By Maria Saporta
As published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle on April 22, 2016
Michael Privette, who has served as the executive director of the American Heart Association’s Atlanta division for the past five years, is being promoted to a national role – as AHA’s nation director of the Go Red for Women Campaign – beginning July 1.
Part-time Atlantan Ron Terwilliger has become one of the leading voices for federal housing policy reform in the country.
Terwilliger, retired chairman and CEO of Trammel Crow Residential, is now spending much of his time working on philanthropic causes primarily focused on providing housing for the working poor.
This week, guest columnist BETTY HOLLAN, executive director of Georgia Women of Achievement, recognizes the achievements of Sapelo Island midwife Katie Hall Underwood.
If you visited Sapelo Island from 1920 until 1968, you may have seen a strong, lean woman briskly walking from one end of the island to the other, a long seven-mile stretch, her mind set on delivering another baby into this world. Born into a family of freed slaves in 1884, Katie Hall Underwood was the last of a long line of Sapelo midwives. Her skilled hands and soothing demeanor brought generations of proud Gullah-Geechee people into the world.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta Tuesday, got personal –talking about how becoming a family man had changed him.
In a moment of candor, the mayor admitted that at home he does not call the shots. For example, he said he wanted his daughter, Maria, to become a student in Atlanta’s public schools. But his wife was a student at the Pace Academy and went to the Suzuki school, a Montessori pre-school. So his daughter is going to the Suzuki School.
Gardening during a recent torrential downpour with my very driven father—a 78-year-old golf pro and lay minister— brought back old lessons in resiliency and competition. In families like ours, standing up for your beliefs requires communicating across generations.
Original Story by Maria Saporta on WABE
Atlanta has until May 9 to make peace for a peace summit set to take place this November.
The international body that selects cities to host the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates met in Rome over the weekend and issued a statement. All the parties in Atlanta must come together within one week, or the summit will be awarded to another city.
Atlanta was selected to host the 2015 World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates ─ a prestigious gathering of all the individuals and organizations who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was supposed to be a kumbaya moment for Atlanta ─ an opportunity for us to reinforce our standing as a center for civil and human rights.
We had so much going for us. Former President Jimmy Carter, who had won the Peace Prize in 2002. Atlanta is the home of Martin Luther King Jr., who had won the prize in 1964. And Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladesh micro-lender who won in 2006, had adopted Atlanta as his second home.
So we had every reason to celebrate when we were awarded the event in 2013.
Planning groups were formed. Host committees were set. Announcements were made. Galas were held.
But then problems began brewing underneath the surface. Community leaders expressed concern that the governance of the Atlanta summit was being controlled by a nonprofit ─ Yunus Creative Lab ─ under the management of Mohammad Bhuiyan and his wife.
Attempts to have shared governance or planning of the event were rebuffed, and community leaders became increasingly concerned about how successful Atlanta would be in putting on such a global event under the existing management.
Mayor Kasim Reed has withdrawn the city of Atlanta’s involvement in organizing the Nobel Peace Prize Summit.
Credit Patrick Semansky / Associated Press
Finally in March Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed announced that the city was withdrawing its support of the summit because it could not work with the organizers. Reed said that the only way the city would get re-engaged in the summit would be if Bhuiyan were no longer in charge.
The situation has continued to deteriorate, and even Nobel winner Yunus resigned as chairman from his own nonprofit ─ Yunus Creative Lab ─ saying he could not work with the management.
But Bhuiyan has had a hard time facing reality. Despite losing the support of the mayor, numerous civic and business leaders as well as his own chairman, Bhuiyan has been unwilling to step aside.
Now the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates has issued the ultimate challenge.
Come up with a solution to host the summit that includes the city of Atlanta, or it will move the summit to another city.
What a shame it would be if we were to lose this unique opportunity to showcase Atlanta and to reinforce our commitment to a peaceful world.
But first we need to make peace at home.
The Atlanta Hawks are poised to prevail in their attempt to honor former Hawks star Dominique Wilkins by getting Atlanta to designate in his honor the portion of Centennial Olympic Park Drive in front of Philips Arena.
Let me guess. It’s barely two weeks into 2014 and you’re already wavering on your New Year’s resolutions. Maybe you’ve blown them altogether. Or if you’re like me, you haven’t even started them yet. What was supposed to be a fresh start is already a dead end.
Maybe we’ve got this all wrong. Susanne Fincher says the dead of winter is precisely the wrong time to setting out to change ourselves. She’s a Jungian psychotherapist, a licensed counselor, registered art therapist and a leading international expert on mandalas—sacred circles found throughout centuries and cultures. At the core of her work is the study and understanding of cycles and patterns that are universal.
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.
“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.
Nine miles due east of the school where she became a worldwide hero for talking down a gunman who had fired at police, Antoinette Tuff showed up Sunday at the church where she has said her pastor’s voice urged her to be “anchored.” It felt strangely reassuring to be in her presence. I was there because I wanted to find out more about how she pulled off such courage in the face of impending evil.
I live six miles north of Tuff’s school, and was horrified momentarily last week at the possibility that another Newtown shooting might be unfolding. Pretty much all the news out of our schools and government in DeKalb County, Georgia, has been terrible lately.
I could see from Sunday’s service how this community teaches members to expect the unexpected. I could see how Antoinette Tuff might get used to behavior that would unsettle the rest of us. It was also clear that this is a community that values deep preparation to counter life’s surprises.
While Jay Smith, retired president of Cox Newspapers, Inc., was in his early twenties working as a reporter for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, he drove 50 miles south to his hometown of Cincinnati one weekend to visit his family. His trip home took a turn for the worse when he heard the devastating news that his father had been diagnosed with terminal malignant lung cancer.
Had Jennifer Johnson not spotted an advertisement seeking restaurant franchisees while sitting in a café with her weekly book club in the early 2000s, Atlanta may be missing out on two delicious dining establishments: West Egg Café and The General Muir. A six-year associate at King & Spalding law firm at the time, Jennifer had always dreamed of working in the hospitality industry. Seeing the flyer in the window reignited that flame of passion and ultimately propelled her to make a dramatic career transition.
“I started to think back to the dreams I had and the things that really fueled me creatively when I was younger,” Jennifer recalled in our accompanying HD Moments video.
When David Geller went through a divorce from his first wife in 2004, he found himself in the middle of a difficult life transition, worried about what his clients and colleagues would think of him. So he did what he always does when he feels stuck—he began to read.
After cracking open a book about the Positive Psychology Movement, he stumbled across an interesting fact about people who hit the threshold of $75,000 of income: As they get richer beyond that point they don’t necessarily get happier. Confused by the lack of correlation between wealth and happiness, David made it his mission to bridge the gap.
“I remember feeling like I was punched in the stomach,” David recalled of when he read that fact about happiness and wealth, as seen in our accompanying HD Moments video. “That Moment was really the beginning of a process that really transformed my firm.”
During late summer four years ago in the depths of the Great Recession, Cynthia Jones Parks was experiencing a significant drop in her business, Jones Worley Communications. She had prayed for months for God’s blessings and direction, but the downward spiral continued. However, that summer evening, she woke up in the middle of the night and sat straight up in bed when God’s voice whispered into her spirit: “I’ve already blessed you, go do something with it,” He said.
“We didn’t have very much business – many of our contracts had been cancelled or were on hold, waiting funding. I didn’t know what we were going to do,” she recalled in the filming of our accompanying HD Moments video.
For most budding professionals trying to make their mark in any given industry, the word “peanuts” represents the measly amount of money they make when they begin working their first entry-level job. For Lee Katz, however, peanuts represent far more than a starting salary. They represent the Moment that ignited his interest in deal making and the Moment he began learning valuable skills that he carries into his current role as the chairman of GGG Partners, one of the leading turnaround firms in the country. Just like all of us, he had to start with peanuts (in his case literally) to get to where he is today.
In 1964, when Lee was 13 years old, he began selling peanuts to sports fans at Georgia Tech’s Grant Field. For every bag he sold for ten cents, he earned a penny in commission. As an added incentive, the seller who sold the most bags during the day received a $20 bonus. Watch our accompanying HD Moments video.
On October 21, 1989, Keegan Federal received a call from Northside Hospital that would change not only his entire family’s life, but would ultimately lead him to add a new specialty to his law practice. His sixteen-year-old daughter, Megan, was in the emergency room, in a coma, with a severe brain injury she had sustained in a car accident. The doctor told him that the prognosis was grim.
After three days in the hospital, the doctors began to think she might survive, but told her father there was a 95% probability she would be in a “persistent vegetative state” for the remainder of her life.
Brandi Helvey was rushing around her house on Christmas Eve 2010, getting her family ready to go on a trip when tragedy struck – permanently altering not only the upcoming holidays, but the lives of her son, her husband Mike and herself.
While other family members were out shopping and preparing for the holiday trip, Brandi was preparing to move a load of laundry from the upstairs washing machine to the dryer while her three-year-old son Jacob was in the living room playing with his toy cars and watching his favorite TV show. The Helvey family lives in a multi-story home built into a hill in the Forsyth County community of Cumming. One of the home’s amenities is a home elevator.
“In a matter of five minutes, as I’m upstairs, he decides to call the elevator cause he wants to come see me.,” Brandi recalls in our HD Moments video. “He’s like ‘Mommy, mommy, I want to come see you.’ And I said, ‘Just a second, I’ll be right down.’ The elevator was on for a second and then there was silence. So, at that point I come running down the stairs. I’m tugging and I’m pulling on the elevator door.”
Brandy Brown Rhodes and her siblings lost their police captain father to a dramatic execution-style hit in the driveway of his home in a southeastern suburb of Atlanta. They lost their mom more privately, when she died of a stroke. There have been other losses, too.
Last week, as a new police precinct next to South DeKalb Mall was dedicated to their dad—sheriff-elect Derwin Brown—Rhodes and her siblings talked about weathering a series of emotional hits, after the violent one that claimed their dad. Unlike most adult children who have lost a parent, the Brown children have spent a dozen years sorting out their dad’s legacy amid lingering questions about how he died, while processing the deaths of other family members.
“I think the hard part about it is coming to peace that both of my parents are gone and I have to look at this world differently now,” Rhodes, 34, said.
