ZZ Archives Best of Atlanta - 2009

Pat Maddox, volunteer, Friends of Refugees

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:39:00 GMT

Pat Maddox has never left North America. Now that she’s seventy-one and living on Social Security, she probably never will. Which is all right, because she lives in Clarkston. The world has come to her. In 1996, Maddox, a home-healthcare nurse, began delivering surplus bread from Publix to the town’s many foreign-born refugees. Unable to speak their languages, she communicated with smiles and hand gestures. This is the danger of giving a little: You suddenly find yourself giving a lot. Soon they were inviting her in for tea. And they found a way to ask questions. What does this letter mean? Where do we get food stamps? How will we pay the electric bill? Miss Pat found the answers. Sometimes she paid the electric bill herself. She let people stay in her basement. To her, it was all part of obeying God’s commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. God made no exception for Bosnian neighbors, or Vietnamese, or African child soldiers. She drove people to the doctor and the dentist. She took girls to the ballet and boys to see the Hawks. Her Friends of Refugees organization grew with the population. Youth groups came from Virginia and Texas to help run her summer camps. Resumes took shape over fresh coffee at the “Cafe Clarkston,” a computer room especially for immigrants. Teachers volunteered for Mommy and Me classes, where everyone learned English together. One day a volunteer said, “Miss Pat, how do you respond to all the needs?” And she said, “Well, as I’ve reached out, some of the refugees have reached back. And the ones that reach back are the ones you pour your life into.” —Thomas Lake

Photograph by Joe Martinez

Bruce Morton, community organizer, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:41:00 GMT

Bruce Morton grew up on Bollingbrook Drive in Beecher Hills, before the dawn of Nintendo. He and his brothers played four square and kickball. They started mudball wars. And they took refuge in the hardwood forest behind their house. Morton grew up and had three children of his own, but he never forgot those woods. A few years ago he found out that a developer had bought the land and planned to clear it to make room for new homes. By then Morton had helped incorporate the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, a group with hundreds of volunteers dedicated to preserving open land. With city support and a grant from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, WAWA organized an effort to buy the land and turn it into public greenspace. Volunteers also cleaned up polluted creeks and worked to develop parks in such underserved areas as Vine City and English Avenue. With Morton as executive director, WAWA established headquarters in a twenty-six-acre urban forest off Richland Road, where the group works with schools to reconnect children with nature. Morton lives a half mile from where he grew up. His children play in the same woods where he played as a boy. “They love to be outdoors,” he says. —Thomas Lake

Helene Gayle, director, CARE

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:42:00 GMT

CARE, the Atlanta-based humanitarian organization, is not about Dr. Helene Gayle. But it’s Gayle, CARE’s director since early 2006, and her longtime public-health cred that have refocused the almost sixty-five-year-old nonprofit.

Gayle ran the CDC’s AIDS program for twenty years, then moved on to work on the disease for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. When CARE came calling, Gayle wasn’t sure she was ready to leave Seattle and her work there—but then she remembered why she had gotten into public health. “Ill health has as much to do with economic status, social status in life—the things that we work on in CARE, whether it’s extreme poverty, gender inequality, marginalization, or stigma,” she says. “So coming to CARE was in many ways coming full circle, to the things that brought me into medicine to begin with.”

But Gayle insists CARE is more than just words, and a new emphasis on policy change—especially efforts to empower girls and women—looks to prove that. Earlier this year, Gayle testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about climate change. The organization is also working to eliminate maternal mortality, world hunger, and sexual violence. “We’ve moved very much from giving a person a fish, to teaching a person to fish, to actually figuring out why there are no fish in the stream to begin with,” says Gayle.

This past summer, President Obama called on the Buffalo native to chair his HIV/AIDS advisory council. First up: developing a national AIDS strategy, “something we really haven’t had,” she says. Interestingly enough, when Gayle first began at CDC, she was discouraged from working on AIDS—everyone thought it would be taken care of quickly. “Obviously, it became in many ways the defining public health issue of our time.”

But most gratifying for Gayle is seeing CARE’s work in action, such as when she traveled to Kenya to meet a group of grandmothers who are using the group’s support to bring up their orphaned grandchildren, whose parents had died from HIV/AIDS. “That’s what makes me get up every morning: knowing it is possible to have an impact on the lives of even the poorest of people around the world.” —Amanda Heckert

Greg Ott, teacher and tech pioneer

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:43:00 GMT

One hundred and six years after publication, The Call of the Wild is still required reading in Greg Ott’s seventh-grade language arts class. Mr. Ott has nothing against antiques. But at Northwestern Middle School in Alpharetta, Ott has become known for something entirely different: a high-tech whiteboard rigged with parts from a video game machine. These interactive whiteboards can be purchased for a high price, but the principal heard about a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who figured out a way to build one for a fraction of the cost. He mentioned this to Ott, who helps implement the school’s new technologies and had already developed a website where students could see his assignments. Ott made the whiteboard work, using a remote controller for the Wii video game system and a regular pen equipped with an infrared emitter. Now, when Ott projects the lessons on the board, his students can write the answers—virtually—using the infrared pen. Why is this a good thing? Motivation. Ott holds daily grammar warm-ups, during which students must break sentences down into their components. This was once seen as a boring chore. Now they compete for the chance to stand before their peers and deconstruct sentences with the light pen. “You’d think they were on TV,” Ott says. “They’re really fighting to understand it.” Ott has helped ten teachers at Northwestern Middle install similar systems. And this fall, with test scores in the 99th percentile, the school held a special assembly in the gym. Georgia school superintendent Kathy Cox stood to announce the winner of the 2009 Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award, a $25,000 prize that has been called the Oscar for teachers. Only one teacher in Georgia would receive the prize this year. “Drumroll,” Cox said. “Gregory Ott!” Mr. Ott stood up, looking wobbly, and his students stood too. They raised their fists and yelled. —Thomas Lake

Photograph by Joe Martinez

Don Crawford, executive director, Empty Stocking Fund

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:43:00 GMT

Adults know they’re responsible for their own stockings come Christmas, but for thousands of Atlanta children, the magic of the holidays rests solely on the shoulders of one man: Don Crawford. In the thirteen seasons he’s been executive director of the Empty Stocking Fund, Crawford has helped bring presents to as many children (around 500,000) as the Fund served in the seventy years before he took over. That equals about 1 million happy kids since 1927.

Crawford, his pointed ears nestled next to a receding salt-and-pepper pate, looks more like one of the Big Guy’s elves than the red-suited man himself, but he’s just as jolly, his brown eyes crinkling as he laughs. “I’m in the service of making people happy,” he says. “But we don’t really know because we’re not there on Christmas morning. If things happen the way they should, the children would never know that we were involved.”

It’s October now, and thick columns bearing the heft of City Hall East above are already wrapped like red and green candy canes in “Santa’s Village,” the basement warehouse where the Empty Stocking Fund operates. The space is empty, but soon tractor-trailers bearing the fruits of Crawford’s year-round labor—negotiating bids with toy vendors, picking out gifts for each gender and age group, canvassing corporations for sponsorships—will arrive. The space will become a labyrinthine “cavern of cardboard,” filled with footballs and basketballs, MP3 players and watches. Crawford makes sure there are enough toys that moms and dads can select from a few options when gathering their child’s goodies. “We don’t want it to feel like a soup line,” he says, “where someone comes in the door and someone hands them something and sends them back out the other side.”

Since taking over in 1997, Crawford has expanded the number of families served by using Medicaid as the qualifier. “Even in good times there are still quite a lot of families living with fairly low incomes, and Medicaid’s on a sliding scale based on the federal poverty level,” he says. He’s also doubled the amount spent on the toys. “The quality of the gifts was a little shaky for a while. When I took over, I made it my priority to make these gifts the kind I would have for my own children.”

Soon someone may have the chance to play Santa to Crawford. The Empty Stocking Fund will be homeless after this season; City Hall East is being sold, and Crawford is already hunting for another spacious, MARTA-friendly spot for next year’s workshop. —Amanda Heckert

Photograph by Joe Martinez

A. B. Short, MedShare founder

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:46:00 GMT

A. B. Short has a missionary’s zeal and an entrepreneur’s imagination. But early stints as both a minister and a businessman left him feeling frustrated and out of place. Only while helping Bill Bolling launch the Atlanta Community Food Bank in 1979 did he discover his perfect niche: inventing nonprofits.

His first start-up, with longtime collaborator Bob Freeman, was Cafe 458 in 1988. This still-thriving MLK-district establishment—more restaurant than soup kitchen—also serves up warm clothing, a mailing address, counseling, and substance-abuse support groups.

But it was through his next venture—organic farming and helping start the Morningside Farmers Market—that Short learned that the U.S. healthcare system has surplus issues with equipment, much like the inefficiencies he’d combated in the food supply chain. Short and Freeman went to their friend Dr. William Foege, former director of the Centers for Disease Control. Foege believed that a lot of “charitable” redistribution of excess medical supplies was really a form of dumping: Agencies shipped materials and devices that the recipients could never use, doing little more than shifting environmental liabilities to developing countries. Foege challenged Short and Freeman to devise a more efficient solution, which led to their founding of MedShare in 1998. Says Short, “We follow a very simple concept of having products pulled from us rather than shipped out—a pull mentality rather than a push mentality.”

MedShare developed inventory-management software that enables healthcare providers around the world to order exactly what they need, from sutures and rubber gloves to autoclaves and anesthesia machines. Hospitals and manufacturers donate eight tons of usable surplus medical goods each week, which are sorted and packed by hundreds of volunteers at warehouses in Decatur and San Leandro, California. This win-win strategy has resulted in the distribution of $65 million worth of supplies and equipment (no pharmaceuticals) to eighty countries over the past ten years—all while earning the highest possible efficiency ratings from nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator and keeping all that steel and rubber out of our landfills. —Betsy Riley

Suzanne Boas, president, Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:46:00 GMT

In 1991, Suzanne Boas became president of Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta, a nonprofit organization founded in 1964 to offer debt management advice to consumers just as the country’s crush on credit cards was blossoming into a full-grown love affair. Since then, her mission has been to teach consumers to “live beneath their means.” When she took the helm, CCCS was a place for Atlantans to find help when financial troubles crept into their lives; she oversaw thirty-five employees and five offices. Today, in a recession that defies hyperbole, Boas has watched her staff double since January 2008 to 600 employees. Today’s CCCS works to help desperate consumers nationwide hold on to their houses and savings without digging a grave of debt. From 2006 to 2008, CCCS saw a 70 percent increase in bankruptcy counseling, an eightfold increase in foreclosure counseling, and 64 percent more Americans needing help with basic budget planning. “We’ve had to grow quickly to meet the needs of those who need us,” she says. “That’s hard to do when the services you offer are free or very low cost.” Boas is hopeful that predictions are correct about economic recovery, but if they’re not, she’s ready. “I realized how well my values match those of the organization,” she says. “I’m the same person at work, at home, and in the community. That’s very rewarding.” —Bill Warhop

Judge Horace Ward, civil rights pioneer

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:46:00 GMT

From his office on the twelfth floor at 75 Spring Street, Judge Horace Taliaferro Ward—his middle name is the same as Booker T. Washington’s—can see Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark Atlanta University, two of which gave him degrees. The University of Georgia, which he never did attend (not for lack of trying), is too far off to glimpse.

The Richard B. Russell building in which he now sits is also a long way from Ms. B.D. Davis’s small, segregated classroom in LaGrange, Georgia, where he read Robinson Crusoe and skipped fifth grade on his way to becoming valedictorian of East Depot Street High School, a three-year graduate of Morehouse, and, at twenty-three, the first person of color to attempt to attend UGA as a law student.

Judge Ward, now eighty-two, recalls how he got here: “Austin T. Walden was a lawyer from Atlanta who represented the NAACP in Georgia. He came to LaGrange when I was a high school student. I got to see my first black lawyer! I read about him later and thought, maybe if he succeeded in it, I could too.”

In September 1950, Ward applied to the University of Georgia School of Law. Nine months later, his answer came. Ward remembers the wording: “Mr. Ward, your application for admission has been received and is hereby denied.”

He appealed the decision. In 1952, a discrimination lawsuit was filed in the northern Georgia federal court. Not until December 1956 did the case go to trial. In the interim, Ward had endured a real war in Korea, and, out in 1955, enrolled at Northwestern’s law school. After a five-day trial, the judge dismissed Ward’s case without saying why he’d been denied admission.

Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes had a trial of their own in December 1960, when they attempted to gain admittance to UGA. Ward represented them. On January 6, 1961, it was ruled that the university had to admit them. “The judge said that if they were white they would have been admitted a long time before,” says Ward.

In the fall of 1979, President Jimmy Carter made Ward a federal judge on the same court that struck down his discrimination suit in 1952. Appointed for life, he’s been there thirty years. He’ll be back again next year, with a reduced caseload. “I don’t have any real hobbies,” Ward says. “I don’t play golf or tennis. But I read a lot of history.” —Charles Bethea

Photograph by Joe Martinez