Reinvention

A vision and volunteers turn a toxic dump into Zonolite Park

Date: April 1st, 2013, 6:52 pm

A raccoon’s muddy tracks are a small shining symbol of the transformation of an asbestos-laden wetland in northeast Atlanta into an Atlanta public park, and the perseverance of volunteers who envisioned that nature could trump industrial pollution.

Zonolite Park is 12 acres near Briarcliff and Clifton Roads, where for two decades beginning in 1950, freight trains stopped at the W.R. Grace Co. plant and dumped as much as 1,225 tons of raw material for attic insulation marketed as Zonolite. The park’s reinvention also shows how a supply chain can bring in business and killer byproducts. Reversing that damage took a chain of volunteers willing to help restore the ecosystem.
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Posted in Atlanta, Ben Smith, Michelle Hiskey, Reinvention, Saporta, Transformation | 9 Comments

With guts and WordPress, Judi Knight reinvents herself and others

Date: March 25th, 2013, 6:23 pm

Judi Knight saw it coming.

Atlanta property owners were falling into quick defaults over what she saw as “crazy loans.” Her loft conversions stopped “flying off the shelves.” She had to get out of the real estate business before the bubble burst.

On top of that, she’d gotten a divorce and had even let her license to practice psychology in the state of Georgia lapse, something her friends had urged her to maintain for job security. “I knew I wanted a different life,” Knight said. “It was like Cortez burning the ships. I didn’t want something to fall back on but I didn’t know what I wanted.”
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Posted in Atlanta, Ben Smith, Career Makeover, Life Changes, Michelle Hiskey, Reinvention, Saporta | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Voice of WCLK’s “Morris Code” reveals secrets of surviving hard times

Date: February 25th, 2013, 3:41 pm

For Morris Baxter, the Great Recession hit six years before the rest of us. In 2002, he lost his six-figure salary record label job and all the perks: the prestige, the travel, the expense account, the corporate card and the national hip-hop record promotions. Bitter and negative, full of self-pity, he had to find a way to reboot his life.
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Posted in Atlanta, Inspiration, Michelle Hiskey, Reinvention, Saporta, Self-Help, Transformation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

George Bailey, teenage suicide and a temporary goodbye

Date: February 4th, 2013, 5:15 pm

Stories of recovery and reinvention inspire us, because they show us possible routes out of our own valleys. These stories prove that we ordinary people are capable of extraordinary resilience.

Each week since August 2011, I’ve told stories like that here. The column will continue, but without me for awhile. Starting next week, another writer will take over this space: Ben Smith, a former AJC reporter who is also my husband. He has written here previously about chicken nachos and his trail adventures.

My attention turns to my personal story of recovery. I believe that we must be brave enough to open up a dialogue about a subject full of stigma and denial: mental illness. If we don’t, too many of our stories, especially our children’s, will keep ending too soon. Continue reading →

Posted in Atlanta, Golf, Michelle Hiskey, Reinvention, Saporta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Southern misperceptions tackled in Decatur author’s “Eat Drink Delta”

Date: December 30th, 2012, 7:58 pm

So much of the South is misunderstood by outsiders, and a trustworthy guide like Susan Puckett helps the rest of us understand where we live. Her new book, “Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler’s Journey through the Soul of the South” (University of Georgia Press), takes readers on a trip into the complicated culture and food of a strip of Mississippi often maligned for its poverty, obesity and backwardness.

Her ground-level stories of the people and crops, their traditions and dishes, bring to life the coexistence of different races and classes in one of America’s most fertile areas. The Delta is synonymous with blues, and Puckett, a Decatur author of six previous books who served as food editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 18 years, explored the connection between the hard stories and soulful food.
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For veteran journalist, neighborhood trail leads to a new beat

Date: November 12th, 2012, 5:22 pm

Note from Michelle: This week’s column is by guest writer Ben Smith, who happens to be my husband. Many of you know him from his days as an AJC political reporter.  

By Ben Smith

In my old life, hitting the trail meant following the money, traveling with a campaign or tracking down a criminal.

Today it simply means taking my dog for walks in the woods and keeping my eyes open.

Yet in the three years since I left the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and sought to reinvent myself in the digital age, I have discovered that my skills as a reporter easily translate to a “beat” that is much smaller, more isolated and surprisingly weird.
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Posted in Atlanta, Inspiration, Life Changes, Michelle Hiskey, Reinvention, Saporta, Transformation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

For working parents, new childcare solutions sprout like Bean

Date: October 22nd, 2012, 3:25 pm

Amid the Presidential debate chatter of workplace inequality and “binders full of women” catchphrase is the real bind that working parents find themselves in every day: how to succeed at work and childcare.

Adela Yelton is in the middle of that daily juggle herself as an entrepreneur serving working families. Her business is a novel answer to that need for working families. Bean Work Play Café near the Agnes Scott area of Decatur offers a portal into how these moms and dads are making ends meet, and seeking more flexibility, in the Great Recession.

At Bean, a parent can plug in down the hall from the childcare area. No rush to leave the office to beat traffic and late pick-up fees. Since Bean opened in March 2011, and began offering a flexible preschool a few months ago, about 200 “co-working” families have dropped in.
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With service in their marrow, metro teacher gets transplant from British student

Date: September 24th, 2012, 9:00 am

“Everything is hard the first time,” Asa Valente tells her fourth graders at Berkeley Lake Elementary in Duluth. “Don’t get discouraged. Hold yourself up and keep trying.”

The lives she touches there were in the balance as Valente battled acute lymphoblastic leukemia. To stay in the classroom as a vibrant, inspired teacher, Valente needed a stem cell transplant. This forced her to live out what she had been teaching her students, and put her lin the path of a stranger 4,200 miles away who was using education to help people survive.

A few days before Valente and her stem cell donor met in Atlanta, national TV anchor (and former Atlantan) Robin Roberts highlighted stem cell transplants by receiving one from her sister.
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With island help, Atlanta family tastes success with a Sea View and pimento cheese

Date: August 13th, 2012, 3:55 pm

Pawleys Island, SC

Brian and Sassy Henry say they left Atlanta ten years ago because they didn’t like how competitive everyday life had become. Simply getting a parking space was a hassle. They didn’t want to raise their daughters (ages 1 and 3) at such a fast, crowded pace. One day in 2002, they took off.

“We literally left like thieves in the night,” said Sassy Henry, who grew up near Chastain Park and went to Lovett School. “We had nothing but what was in our car, and when we got to the island, we slept on mattresses for three weeks.”

To restore their balance, they took on a big restoration project 350 miles east: an icon of South Carolina’s Low Country, the rustic Sea View Inn.

Now in its 75th year, and the only inn on Pawleys Island, the Sea View is where generations of families have vacationed, eating family-style meals in the dining room, unplugging how the rat race and pace conditions us over time. The the inn, the couple and their line of gourmet pimento cheese (Palmetto Cheese) have followed a similar recipe for success: Blend the new and old to make the new better. Continue reading →

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Word power stokes Jenny Munn’s success and our search engines

Date: July 30th, 2012, 12:10 pm

When Jenny Munn worked at the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, she traveled to Latin America to persuade people and companies to visit Atlanta. Her message relied on her fluency in Spanish.

Today she’s 31 and no longer needs a passport for the global reach of her language skills. Her expert fluency these days is in search engine optimization (SEO) – the way we find what we are looking for on the Internet, and how businesses use our word patterns to connect with us.

“SEO does have its own language, with basics that you need to understand to become more fluent in it,” said Munn, a native Atlantan who went to Lassiter High School and University of Georgia. “Once you get the ‘code,’ you can break down the barriers.”
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