Georgia Works! in Virginia Highland
by Jack White
Residents who have occasion to be on North Highland Avenue on many Monday mornings may have seen a number of men in bright blue T-shirts cleaning the commercial areas, with a particular emphasis on the street trash that sometimes accumulates around the Triangle at Virginia Avenue. These men are members of Georgia Works! (exclamation point included), a not-for-profit residential program tasked with addressing one of this country’s most unrelenting challenges: mainstreaming homeless men.
In their own words:
“Our goal is to take chronically homeless men and help them become self-sufficient, productive members of society. Our men typically are facing multiple challenges, including criminal records, past drug use, poor work history, dependency on handouts, bad habits, lack of formal education, past child support, outstanding fines, etc… WE END ALL OF THESE THINGS. At Georgia Works, if a man is committed to being clean, to addressing the past, and to working, we will help him get a full time job, transportation and permanent housing within a year. Our program is proven to be effective in helping chronically homeless men, proven to be cost effective, and proven to improve our community.” (From the Georgia Works! Web site: http://www.georgiaworks.net/home.html
The program is multi-dimensional, as any such effort has to be. It offers dependency counseling, paid work, job training, money and debt management, and a host of other forms of support.
Our neighborhood has a long history of residential homelessness within our borders – especially in the summer – as well as several programs trying to meet the needs of such citizens. Georgia Works is highly aspirational and is based on the concept of putting participants to work and paying them for their labor. To that end, the program has contracted to provide cleaning services to several communities, including Buckhead (through their CID) and now–on a trial basis though the end of July–VaHi (through VHCA).
In addition to their regular task list, Georgia Works supplied a crew to help us on very short notice to help the City and VHCA Parks Committee mitigate the damage of the fallen tree in John Howell Park just prior to Summerfest; and they provided additional services the day after the festival ended. They came well-recommended – the Buckhead CID and Councilmembers Wan and Dickens spoke highly of the program and its results. Our experiences have been gratifying – we’ve been very pleased with their work and have enjoyed getting to know the crews and staff.
Needless to say – like many citizens in this neighborhood – we are happy to support a program that systematically tackles one of the country’s most intractable challenges. And we appreciate the cleaner neighborhood.
As always, your comments are most welcome via email to [email protected]. For more information, please visit the group’s web site, noted above.