Technology and The Atlanta Project

Her mother disappeared.

Too weak to cry, so small she easily fit into a nurse's palm, Pumpkin won the hearts of countless people, including former President Jimmy Carter, who saw her while on a tour of the downtown Atlanta hospital. For Carter, Pumpkin became a symbol of an entire city's ills.

"I never knew about it before," said Carter, a member of Georgia Tech's class of 1946. "God knows I should have. I've been governor of this state. I've been president of the United States. I didn't even know about things like this."

More than a year later, Pumpkin lives with foster parents in Fulton County. Although still beset by many chronic medical problems, she has already cleared a hurdle that most infants in her situation do not: She is alive. And her struggle moved Carter to start a project in October 1991 that some believe may profoundly change how the country deals with its societal problems.

n a quiet room in a renovated area of the long-abandoned Sears and Roebuck distribution center, Georgia Tech Professor David Sawicki and two graduate students stare at a computer screen. They review long lists of numbers, making changes here and there. They come to a glitch in the software program. For 10 minutes they try to make it work. Finally, it does. They merge lists of numbers. They type more commands.

Suddenly the computer screen is filled with dots--hundreds, thousands of them. And behind the dots appears a map of Atlanta. "We've hit paydirt," says Sawicki.

It's hard to imagine that the detailed, tedious work of Sawicki and 12 graduate students can have a direct impact on the lives of thousands of Atlantans. But the columns of numbers and the computer commands will make it possible for many aspects of life to be improved.

Sawicki, on a part-time, two-year leave from the Institute, and through funding from the Georgia Tech Foundation, serves as senior advisor for data and policy analysis for the Atlanta Project, an effort by Jimmy Carter and The Carter Center to attack the social problems associated with poverty in U.S. cities, beginning with Atlanta.

"We're proud of getting the Olympics, we're proud of the Braves, Atlanta's skyline and that sort of thing. But underneath, Atlanta is rotten in many ways, and this needs to be addressed frankly," Carter said in an interview announcing the Atlanta Project (TAP).

"I think now there's a general conviction in this country that nothing can be done about school dropouts or homelessness or unemployment or crack babies or teen pregnancy."

"But I think if there can be a bold-enough, inspirational-enough concept engendered, then I think Atlanta people will rally to it."

The project is focused on a three-county group of 20 neighborhoods called clusters, most named after the high schools which serve as their focal points. Within these clusters lie some of the poorest parts of the state, attended by the poverty-related problems of crime, joblessness, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, lack of education, poor housing and homelessness. The Atlanta Project plans to address these problems--and find ways to solve them--by establishing partnerships among government agencies, service-providers, cluster residents, volunteers and business.

In discussions with Atlanta Project organizers, the word that crops up most often is "empowerment." The hope is that the ineffectiveness of previous anti-poverty efforts can be avoided by involving poor people themselves to set their own community priorities and participate in their implementation, rather than simply have another government plan foisted upon them. It's a "bottoms-up" philosophy expressed by the old saying: Give someone a fish and there is food for a day; teach someone to fish and there's food for a lifetime.

In each neighborhood cluster, the Atlanta Project is represented by a coordinator and an assistant, who help organize the community and relay its concerns to the Atlanta Project headquarters on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Volunteers play a key role in the project's outreach. The project plans to coordinate a massive number of volunteers who can help teachers in schools, assist in community health centers, assist probation officers, serve as mentors to unwed mothers-to-be or tutor children who need attention.

Corporations have donated the funds for a vast computer network which will make it possible for participants and communities to network ideas and information with simple computer commands.

nformation is essential to the project, and that's where Sawicki and his class come in. Today, Sawicki and students Joe Zagame and Rick Wood are using current census data to map areas with high concentrations of children under the age of 5. Using this and other data, they will be able to determine where children live who have had no prenatal care, no well-baby care--and no inoculations.

Recently, the class was abuzz with a rumor that Vice President Al Gore had called Sweat to ask how the project would handle inoculations, should they be made available without cost by the U.S. government. Soon thereafter, newspapers nationwide ran stories telling of President Bill Clinton's intention to provide free inoculations to qualified children.

"What we're doing is really basic computer work--down-in-the-trenches stuff," says Zagame. "But it makes you feel good to know that these maps can really make a difference in people's lives."

The work can be frustrating. Zagame and Wood have spent about two days just learning the software and organizing the census material. Their class meets from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. But today the computer was down for several hours. Now, it's 5 p.m. and Wood must go to another class. Zagame is tired and anxious about missing the building curfew. Sawicki is looking at his watch, entering more computer commands, calling home to report that he's once again running late, and trying to find glitches in the computer program. When the dots finally materialize against the outline of an Atlanta map, there's a tired sense of accomplishment. Then more disappointment.

They forward the information on the screen to the printer, race down the hall to see the results--and, nothing. The printer is on the blink; the network is down. Sawicki looks for someone to fix the printer. Everyone who could has gone home.

They call it a day.

awicki, a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Cornell, was chairman of the Planning Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before coming to Georgia Tech in 1983. He directed the city planning program until last year, when he stepped down to do more research. Shortly after that, he learned about the Atlanta Project and realized that it was something he wanted to be part of. "I really believe in what's going on here," he says.

Sawicki, who is supposed to work part time at the project, has worked seven days a week there for the past six months. He jokes about cutting back to six days a week. His job description makes him the liaison between the secretariat heads and those who gather data, as well as those in the community who can provide data.

It is a suprisingly political cross to bear. Sawicki must constantly protect students from working too hard at tasks that he believes will not yield important results, and field criticism from those who seek information that is not available.

"A lot of times we're working with big-picture people," says Zagame, "who don't understand the details at all."

But Sawicki and his students know their behind-the-scenes work will yield big benefits. "We're lucky as students to get to be a part of something this big," says Zagame.

he Atlanta Project itself is a massive endeavor--an approach involving state, local and federal resources in a manner that is inventive and unparalleled. Regularly, other countries send officials to learn from the experiments here. Nowhere else has a city tried to cross racial, geographic and economic lines to cure its problems. Nowhere else have city and county governments, corporate enterprises and private citizens joined forces so completely.

Perhaps because its task is so huge, the Atlanta Project has received some criticism for moving too slowly. There have been internal power struggles, with some claiming that the secretariat is made up of too many suburbanites, out of touch with real inner-city problems. There have been complaints that inner city-dwellers in the clusters are too slow to participate.

"We are developing an empowerment model. And that takes time," says Dan Sweat, the Atlanta Project's overall coordinator. "We have deliberately held off on making decisions about projects until the communities tell us their priorities."

The problems are clear enough. Within the Atlanta Project neighborhoods which cover parts of southern Fulton and Dekalb counties, and northwest Clayton county, more than 90 percent of the residents are black, unemployed and living in substandard housing. Here, 30 percent of babies are born with no prenatal care.

There are an estimated 15,000 homeless people in Atlanta. Yet nearly 12 percent of housing units owned by the Atlanta Housing Authority stand vacant. Seventeen percent of all newborn babies at Grady Hospital are born to mothers who abuse cocaine. In the last five years, drug cases in Atlanta's Fulton County Juvenile Court have increased by 1,700 percent. During that same period, weapons charges increased by 73 percent, robbery by 240 percent, and violent crime by nearly 300 percent.

Sawicki's students, representing majors in city planning, public policy, and industrial and systems engineering, have been divided into six teams: health, education, economic development, criminal justice, housing and geographical information systems. One graduate student, Lynn Brockwell-Carey, is writing a master's thesis on grocery stores--or a lack of them--in the area.

From their findings, the students hope to be able to tell where and what the greatest health needs are. They want to provide data that will make it possible and plausible for businesses to begin in the inner city. They will look for ways not just to improve housing, but to create housing.

It seems almost miraculous that all of this work can be performed by students sitting before PCs. But that is only a small part of the miracle. "I really need for this project to work," says Zagame. "I don't mean the class. I mean the Atlanta Project itself.

"I feel like we're a part of history here. We've got to succeed. Not just for ourselves or for our city, but for everybody--for the world."

Alumni and the Atlanta Project

In addition to Jimmy Carter, many other Tech alumni have donated a substantial amount of their time to helping the Atlanta Project get off the ground. Fred DeMent, IM '61, an executive on loan from Georgia Power Co., is the economic development chair of the project's seven-member governing secretariat. Harold McKenzie, IE '53, former executive vice president of Georgia Power, is a senior advisor for facilities management.

The Atlanta Project Campaign Cabinet, which is raising money to fund the project, is chaired by Delta CEO Ron Allen, IE '64. Other members of the group include Charles Brady, IM '57, chairman of INVESCO Capital Management; L.L. "Larry" Gellerstedt III, ChE '45, president of Beers Construction; Gay Love, Hon '89, of the Gay and Erskine Love Foundation; and D. Raymond Riddle, IM '55, president of National Service Industries.