business, Fisher has managed to turn it into a statewide agency, and as part of the Seaside Healthcare family, has more than 40 sites in Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. “To this date, we have over six hundred and twenty-something employees,” Fisher says with discernible pride. “A total of $24 million in payroll and a direct impact throughout the state.”
Fisher’s company is based on a referral system. As he explains the way in which the company he lovingly created operates, one can hear in his voice the sense of satisfaction at doing something meaningful to help others. “We get referrals from the school system, from the court system and from clients who have been admitted to behavioural health hospitals. When they get discharged, they call us to come and service those individuals. Then we service them out in the community, in their homes or wherever the need is. We go to where they are now.” He adds, “A lot of our staff go out in the field seeing clients, and they do individual group therapy or family therapy. We work intensively with a lot toof people who have substance abuse challenges.”
Given what he has witnessed over the decades and the many thousands of people his company has helped treat, Fisher is unashamedly forthright about the role of human will in making changes to one’s behaviour and thus being able to overcome addiction and substance abuse. “You have to want to change. If you don’t want to change, and if you’re not at a point that you are willing to change, it’s not going to happen.” He adds the harsh realities of much painful, hard-fought experience in his tone, “We’re going to get you on a path to get better, but you got to want to get better.”
With an enviable gentleness and intrinsic kindness, Fisher reflects on the exact nature of his business providing mental health services and counselling. “It’s not a pretty business. We are in business because somebody’s hurting somebody or someone is having serious challenges, either mentally or with substances. That’s the reality of it. But it’s always going to be here. And we are just here to service that need.”
As to what his business seeks to achieve in the lives of those they help and what his meta-aims are, Fisher speaks with a profound humanity animating his features, “Our main goal is to keep people from being hospitalised, to keep them from going to the ER rooms and to keep them from long-term care. Then, one-on-one, our main goal is to help them grow as individuals. Then our main priority is to come in and have individuals or their families be able to maintain without us.”
Political Career
Despite being at the helm of a successful and meaningful business, Fisher decided in 2021 to courageously to embark upon a political career, and thus, for the last 16 months, has been the Democratic House Representative for District 16 and for Morehouse and Ouachita parishes – an area with a population of some 44,000 people. Winning the election in November 2021 with 69.3% of the vote, it was, in effect, a landslide victory which gave this quasi-reluctant politician a clear, unequivocal mandate to affect some change in his immediate community.
The Desire To Serve
However, according to Fisher, he never harboured any strong political ambitions. As he explains candidly, “I didn’t really have any aspirations to go in politics. But at the time, it was more about timing.” He continues, again with gentle, self-deprecating humour, elucidating the role his neighbour and serendipity played in his paradigm shift from behavioural health care to political office. “My business probably runs better when I’m not there, so I had some freedom to be able to get away. And my neighbour just happened to be the guy who was the previous state representative – and he’s a friend of mine who lived directly in front of me. So, when he decided that he was only going to do two of the four years, I was in a position to be able to run, in that I had the time and the resources.”
Fisher then adds, tellingly and with his altruistic disposition evident, “I felt compelled to be able to serve. This is just another way to serve and give back to our community.”
When asked why he decided to run (for political office), he says with rousing conviction and an acuity of vision, “I’d rather be at the table where these decisions are being made. I’d rather be at the table making the decisions than being on the back end.” With typically good grace, he adds, “I’m just the average person that’s working who wants to take time and give myself back to the community by serving in this capacity.”
For Fisher, the key thing for a man in his position is to be impactful and to “be able to affect policy change.” He continues, “Because the policy change starts here in the state level, and then it trickles down to providers, then to individuals and families. So I’d rather be there actually making those laws.”
Thus far into his tenure, Fisher admits that he has greatly enjoyed getting to understand the nature of the political process. As he says cogently, “I have really enjoyed understanding the local and the state political processes. Actually being in the House of Representatives, understanding the creation of a bill and of a piece of legislation, and then sitting through the whole process, and seeing exactly how it works, has been fascinating.”
Networking with a view to helping the people he represents has also been a key factor in Fisher’s political education. As he relates,
“Being able to network to know where to go for resources – resources meaning there’s information to help my district and my people.”
Likewise, understanding the minutiae of how government works on the inside has been a major boon for Fisher. “Really seeing how government works and how we are impacted by government actions and decisions has been very useful. Now I’m learning to understand it more.”
Even a cursory glance at Fisher’s political Facebook page shows both his commitment to local community issues – be it the Northeast Louisiana Sickle Cell Anaemia Foundation or facilitating many school groups to visit the state capital, and the passion, energy and enthusiasm which he puts into such grass-roots matters.
Fisher’s voting record – the bills he has sponsored whilst in the House of Representatives – unsurprisingly reflect a man of moral stature desirous of equality for all, one deeply committed to both affording young people more opportunities and to seeking greater racial justice for black people. Be it his support for free school breakfasts for certain marginalised demographics, the School Safety Act of 2023, dyslexias screening and diagnosis for school students or creating a task force to investigate and address high African-American suicide rates, Fisher is most vocal on those topics close to any sentient, forward-thinking and compassionate person’s heart.
Sixteen months into his appointment, Fisher is happy with how things have gone thus far, but is filled with both optimism and excitement at what can be achieved in the future. As he says with characteristic and disarming modesty, “It’s going about how I thought it would, but there’s a lot more to do and I still have a lot more to learn.”
As he remarks in a tone imbued with benevolence, “I try to make an impact on those who I encounter. That’s what I’ve been endeavouring to do.”
Listening to him explain his political modus operandi, one cannot but admire the rare humility of a man now occupying a role which often goes directly to others’ heads, inebriating them with a self-importance mistakenly derived from the pomp and circumstance. “I like to listen and be quiet at first. Then, once I understand the topic or the issue at hand, then and only then do I start putting things forward and vocalising my thoughts and concerns.” In fact, Fisher has remained steadfast and true to what he told interviewers on the night of his election victory, “I want to come here and listen, learn, and then go to work.”
On his desire to seek re-election, Fisher is clear: “I want to get more done for our district and our state. I am going to run again, because I came in the middle of a session. I at least want one full session on my own. Then from there, I will just take it from term to term.” As he adds, with wisdom and a valuable sense of perspective, “I just want to be impactful where I am at this time. If it leads to something different, something more, then that’s a path I can take. But I don’t have some big, grand ambition that I want to end up in government. I just want to take each year to year and see how I can help the people in our district and also the people in the state.”
Fisher is also influenced in no small way by feelings. As he relates with emotional candour and self-possession, “I live by how I feel led to live. If I am convinced that I need to stop, I’ll stop and go back to my business. If I feel that I need to keep going, that I can be impactful here and stay politics, then. I will stay here for a while. So, I will just go how and where the spirit leads me to go.”
If only more elected officials and politicians espoused such sentiments and actually listened to those who elect them!
Family
Providing the much-needed stability for his political accomplishments and aspirations is a large, loving family. Fisher is happily married with eight children. “I have four boys and four girls,” he says proudly. He then elucidates his response, pre-empting the inevitable enquiry with a knowing smile and a throaty laugh, by now used to the implicit question contained therein, “Yes, they’re all by the same woman.”
With his brood of children ranging in age from 6 to 32 years old, with a 12-year-old, a 15 year old, an 18 year old, a 20 year old and 22 year old twins in between, Fisher is certainly an eloquent advocate for doing one’s biological duty to further the human race.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, like many high-achieving men, he is in possession of a redoubtable, hugely supportive wife and he admits that it was her who initially encouraged him to run for political office. “She’s the one who nudged me on. She wanted me to to stay local and run for mayor, but then this Representative role became available, and because I knew Fred and I didn’t want to go into local politics at the time, this was a real opportunity.”
Fisher now divides his time between his home and family in Monroe and his political duties in Baton Rouge. Detailing his weekly commute and his enviable work v life balance, “I drive in on Monday mornings and leave out on a Thursday evening.” Confining his political activities to mid-week, he is thus free to focus on his family and children at weekends and to thus be the hands-on father he never had.
Regrets?
When asked if he has any regrets in life, Fisher is unrepentant, steadfast in the choices he has made thus far, demonstrating real sagacity and a decidedly philosophical disposition. “As a whole, I wouldn’t change anything, because our life is a sum total of what we’ve done. You take it as learning experiences, even though some things haven’t always been pleasant. But you grow from that. That’s how you grow and that’s how you learn.”
Three Wishes
When it comes to the proverbial three wishes he would like where he granted them, Fisher’s choices reflect his strong spirituality and his keen desire for constant personal growth and ever-increasing self-knowledge. As he says deliberately, and with peace in his voice, in the tone of a man who knows both exactly what he wants and how to acquire it, “To be aligned with my creator. And just to keep growing, to be open to learning and to never stop learning.”
As for Fisher’s second and third wishes, he is an ardent believer in the importance of human potential being fulfilled, and that each of us has a set of gifts that we must use to the full during our lives on earth. He adds, “Secondly, that each person fulfils what they were created to do.” He adds, “Because I really believe there’s greatness in everybody, which is from our experiences, good and bad. And if our experiences in life are mostly bad, it prevents the real person from emerging. They don’t really know themselves. So, I want each person to really achieve their true potential.”
Conclusion
Thomas Jefferson once famously remarked, “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” Likewise, former POTUS Barack Obama, echoing this sentiment, has said on several occasions that “you get the politicians you deserve.” Assuming the veracity of such statements, it therefore follows that Louisiana’s District 16 is indeed deserving of Fisher as their House of Representatives incumbent – a decent, courageous man in an often-tawdry political landscape, trying to make a tangible difference to the lives of others, often those less fortunate, and to serve his community with probity, generosity of spirit and an over-arching sense of duty.
With his term in office due to end in 2024, one can look forward to Fisher standing for re-election and continuing to “fight the good fight”, and thus in so doing, continuing to do his utmost for the people he conscientiously, lovingly and at times even doggedly represents.
It is often said that one powerful indication of a society’s level of civilisation is how said society treats its most vulnerable citizens. After a long, fulfilling career working on the frontline of mental health community care, Fisher knows only too well how true this is. Given his consummate integrity and tireless dedication to helping those most at risk, one has no doubt that Fisher can bring to the world of Louisiana politics the same gentlemanly, solicitous and empathetic approach he has brought to communities throughout the state with his psychiatric outreach work over the last three decades.
