Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 23, 1993 TAG: 9306230101
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: Long
Vivian Moore steered her van into the apartment complex parking lot, and eyed the gaggle of men dispersing like nervous geese.
"See those guys?" she said. "Those are crack dealers."
Her tour of Third-World pockets in suburban Atlanta went on. Past the street where Tiffany Harderson, who ranked first academically in her seventh-grade class, was killed by a drug dealer's random bullet. Past the apartment where a mother on crack last year set a fire to mask a stabbing committed by her young son. Past boarded windows and balcony rails hung with laundry.
"We've got liquor stores. We've got check-cashing stores. We've got pawn shops on every corner," she said. "We need banks."
Multiply Moore's neighborhood by a metropolis-worth of human tragedy and blight and you will sense the challenge facing The Atlanta Project, the most concerted private effort ever to erase poverty in an American city.
The project, in which Moore, 38, is a foot soldier, is the latest and perhaps crowning passion of former President Carter. Through a quintessentially Southern blend of neighborliness and religiosity, plus corporate dollars, Atlantans are aiming to do what even the Bible suggests cannot be done.
To the extent that they succeed, cities in Virginia and nationwide can be the beneficiaries. Just as poverty knows no boundaries, so there is no copyright on solutions. Already, talk is surfacing of a spinoff "America Project."
It is 20 months since Carter announced his idea, proclaiming that "somewhere in God's world we need to demonstrate that progress can be made toward the relief of human suffering."
Since then, more than $32 million has been raised. Tens of thousands of volunteers have enlisted. Corporations like Marriott, Coca-Cola and NationsBank have formed partnerships with poor neighborhoods in Atlanta and suburbs. And thousands of the needy have taken tentative steps toward a better life.
Skeptics have surfaced also. The project, some claim, is a tool of Big Business, aimed at whitewashing the city for the 1996 Olympic games. Whites dominate the organization. Progress is too slow. And others complain that the answer to poverty is a redistribution of power and wealth, not goodwill.
Still, even critics agree that the Atlanta Project has strengthened a sense of community and, for some, hope in this metropolitan area of 3.1 million.
"What we're trying to do is rekindle community. Nothing deep, just people talking to each other," explained Joe Lewis, who came to Atlanta in 1973 as an urban missionary for the Shrine of the Black Madonna and who - like Vivian Moore - is one of 20 "cluster coordinators" in the Atlanta Project.
"[We want] the kind of community where I grew up, where you walk down the street and people ask, `Ain't you Ruth's boy?' "
There are 407,000 people in Atlanta proper, and almost one-quarter of them live in poverty. Between 12,000 and 15,000 homeless people walk the city's streets. Seventeen percent of all babies at Atlanta's Grady Hospital are born to mothers who abuse cocaine. Cases of violent crime in juvenile court in Fulton County, encompassing most of the city, are up almost 300 percent in the last five years.
Heavy incense and soft jazz fill the air in the former Wachovia Bank branch where the Atlanta Project's Brown Cluster is housed.
"Poverty is always going to exist," concedes Lewis, a self-described "overall neighborhood hell-raiser." But Lewis believes that the recession, drugs, and the "Me Decade" of the 1980s have altered the climate in American cities for the worse.
"What has not existed before is the level of hopelessness," he says.
Two-and-a-half miles away, in a downtown complex equipped with recessed lighting, modular furniture and state-of-the-art computers, is the nerve center of the Atlanta Project. But the project's high-powered advisory committee, its corporate partners and its 40-person central staff - about half on loan from businesses - agree at least in theory that the soul and guts of the operation, the places where the battle will be won or lost, are the clusters.
Each cluster represents a collection of at-risk neighborhoods, usually with a high school at its center. The idea is that solutions to poverty must "bubble up" from those communities, and that corporations and volunteers must stand ready to help meet the goals once they are set.
A major debate within the Atlanta Project is whether that, in fact, occurs. The most publicized initiative to date, a citywide immunization drive that enlisted singer Michael Jackson and about 7,000 volunteers for a door-to-door campaign, clearly was directed from the top. Other similar undertakings, perhaps involving drugs or literacy, are planned.
Waiting for neighborhoods to act, "we've had to develop a real sense of patience," acknowledged Dan Sweat, a longtime civic booster, fund-raiser and corporate cheerleader tapped by Carter to direct the Atlanta Project.
Sometimes what bubbles up from the clusters is far-reaching and clever. Other times the ideas are less obviously so.
For instance, since last fall, the Brown Cluster has succeeded in getting a food stamp office moved out of a residential neighborhood, supplied a local elementary school with 78 trophies for honor students, enlisted one corporate partner (Wachovia Bank) in urging the Georgia Theatre Association to open a movie theatre, and laid plans with another (Equifax) to help residents clean up their credit ratings.
Elsewhere, a grab bag of ideas is being tested. One cluster is investigating replacing a swimming pool that was lost to rapid transit construction a decade ago. Another is setting up day-care facilities for teen-age mothers. And another is bringing in a task force of psychologists and volunteers to work with children traumatized by violence and drugs.
There are ideas for after-school programs, job fairs, mentoring programs, community development corporations, summer recreation programs and dozens of other initiatives. In most of the clusters, teams of residents - organized around a half-dozen broad topics, including health, education and economic development - are discussing ideas.
Two tenets are central to the concept: that the Atlanta Project will provide little direct cash to individual projects, and that long-term success depends on personal relationships being built across economic lines. Corporate executives, suburban volunteers and the inner-city poor must get to know each other, person-to-person.
"It's the discovery that, damn, they're all right," said Lewis.
The corporate response thus far fits the image spawned by Atlanta's civil rights era slogan - "The City Too Busy To Hate."
How strong are bonds? Some Atlantans question whether that enthusiasm will extend beyond the Olympics. Organizers acknowledge the possibility that it will not. But they hope that the bonds between corporations and neighborhoods will be strong enough to prevent widespread abandonment when the international spotlight fades.
Toby Sanders and Donald Holt can testify to both the power and the limits of those bonds.
As would-be entrepreneurs, the two young blacks had submitted a dozen bank loan applications over the past year seeking start-up funds for a video store and a flower shop.
Friends since their days at Morehouse College, the pair envisioned breathing some vitality into a small shopping district in the Oakhurst section of Decatur, just east of Atlanta. The neighborhood fell on hard times when whites moved out a decade ago, but recently has seen some resurgence.
Banks were uninterested, however, until Atlanta Project officials got involved. Coincidentally, Bank South became the corporate partner for the cluster in which Oakhurst is located, and Sanders and Holt wound up with a $15,000 loan on April 2.
But the loan, added to their personal investment of $30,000, probably won't cover operating costs until the businesses stabilize. What is needed is venture capital. And the Atlanta Project - despite its fund-raising prowess - is not in the direct-funding business.
"That's really the stumbling block," said Sanders on a recent afternoon as a handful of customers browsed the still-limited stock at "Movies You Like."
"They don't have a pool of money, and sometimes the answer is money.
"The Atlanta Project is doing a good job of broadening the concept of community. It's saying that all these suburbs that are sucking the doughnut dry are part of the same community," he continued. "But you can only raise the level of discussion so much before you have to deal with the reality side of jobs and money."
Most of the disputes involving the Atlanta Project center on that truth.
"The corporations need to be told by someone, preferably President Carter, that now is the time for them to be more labor intensive and less capital intensive," said one high-ranking member of the Atlanta Project family.
"It's not about planting flowers and trees. It's about knocking down filth and putting some black men to work."
It is a sentiment echoed by Anita Beaty, who heads the Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless and is one of the most outspoken critics of the project. "It would be naive to say you can create major change in poverty without massive policy changes. . . . The reason things haven't changed is not because there aren't a lot of good efforts, but because the powerful haven't wanted to give up their power."
Walk along "Sweet" Auburn Avenue with its boarded storefronts and palms-out panhandlers and glimpse the magnitude of the task. Here, in the shadow of downtown skyscrapers, along the street where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, the awesome idealism of the Atlanta Project collides with a daunting reality.
"You get one person a house out of 30,000 and it just doesn't seem to help," said Dan Stafford, as he sat idly at midday in his small dry-cleaning shop. "I doubt if anybody knows the answer."
But talk, too, to volunteers such as Bette Hinesley, who once a week makes the 150-mile round trip from her north Georgia home to help. "I just have such strong feelings about this," she said. "I feel you can have a city that is sort of like the ideal, that it's possible to have things working privately and publicly together."
"Each day more and more people understand the vision," added Beverly H. Dabney, a Bank South accounting executive detailed to the project. "The opportunity is just unreal."
Hinesley, Dabney and thousands of others take as their credo a challenge issued by Carter in unveiling the project: "The real failure, for Atlanta and cities like it, would be not to try."
by CNB