The Atlanta Project

Shepard Barbash

NO RECENT experiment in community development has attracted more attention than The Atlanta Project (TAP). Announced to the world by its founder, former president Jimmy Carter, in November 1991, TAP has quickly become the largest private anti-poverty initiative in Atlanta and among the boldest efforts of its kind in the country. Last year, Atlanta's newspaper of record -- the Atlanta Journal & Constitution -- took the extraordinary step of launching a new weekly section called City Life, and devoting two full pages of it every week to TAP. "Like it or not," our Program Administrator Dr. Jane Smith told us recently, "we are a part of the developing history of this city." We are getting lots of play outside the city, too. As I write this on one of our 150 personal computers -- all donated to us, like so many things are (in this case by IBM, one of our corporate partners) -- I am distracted by preparations for a meeting with a Danish journalist, in town to interview President Carter and do a story on TAP. I am preoccupied as well by a letter of welcome that must be written to a group of 125 volunteers from another corporate partner, the Marriott Corporation, who will be arriving tomorrow from around the country for a convention. They are coming a day early to help us paint and clean houses.

What is it about The Atlanta Project that commands such curiosity, such generosity, such hope from far-away places? Jimmy Carter is only part of the answer. The sheer size of the project, its comprehensive scope, its call for unity and inclusiveness, and its patina of "newness" have all raised expectations, and contributed to the sense among locals that TAP is not so much an initiative of The Carter Center (a non-profit organization affiliated with Emory University) as a public trust, "owned" by and accountable to the people of Atlanta. (Indeed, as an in-house writer, I am a full-time volunteer for TAP, answerable to no one really but myself. The Project by design is filled with such entrepreneurs -- encouraging "volunteerism" is one of TAP's guiding principles.)

What Is It?

When friends ask me what exactly TAP does, I often begin by telling them what it doesn't do. With few exceptions, The Atlanta Project does not give grants. It does not build housing, run human service programs, propose specific legislation, or endorse political candidates. Hanging amid other service providers like an ether, it has no easily identifiable "turf." It seeks instead to convoke
an all-out, societal assault on urban poverty.
Part Prospero, part Yenta, it is an organization of arrangers and choreographers, match-
makers and mediators, mid-wives and deal-makers, all brought together to bring others together in a grand scheme of problem-solving, relationship-building, and resource identification. If TAP "creates" anything, it is conversations and institutional partnerships: between corporations and communities, between universities and neighborhood volunteers, between city, state, and federal agencies, between rival non-profit intermediaries, between the military and the schools, businesses and governments, churches and health centers, synagogues and mosques, banks and public housing projects, banks and competing banks.

"TAP is a mechanism, not a program -- people have a hard time understanding that," according to Sonny Walker, Executive Director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for NonViolent Change and a member of TAP's Policy Advisory Board. We're the human equivalent of a relational database, created on behalf of the city's poorest residents -- all of them.

The Dimensions of the Problem

TAP's target region is an enormous expanse with enormous problems: a violent, depopulating Third World country surrounded by one of the fastest-growing economies in the nation. The area, shaped vaguely like the head of a Brave's tomahawk, extends beyond the city limits and across three counties -- Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton -- straddling the east-west Interstate 20 and subsuming Atlanta's south side, where the bulk of the city's poor reside. Roughly one in five residents of the entire, nine-county metropolitan region of Atlanta (population 2.42 million) fall within TAP's purview. This mammoth "priority zone" comprises a population of approximately 534,000, more than 100 identifiable neighborhoods, and 200 square miles: a serious challenge to any community organizer and would-be consensus builder.

Relying largely on data from the Atlanta Regional Commission, TAP defined its work area in part by using two indices associated with poverty: the rate of single-parent households and the rate of teenage mothers. One in four residents in the work area lives below the poverty line, compared to about one in 20 for the rest of the region. As in other cities, the problem tracks the color line: 73.6% of the residents within TAP's area are African-American, compared to just 15.1% for the rest of the region.

Even more so than others, Atlanta is a city of extremes. In 1993 it was the most violent city of its size in the nation. It has a higher proportion of families with incomes below 50% of the average national poverty level than any city except Newark. Boosted by Atlanta, Georgia's infant mortality rate is the highest in the nation, its high school drop-out rate is second highest -- roughly one of every three residents in TAP's work area over age 25 has no diploma -- and the state ranks dead last in the overall well-being of its children.

Impervious to this disaster, Atlanta's economy has blossomed around it. Since 1991, led by gains in the northern suburbs, the region has dramatically outpaced the nation in job creation. At the end of 1993, Atlanta boasted an unemployment rate of 5.4%, compared to 6.4% nationally. (In fact, job growth has been remarkable for some time: in the 24 years since 1970, employment in metro Atlanta increased 126%, while population increased just 69%.) Historically specialized in transportation and wholesaling, the economy in recent decades has diversified
to include communications, finance, insurance, real estate, and professional services. Corporate relocations have been a major engine of growth, and the city is regularly cited in surveys of corporate executives as one of the best places in America to "do business." Labor costs and taxes are low, housing prices moderate, and the climate agreeable. Political contests are also tame and race relations mild compared to those in, say, Chicago. Co-optation and consensus-building are the norm; confrontation and divisiveness are to be avoided, given the region's painful segregationist past.

Building a Community

The local ethos of team play permeates The Atlanta Project. Galled by the increasing disparity and isolation of rich and poor, black and white, TAP declared that its first concern would be to bridge the divide and so change everybody. Hence the first words of our mission statement: "The mission of The Atlanta Project is to unite Atlanta as a community to improve the quality of life in our neighborhoods." Attacking the sense of impotence felt on both sides, TAP would offer hope to all that some of society's most intractable problems could be solved -- and concrete opportunity to act on that hope. Moreover, solutions would be achieved on the disadvantaged communities' terms, by empowering half-million-plus residents to set the priorities for TAP's agenda. Organization. Needless to say, this ambition has proved a tall order to operationalize. TAP's staff has grown substantially and restructured itself, even as agendas, goals, and promises have been scaled back. Preserving the lofty vision which brought me and so many others to the Project in the first place, TAP is learning to pick its spots.

Still, the basic infrastructure has remained the same: 20 small community offices, each typically staffed by two local residents and located in a public high school, are supported by a 30,000 square-foot central office, housed in a converted warehouse in Atlanta's City Hall East. General guidance and links to institutional resources are provided by The Carter Center and by the Policy Advisory Board, a diverse 36-member group of community leaders whose 12-person executive committee is chaired by President Carter and co-chaired by Rosalynn Carter.

The two-person teams in the field act as servant brokers and community organizers. Their "community" is defined as the collection of neighborhoods and schools that feed into the area high school. These work areas are referred to as "clusters" and their leaders "cluster coordinators." Named after the 20 high schools that anchor them, they range widely in character and size -- from the small residential West Fulton cluster, population 8,000, to the huge industrial and residential hodgepodge of Tri-Cities, population 59,000. They vary in institutions, resources, and degree of social cohesion.

Each cluster has a steering committee, comprising key stakeholders of the community and responsible for assessing and articulating its priorities through a series of volunteer task forces, which the steering committee members typically chair. Cluster coordinators were initially encouraged to form task forces in six functional areas: health, housing, economic development, education, community development, and public safety. Other work areas identified subsequently as priorities by various clusters include children and youth, communications, family support, the arts, and homelessness. As of this writing, more than 100 task forces are in varying stages of development in the clusters across TAP.

Cluster staffs were also asked to inventory resources and prepare overarching strategic plans for their communities. Drafts of these plans were completed by the end
of last year, and identify literally hundreds of proposed initiatives and priorities for concern.

The task of reviewing, consolidating, and, in the end, responding to this wish list falls to TAP's central office -- the Carter Collaboration Center. The Collaboration Center serves several functions. It provides a neutral meeting site for the different entities and interest groups that have a stake in the clusters. It also houses TAP's central management team, led by Project Director Dan Sweat and Program Administrator Jane Smith. A group of loaned executives from various agencies serve as "resource coordinators" in the various functional areas (health, housing, education, etc.). Other staffed areas include data policy and analysis, training, evaluation, communications, volunteer management, and technology and management systems. (Few community development initiatives are blessed with so much high-tech equipment, or with as many volunteers. The clusters are connected to each other and to the Collaboration Center by computer, and the Project has a database of more than 10,000 volunteers.)

Partnerships. By far the biggest net transfer of resources TAP has achieved for the cluster communities thus far has been its recruitment of major corporations to the Project. The bulk of the Project's five-year, $32.8 million operating budget (including $12 million of donated goods and services) has been raised through private contributions. More than two dozen major companies have made significant cash and/or in-kind commitments to TAP.

Just as important, 19 of these donors have entered into novel partner relationships with individual clusters, and two others have become partners with all 20 clusters. Although arrangements vary, the corporate partner generally makes a cash contribution to TAP and agrees to supply an executive to work full-time with the cluster for at least a year. The loaned executive assists the cluster staff in planning and administration and provides entree into the company's pool of human resources, including volunteers, professional and technical expertise, and in-house training programs. The executive also sensitizes his or her employer about the conditions and needs of the cluster, often focusing more of the corporation's community reinvestment efforts there.

The potential benefits from these corporate relationships -- in Atlanta and throughout the United States -- are enormous, varied, unpredictable, and difficult to measure. The companies, most headquartered in Atlanta, are huge. Fortune 500 partners include Coca-Cola Co., AT&T, United Parcel Service, Delta Air Lines, Georgia Power Co., NationsBank, Turner Broadcasting Systems, The Home Depot, and the Marriott Corporation.

The gathering of so many corporations under one tent to fight poverty in partnership with the poor is unique among community-building initiatives. Other novel partnerships are developing as well. Most clusters have been paired with a local university. And many are pursuing relationships with churches, smaller businesses, medical centers, schools, and government agencies.

Projects. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a "TAP initiative." Everything we do is in concert with others. Moreover, our role varies. Sometimes we're the conductor, sometimes the stagehand. Often we just provide the hall. "TAP projects" likewise run the gamut. Corporate partner BankSouth Corp. helps children run an in-school bank in Decatur. Trust Company Bank, partner with the Carver cluster, offers free check-cashing to residents in a public housing project and gives educational seminars to encourage them to open bank accounts.

Ten major federal and state agencies are piloting a simplified, eight-page common application form -- one-stop shopping -- for seven public assistance programs.

The US Forces Command at Fort McPherson and Cities In Schools, a non-profit organization devoted to drop-out prevention, jointly run an innovative leadership training program for cluster teens known as FutureForce.

Six major banks and the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce have launched an $11.5 million lending program, seeded with startup money from TAP, that offers business loans and mentoring and technical support for budding entrepreneurs who might not otherwise qualify for credit.

The US Forest Service and the Georgia Forestry Commission work with paper companies, local green groups, and residents to plant trees and promote environmental education in three other clusters.

Three major local housing groups, traditional rivals, entered into an agreement to create a housing resource center, funded initially by the state, to support community development corporations and others providing affordable housing in the clusters.

Arts in The Atlanta Project, a partnership of TAP and various public arts agencies, has awarded dozens of small grants to support the creation of youth dance companies, community theaters, public murals, book making, talent and art shows, and oral history projects.

In an effort that has received international recognition, an Atlanta architect, Wade Burns, is working with students from Georgia Institute of Technology and residents in Carver to design, build, and site housing for the homeless using old railroad boxcars.

In the largest initiative so far, 7,000 TAP volunteers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three county health departments, and two local hospitals mounted a door-to-door campaign throughout the Project area to promote immunization and begin developing a regional computer tracking system to monitor children's health care.

In the most recent, on 30 April, nearly 4,000 volunteers went door-to-door in a massive awareness and team-building campaign to distribute information about violence prevention and canvass residents about what they would do to make their neighborhoods safer. The effort involved a broad coalition of local groups -- including the City of Atlanta, the King Center, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference -- and marked the beginning of a long-term effort by TAP to address the number one concern expressed by residents in the clusters: violence. Believing the issue needed to be reframed as a first step to cope with it, the cluster coordinators' health committee, which developed the campaign, has named it "TAP into Peace."

Common Values

Rather than shoehorn all this activity into a particular theory for urban renewal and declare ourselves adherents, most of us at TAP explain what we do and why we do it by referring to a series of values. The most important -- and most problematic -- is empowerment. As often as we use the word, we still have an "I-know-it-when-I-see-it" understanding. The best advice I've heard came from Neil Shorthouse, a TAP senior advisor and executive director of Georgia Cities In Schools. "In everything you do," Neil told me early on, "you must always ask yourself: am I generating dependency or inspiring self-sufficiency?" Applied to my own case, what he meant was: don't just churn out copy for cluster newsletters; teach people how to write!

Inseparable from the idea of empowerment is the belief that the cluster stakeholders, not President Carter or TAP's funders, should articulate for themselves what they want TAP to be doing. At the very least, they should be willing and active partners in any program that floats in from the Ivory Tower.

Other basic values already noted include volunteerism, collaboration, efficiency and avoidance of duplication -- reflecting the style of The Carter Center -- and comprehensiveness, or holism -- derived from the understanding that poverty is a multi-headed hydra whose faces must be attacked simultaneously, from various directions.

How Are We Doing?

Halfway through its initial five-year funding period, The Atlanta Project is not easy to evaluate. Lots of new relationships have been established, dozens of new initiatives are showing promise, more grant money is flowing into neighborhood revitalization, volunteerism is up, public awareness has been raised. But quantifying the impact of this effervescence -- much less the credit TAP deserves for it -- is impossible. Certainly, the basic indices of poverty in a population of more than half a million people are not likely to have improved in the 18 months since TAP became fully operational. On the other hand, good things are clearly happening, and TAP has been a catalyst and supporter for many of them. That said, TAP faces enormous challenges. The decline in manufacturing and real wages, the lure of the northern suburbs, corporate layoffs, a weak public school system, a reluctant state legislature, and segregationist housing practices all work powerfully against us. The horrors that these forces have helped to produce -- joblessness, disinvestment, white flight, violence, drug abuse, broken families, fear, despair -- are so far from the suburban Atlantan's everyday experience as to make our mission statement seem quaint. "Some of those people just don't want to work," a neighbor of mine says. "You can't help somebody who doesn't want your help."

TAP faces internal struggles as well. The greatest is simply managing our cultural diversity and forging a common language: how do we define "empowerment." Corporate executives, community organizers, non-profit administrators, foundation directors, academics, preachers, semi-literates, writers, doctors, judges, government bureaucrats, a former president of the United States -- all can be found at TAP, and we don't always understand each other, much less agree.

A related administrative challenge is TAP's sheer size and fluidity -- our cooperating and competing 20 clusters, our shifting players, partnerships, and programmatic foci, our mix of in-house paid staff and off-site corporate partners, in-house loaned executives and off-site contractors, now-and-again volunteers and full-time fanatics like me, three-month student interns and long-term university partners. Communicating and coordinating regularly among ourselves, much less with the rest of Atlanta, is a major task, as is maintaining accountability and quality control.

Still another challenge has been to set concrete priorities and add specificity to
the TAP vision while staying faithful to the ethos of "bottom up," consensual decision-making. Focusing and defining TAP's precise "coordinating" role in the various functional areas has been a long, slow process. Ideas are plentiful, resources are scarce, and choosing is hard. Popular agenda-building is messy business, especially when the agenda is poverty.

Finally, TAP has struggled to balance the imperatives of participatory democracy -- maximizing the community's control over events -- and programmatic efficiency -- making sure the Project gets "results" and achieves some agreed-upon goals. How much freedom should "the community" (itself a problematic term) be given to spend someone else's money? How empowering is the liberty to make mistakes? How aggressively should corporate advisors push their ideas with their cluster partners? Does "let the community decide" mean that the community is the chief architect and repository of wisdom, or does it simply mean it has a veto? Is the source of an idea as important as its content? Do we really need all those committees?

A friend of mine whose father has gone through Alcoholics Anonymous observes that the problem with empowerment models is that both sides wind up expending enormous amounts of energy just defining the rules of engagement. To an extent, this has been true at TAP. Questions of process give us no peace.

Then again, TAP is no 12-step model. We're an experiment with an uncertain future, and the learning curve has been steep. This excuses no one for inaction, but challenges us all to keep working and come together to make things happen. President Carter has just launched The America Project, which, he is careful to say, will not be a TAP-replication machine but a collaborative, information-sharing network and an advocate for cities. We may have some answers. We'd like a few more. Our communities deserve it.

Click here to return to the Boston Review Series, The New War on Poverty.

Originally published in the June/September 1994 issue of Boston Review

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