The city of Atlanta has the capacity to have a catalytic four years ahead. My back of the napkin wish list for the New Year includes three wishes.
They are for city leaders and developers to have a greater focus on repurposing vacant industrial space; to rethink affordable housing and transportation; and to turn Atlanta into a city that sparks the creative curiousity of the Generation Y population — giving us a reason to stay and make this our home.
At the start of the 2013 college football season, Chette Williams, chaplain of the Auburn University Tigers, said he told a reporter, “I hope our football team scores a lot of touchdowns for Jesus.”
Williams had no idea what miracles were coming, the preternatural last-second shifts of fortune that enabled Auburn to beat huge rivals—Georgia and No. 1-ranked Alabama—and end up squaring off against Florida State University tonight in the NCAA college football championship.
Williams documented his experiences in the 2013 book, “The Broken Road: Finding God’s Strength and Grace on a Journey of Faith” (Looking Glass Books). It chronicles the three-year spiritual climb by the Auburn players and coaches to their previous national championship at the end of the 2010 season.
Steve Walton’s Christmas display around his Virginia Highland bungalow features a manger and baby Jesus without mom and dad, a monstrous snowman’s head and the effigy of an elderly woman who apparently got run over by a reindeer.
There are no flashing holiday lights, dime store decorations or blow up Santas. His displays are funny and edgy, sometimes quite dark and suggestive of a sense of longing for an artist who has experienced considerable loss in his life.
He moved on with his life by turning discarded stuff into elaborate, seasonal lawn displays. After the death of his partner in 1989, “I started to see the yard as a palette, not a chore,” said Walton, 59, last week. “It was very therapeutic.”
Earlier this month, former Vice President Dick Cheney opined on FOX News about American exceptionalism.
“I don’t think that Barack Obama believes in the U.S. as an exceptional nation, and the whole concept that the world is a safer place, a more peaceful place, when the U.S. is powerful, able to in fact project its will in various places around the world,” Cheney said.
Living in uncertain times, we’re all looking for anchors. Nostalgia is a powerful one, as is music and lending a helping hand.
Friday night, more than 800 people showed up in Midtown to hear 13 bands who tried to recreate the time of peace, love and understanding known as the 1960s through the songs of two iconic bands: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
The music of these bands is now timeless, but in its day it was revolutionary, and the gray heads in the audience may have flashbacked like I did to a time when rock first moved us and when some of us sought to move others.
Beatles vs. Stones reminded me of my own altruistic early rocker roots in Staunton, Va. I played with a hastily assembled band called Ravenscroft in my first gig in a church basement.
Here is a Georgia statistic we can be proud of. The Chronicle of Philanthropy notes the state ranks sixth nationally in charitable giving, with $4.8 billion in total contributions, averaging 6.2 percent of total income given.
As Georgians aged from 20 years to 44 years make up more than 35 percent of the total population, and those under 20 year nearly 29 percent, not-for-profit organizations are actively recruiting younger donors and finding creative ways to tap into their discretionary spending.
Behind Atlanta’s hunger, poverty and homelessness are parents who are trying to stretch every resource—even dirty diapers. To cut the cost of this basic need, their babies wear soiled diapers for longer periods than they should, and sometimes parents try to wash or reuse disposable ones, putting the kids at risk for staph infections.
Founded by Adrienne Hopkins of Kennesaw, the Diaper Bank of Greater Atlanta is winding up its annual “Twelve Days of Diapers” drive that began Dec. 1. The Diaper Bank is a nonprofit that helps cover the bottoms of babies and toddlers as well as adults who require disposable undergarments but cannot afford them. Its current goal is collecting 100,000 diapers and adult incontinence products before Thursday.
Four years ago our city came to the proverbial fork in the road in selecting a new Atlanta mayor and some freshman council members.
The 2009 campaigns highlighted tremendous concerns related to public safety and the fiscal wellbeing of the city. Significant revenue losses due to the Great Recession Atlanta led the Council and administration at the time to increase property taxes, an incredibly risky election year decision.
In the coming weeks, as Americans rush to shove hastily written holiday cards and form letters in mail boxes to friends and family members, Randy Osborne will still pen a letter a day to a stranger.
Osborne doesn’t care if his letters arrive before a day attached to a religious figure or public cause. More than a resolution, his Letter a Day Project is about connection through a nostalgic form of messaging. It is one man’s reply to a national nosedive in personal correspondence.
“I think people really want some kind of contact even if it’s from a stranger, something that takes time and attention,” said Osborne, 58, who teaches fiction and non-fiction writing at Emory University and co-founded Carapace, a monthly storytelling event at Manuel’s Tavern.
Elections have consequences, and the City of Atlanta elections on Dec. 3 will be among the most important run-off contests we have seen in quite some time.
Just three weeks ago, a mere 20 percent of registered Atlanta voters cast ballots in the general city and school board elections. Four of the Atlanta school board races ended up in run-offs. And those will be decided next Tuesday.
While media coverage has been sparse at best – headlines these days are focused on stadia — taxpayers and the general public ought to focus just as fervently on the future of a school district yearning for a new day.
The bonds of family and friendship can be created through the sacrament of a regular shared mealtime, and it doesn’t have to be as seldom or elaborate as the big Thanksgiving event many of us will travel thousands of miles to celebrate this Thursday.
For several years, Owen Mathews has hosted what he calls Potluck Dinner every week at his Midtown studio. It has grown into a broad range of young to early-middle aged professionals of assorted ethnic backgrounds and experiences.
“It’s almost like we have family dinner once a week,” said Sara Le Meitour, who is engaged to another potluck regular.
This past weekend proved Govathon is easily becoming one of the most important events hosted at Atlanta’s City Hall.
Its second civic hackathon was ripe with ideas from city department heads, including finance, public works, Invest Atlanta and the airport.
In less than 24 hours, the teams presented 22 projects to judges and participants, three of which were specific to Atlanta Public Schools. One such application, RightRoute, allows parents and school administrators’ track real-time bus locations and arrival times.
Even though Walmart will likely take over Suburban Plaza shopping center in Decatur, Brian Sherman still isn’t giving up. Late last week, he stood among a couple of dozen placard-waving protesters from Good Growth DeKalb insisting Walmart can still be stopped.
Their unflagging commitment intrigued me. I stopped at their protest, feeling cynical in the wake of news that the Atlanta Braves will move to Cobb County. Why continue to fight Big Money, the Power, the Man, or whatever you call It when It always seems to get Its way? That was my question to Sherman, who at 70 has been fighting the fight since the 1960s.
“Because,” said Sherman rather defiantly, “We eventually win.”
Diagnosed with diabetes in her first year at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Leah Owenby felt anger, fear and other deep emotions. Those feelings now are channeled into whimsical, funky and jarring pieces of art in “My Creepy Diabetes Show” at Yay Studio in Avondale Estates. She assembles syringes, test strips and other found objects familiar to all of us with this disease to create darkly humorous statements about dealing with the hideous monster that never leaves our bodies. By putting eyes and Lego legs on her blood glucose meters, for instance, she converted them into “glucobots.”
There is a sobering enormity to her work that reminded me that she and I and millions of us with diabetes most likely will die of this disease. No matter how much we exercise and try to eat right, it is always stalking us.
The unfinished trail is bordered in part by cedar trees native to the Himalayas. It runs by a creek where, on a recent morning, fallen leaves floated like boats and a blue heron glided gracefully over the water. Up a steep bank, cars and trucks roar along Interstate 85.
Welcome to the new Creekside Trail, a transformative project by the Georgia Department of Transportation to turn a half-mile of scrubland north of Lindbergh Drive into a hiking path. This is one example that the BeltLine is becoming a catalyst for other trail projects.
The trail, between I-85 and the North Fork of Peachtree Creek, is the first nature trail built by the state transportation agency. It reveals more than just a small oasis right under the tires of thousands of daily commuters in Atlanta. It’s a spawn of the mothership BeltLine, a secondary trail that is supposed to beckon Atlantans out of their cars to walk or bike to work in Buckhead and northeast Atlanta.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that schools could censor student newspapers, teenagers responded by creating their own uncensored and independent newspapers. Atlanta became home to VOX—Latin for “voice.”
Many of these papers folded in an era of massive cutbacks in professional journalism. But against those odds, VOX Teen Communications celebrated its 20th anniversary Saturday. Through VOX, many students launched successful college and professional careers in fields beyond journalism, earning the Gates Millenium scholarship among other awards.
In those short hours and on the weekends, VOX attracted students from all over the metro Atlanta area, who were mentored by professional journalists and other advisers. They reported, edited, photographed and designed a newspaper that publishes five times a year and a website www.voxteencommunications.org, that updates continuously, filled with work not likely to be deemed suitable by most high school administrators. Some of it is truly groundbreaking.
On the heels of (co)lab, a thought leadership conference, many conversations have taken place across the city and the metro region on how to move Atlanta forward. While the dialogue is always stimulating in these types of settings, people move on to the day-to-day minutiae of their respective lives.
Over two days last week, a new project was birthed in the hopes of moving from ideation to collaboration and implementation of projects that can truly move the city forward via a theme of thrive, play and grow.
“I just want to know one thing: How do we stop the refugees from coming here?” That faceless voice rings from a cast member planted in the audience at the Horizon Theatre.
The play is“Third Country,” a drama based on the seismic change in Clarkston, which in the past 20 years has transformed from a predominantly white Atlanta suburb into what Time magazine called the most diverse square mile in America.
In this play by first-generation Egyptian-American Suehyla El-Attar, Clarkston is called Sidington, and the plot captures the intense emotions and misperceptions across our country about newcomers and the meaning of home, between ourselves and our shared space.
Weekend projects. We all have them but I doubt any of ours were as exciting as what the folks at Atlanta Maker worked on this past weekend.
The Georgia Tech Invention Studio partnered with the Coca-Cola Co. and General Electric to host a special “maker” edition of Startup Weekend, the second of its kind in the world.
When the Braves made yet another early post-season exit last week, this time against the Los Angeles Dodgers, former closer Billy Wagner said he was in bed. He said he was too busy working with his son’s private high school baseball team, which he coaches, in Crozet, Va. to watch the National League Division Series.
In 2010, Wagner gave up $6.5 million from the Atlanta Braves, the near-certainty of being major league baseball’s No. 1 closer and any hope of playing in a World Series. He chose home over the game.
How could he give all that up so easily? He answers in a new memoir, “A Way Out: Faith, Hope & Love of the Game.”
