Atlanta’s young people have always carried possibility. What they’ve needed from the rest of us has changed with each generation.
During one of the most frightening periods in Atlanta’s history, children needed safe places to spend the summer. Young people leaving foster care needed financial resources, stable housing, healthcare, and a voice in decisions affecting their lives. Students aspiring to college needed more than admission. They needed a way to afford it and support to complete it.
Each moment required a different response. Each began with the same question:
What do Atlanta’s young people need from us now?
Investing in Children from the Beginning
Key Moment: First grants supporting children and families (1959)
Children and families were part of the Community Foundation’s work almost from the beginning. By 1959, some of its earliest grants supported children and families, establishing a commitment that would continue to evolve for decades.
A Commitment That Outlives a Generation
Key Moment: George & Pearl Strickland Scholarship (1984)
George and Pearl Strickland believed education could transform lives.
When Pearl died in 1984, her estate established the George and Pearl Strickland Scholarship Fund at the Community Foundation. Today, the fund continues helping Georgia students pursue higher education at Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine and Spelman College.
Their generosity demonstrates one of philanthropy’s greatest possibilities: a gift from one generation can continue opening doors for those that follow.
When Atlanta’s Children Needed a Safe Place
Key Moment: Camp Best Friends (1981)
During the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979–1981, fear changed daily life for families across the city. As summer approached, civic leaders faced an urgent challenge: How could Atlanta give children safe, supervised places to learn and play while school was out?
Businesses, city leaders, residents, and donors mobilized. The Community Foundation moved quickly to receive and steward contributions supporting an expanded summer recreation program.
That community response helped create what became Camp Best Friends, a City of Atlanta tradition that has served generations of children for more than four decades.
The Foundation did not run the camp. Its role was to make collective action possible at a moment when Atlanta needed to move quickly. The community brought the urgency, generosity, and commitment. The Foundation provided the philanthropic infrastructure to help put those resources to work.
What began as a response to a crisis became a lasting investment in Atlanta’s children.
For 45 years, the program has given generations of children opportunities to learn, play and build friendships.
Supporting the Transition to Adulthood
Key Moment: Metropolitan Atlanta Youth Opportunities Initiative (2000–2006)
By 2000, Atlanta faced another challenge: young people aging out of foster care were entering adulthood without many of the resources and support systems their peers could rely on.
Through the Metropolitan Atlanta Youth Opportunities Initiative (MAYOI), the Community Foundation helped provide financial resources, matched savings, financial literacy and connections to education, healthcare, housing and employment.
Young people themselves helped guide the work. A Youth Board identified their most important needs, while community partners developed solutions around those priorities.
MAYOI reinforced an important lesson: supporting young people means listening to them.
Tarkiyah Melton, a MAYOI participant who became an advocate and mentor, later described what that experience made possible: “They taught me how to use the power of my own voice.”
Building Pathways to Lifelong Success
Key Moments: Achieve Atlanta (2014) and Learn4Life (2016)
Years later, another question demanded attention: Why were too few Atlanta students completing education after high school?
A 2014 study commissioned by the Community Foundation and the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation found that only one in seven Atlanta Public Schools students entering ninth grade was projected to earn a postsecondary credential within six years of graduating from high school.
That research helped lead to the creation of Achieve Atlanta, the following year. Today, Achieve Atlanta works with students, schools, colleges, and nonprofit partners to make postsecondary education more accessible and affordable and to help students complete their credentials.
The work expanded from supporting individual students to strengthening the systems around them.
Through Learn4Life, school districts, nonprofits, businesses, and communities now use shared data to identify effective practices and improve educational outcomes across metro Atlanta. Partners work together around milestones including early literacy, eighth-grade math, and postsecondary success.
The form of the work has evolved, but the responsibility has not: listen closely, understand the barriers, and build the partnerships young people need to move forward.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
Meeting the moment means responding to what young people need today while investing in what they can become tomorrow.
No single program can answer every need. No institution can do the work alone.
The lesson of this history is not that the Community Foundation always had the answer. It is that philanthropy can help Atlanta find and act on better answers by listening to young people, connecting those closest to the work, and moving resources behind what they know and need.
The question now belongs to this generation:
What do Atlanta’s young people need from us today, and what could they make possible if we invest in them?
Talk with the Community Foundation about how your giving can help Atlanta’s young people shape what comes next.
Because when we invest in Atlanta’s young people, we invest in Atlanta’s future.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Public health crises can change communities quickly. They can create urgent needs, expose inequities, and place enormous pressure on the organizations serving people most affected. They also require something philanthropy can be uniquely positioned to provide: the ability to respond, collaborate, and move resources where they are needed.
Twice in the Community Foundation’s history, Atlanta faced public health crises unlike anything the region had experienced before.
The circumstances were very different. But in both moments, Atlanta needed people and resources to come together.
Responding in the Earliest Days of AIDS
Key Moment: First HIV/AIDS Education Grant (1981)
In 1981, the AIDS crisis was only beginning to emerge.
Little was understood about the disease, misinformation and fear were widespread, and organizations serving affected communities faced an enormous challenge with limited resources.
That year, the Community Foundation made its first grant addressing the crisis, funding a new education program taught by the Atlanta Gay Center for the Fulton County Health Department.
It was an early example of philanthropy responding to an emerging need before the full scale of the crisis was understood.
As HIV/AIDS continued to affect communities across Atlanta, it became increasingly clear that the response would require sustained investment and collaboration.
Mobilizing Philanthropy Around a Growing Crisis
Key Moment: AIDS Partnership Fund (1988–1990s)
By the late 1980s, the AIDS epidemic had become one of the country’s defining public health crises.
In 1988, the Community Foundation became the first community foundation to partner with the Ford Foundation to raise funds for preventive education and direct care for people with AIDS.
That partnership grew into a larger philanthropic response, bringing resources and attention to organizations working on the front lines of the epidemic.
The lesson was one the Foundation would carry forward: during a crisis, philanthropy can do more than make individual grants. It can help donors and partners organize around a shared need, direct resources toward trusted community organizations, and create a coordinated response.
A New Public Health Emergency
Key Moment: COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund (2020)
Nearly four decades later, Atlanta faced another public health crisis.
COVID-19 disrupted nearly every part of daily life. Families faced illness, job losses, food insecurity, housing instability, and isolation. At the same time, nonprofits experienced extraordinary demand for services while navigating unprecedented uncertainty.
Once again, the moment called for a collective response.
In 2020, the Community Foundation helped mobilize philanthropy, nonprofits, businesses, and other partners through the Greater Atlanta COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund, creating a way for generosity from across the region to support organizations responding to urgent community needs. The Foundation’s 75th anniversary campaign identifies the fund as a defining example of bringing sectors together during crisis.
The crisis was different, but the principle was familiar: listen to organizations closest to the need, bring resources together, and respond as a community.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
Public health emergencies are impossible to predict. But communities can build the relationships and philanthropic infrastructure that allow them to respond when crises arrive.
From the earliest years of the AIDS epidemic to COVID-19, Atlanta’s nonprofits, healthcare providers, donors, civic leaders, and communities have stepped forward when their neighbors needed them.
The Community Foundation’s role has been to help connect that generosity with the organizations and people responding on the ground.
For donors, that infrastructure matters. It means that when an urgent need emerges, generosity can become part of a larger community response, informed by local knowledge and directed where it can make a meaningful difference.
Meeting the moment means being ready to listen, respond, and bring people together when Atlanta needs it most.
When the health of our community is at stake, Atlanta is stronger when we respond together.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>By the 1980s, women were becoming an increasingly powerful force in Atlanta’s philanthropy scene.
Across the country, women’s funds were emerging as a new model of giving. They were designed not only to direct more philanthropic resources toward issues affecting women and girls, but also to give women a greater voice in deciding where and how those resources were invested.
Atlanta was ready for a similar movement.
For the Community Foundation, the opportunity was about more than creating a fund. It was about creating a place where women could learn about philanthropy, grow as civic leaders, and use their collective generosity to strengthen their communities.
A New Model for Women’s Giving
Key Moment: Atlanta Women’s Fund (1986)
The idea began with Alicia Philipp, then president of the Community Foundation, who was serving on the board of a national organization focused on increasing philanthropy for women and girls and expanding women’s participation in the philanthropic field.
Inspired by women’s funds emerging around the country, Philipp began talking with women in Atlanta’s corporate and professional communities about creating something similar here. Interest grew, and Women Business Owners provided seed funding.
In 1986, the Atlanta Women’s Fund was established within the Community Foundation.
Women lawyers, doctors, CPAs, corporate leaders, and individual donors came together around a shared purpose. They raised money for organizations serving women and girls while learning how to become more engaged philanthropists themselves.
Building Philanthropic Leaders
From the beginning, the Fund was designed to do more than make grants.
It also helped women learn how philanthropy works and prepared them to serve on nonprofit boards.
That was significant because philanthropy isn’t only about who gives. It is also about who has a voice in deciding which issues receive attention, which organizations receive resources, and which solutions have the opportunity to grow.
By bringing women into those conversations, the Fund helped expand women’s leadership across Atlanta’s philanthropic and nonprofit communities.
The model also demonstrated something that has become increasingly important in philanthropy: giving can be more powerful when people learn and act together.
Creating Something Built to Grow
Key Moment: Atlanta Women’s Foundation (1998)
As the Atlanta Women’s Fund evolved, its leaders recognized that its future would be stronger as an independent organization.
In 1998, the Fund spun off from the Community Foundation and became the Atlanta Women’s Foundation.
Rather than marking the end of CFGA’s involvement, its independence represented an important kind of philanthropic success: an idea incubated within the Community Foundation had grown into an organization capable of carrying its mission forward.
The Atlanta Women’s Foundation continued raising and investing resources in issues affecting women and girls while developing women as philanthropists and nonprofit leaders.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
The story of women’s philanthropy in Atlanta is ultimately a story about what happens when more people have the opportunity to lead.
The Atlanta Women’s Fund created a space where women could bring their generosity, experience, relationships, and voices together around issues they cared about. The organization that grew from that effort has carried that vision forward.
For donors today, the lesson still resonates. Philanthropy isn’t simply about making a gift. It can also be a way to learn, lead, connect with others, and help shape the future of a community.
Meeting the moment means making room for more voices in philanthropy and recognizing the power of generosity when people come together around a shared purpose.
When more people have the opportunity to lead through giving, Atlanta’s capacity for change grows with them.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>In the summer of 1996, the world’s attention turned to Atlanta. For 17 days, the Olympic Games filled the city with athletes, visitors, journalists, and spectators from around the globe. The Games marked a defining moment in Atlanta’s evolution into an international city, transforming its infrastructure and elevating its profile around the world.
But when the crowds left, Atlanta faced another question: What from this moment should endure?
Over the next decade, the Community Foundation would have opportunities to help Atlanta answer that question, first by stewarding part of the city’s Olympic legacy and later by joining an extraordinary effort to keep one of Atlanta’s most important historical collections here at home.
Preserving a Moment that Changed Atlanta
Key Moment: Atlanta Public Art Legacy Fund (1997)
Public art created for the Olympic Games had become part of Atlanta’s landscape and a lasting reminder of the moment the city welcomed the world.
Atlanta had added pieces to central areas and moved and restored existing ones. The Games opened conversations about the impact of public art on the city’s quality of life and initiated plans on how to better maintain and restore public art.
And like it did for so many things in Atlanta, the Olympics elevated Atlanta’s public art to an international stage.
In 1997, the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta established the Atlanta Public Art Legacy Fund and entrusted the Community Foundation with managing its assets. The goal was to help preserve the artworks and public spaces created as part of Atlanta’s Olympic legacy for future generations.
It reflected an important idea: civic legacy doesn’t preserve itself. What a community chooses to steward can shape how future generations understand the moments that came before them.
Keeping Dr. King’s legacy in Atlanta
Key Moment: Martin Luther King Jr. Papers (2006)
Ten years after the Olympics, Atlanta faced another defining moment.
In 2006, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal papers were placed with Sotheby’s for auction. The collection included handwritten notes, speeches, sermons, and other documents offering a direct connection to Dr. King’s life and leadership.
For Atlanta, the possibility that the collection could leave the city carried particular significance. Dr. King’s story was deeply rooted here, in Atlanta’s neighborhoods, churches, schools, and institutions.
Then-Mayor Shirley Franklin turned to the Community Foundation as civic leaders worked to find a solution.
Working alongside the Mayor, financial institutions, the King family, and other community partners, CFGA obtained a $32 million line of credit that allowed the purchase to move forward while fundraising continued.
Former CFGA CEO Alicia Philipp later described the effort simply:
“It’s a good story of how trust works in a community.”
The collection stayed in Atlanta. Morehouse College owns the collection, the Atlanta University Center preserves and houses it, and materials from the collection are displayed at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
The achievement belonged to the many people and institutions that came together around a shared conviction: this piece of history belonged in the city that helped shape it.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
Atlanta’s legacy isn’t only found in history books. It lives in the art in our public spaces, the documents that preserve the words of our leaders, and the stories we choose to carry forward.
Philanthropy can play an important role in that stewardship.
For donors, preserving Atlanta’s legacy is an opportunity to invest beyond the immediate moment. A gift can help protect the cultural, civic, and historical assets that tell our story today while ensuring they remain available to generations we may never meet.
From the Olympic Public Art Legacy Fund to the King Papers, CFGA has been honored to help Atlanta protect pieces of its story that were too important to lose.
Meeting the moment sometimes means creating something new. Other times, it means recognizing what we already have and coming together to protect it.
Preserving Atlanta’s past is one way we help ensure its story continues into the future.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Supporting a community can also mean supporting the nonprofits that serve it.
Nonprofits feed families, educate children, support the arts, strengthen neighborhoods, protect public health, and respond when communities face crisis. As Atlanta has grown over the decades and its challenges became more complex, nonprofit organizations have become increasingly essential to the region’s civic life.
But serving a community requires more than a strong mission. Nonprofits also need strong leaders, sound operations, financial stability, and access to expertise.
For decades, the Community Foundation has invested not only in what nonprofits do, but in their ability to do it well.
Strengthening the Sector
Key Moments: Nonprofit Resource Center (1980) and Georgia Center for Nonprofits (1994)
In the 1980s, Atlanta’s nonprofit leaders were confronting growing community needs, often without access to the management expertise and organizational support available in the private sector. They needed more than grants. They needed help with governance, strategy, leadership, and sustainability.
The Community Foundation responded with nonprofit management workshops that evolved into the Nonprofit Resource Center, providing training, technical assistance, and organizational support. That work ultimately grew into the Georgia Center for Nonprofits, which became an independent organization in 1994 and continues strengthening Georgia’s nonprofit sector today.
Former Community Foundation CEO Alicia Philipp remembered that not everyone initially believed this work belonged within a community foundation.
“We made a compelling case that the work of nonprofits will not get done if they are not strong,” she recalled. “If you believe the work should be done, then someone has to strengthen them, and nobody else was stepping up in that role.”
That belief would shape the Foundation’s nonprofit investments for decades.
Responding When Nonprofits Need Support Most
Key Moment: Nonprofit Bridge Loan Fund (2008)
The Great Recession put that commitment to the test.
As the economy contracted in 2008, nonprofits faced a difficult combination: community needs were rising just as funding and access to capital were becoming less certain.
The Community Foundation created the Nonprofit Bridge Loan Fund to help organizations facing cash flow challenges and difficulty accessing loans. At the same time, the Foundation made a significant shift toward general operating grants, giving nonprofits greater flexibility to determine how resources could best support their missions.
The response reflected an important principle: trusting nonprofit leaders means supporting not only their programs, but the organizations behind them.
Connecting Organizations with Expertise
Key Moment: Catchafire Partnership (2016)
Money isn’t the only resource nonprofits need.
Through a partnership with Catchafire beginning in 2016, the Community Foundation expanded access to skills-based volunteer support, connecting nonprofits with professionals who could help strengthen areas such as marketing, technology, strategy, and operations. The partnership is part of the Foundation’s longer history of investing in nonprofit capacity, not simply individual programs.
The model recognized something the Foundation had learned decades earlier: stronger organizations are better equipped to deliver on their missions.
Investing in Resilience for What Comes Next
Key Moment: Nonprofit Sector Sustainability Fund (2025)
Today, Atlanta’s nonprofits are navigating another period of change.
Rising costs, workforce pressures, and an evolving funding environment are challenging organizations at the same time communities continue to depend on their services.
In 2025, the Community Foundation, in partnership with the Nonprofit Finance Fund, launched the Nonprofit Sector Sustainability Fund, continuing its longstanding commitment to organizational strength and resilience.
Like the Nonprofit Resource Center decades earlier, the fund recognizes that supporting nonprofits themselves is an investment in the communities they serve.
“For 75 years, CFGA has helped connect generosity with the needs of this region. Today, that role is especially urgent. Community foundations exist for moments like this,” said Ayana Gabriel, vice president of community impact of the Community Foundation. “Our role is to bring people together around what Atlanta needs most—connecting organizations, expertise, resources, and partners so nonprofits are not navigating this period of uncertainty alone.”
Keeping the Momentum
Today, the momentum continues through several capacity-building opportunities for nonprofits, including the Partner for Innovation (PIN) Summer Internship Program, which paired four metro Atlanta nonprofits with college interns to help put responsible AI into practice, building tools and systems that strengthen capacity.
Through a partnership with the Partner for Innovation (PIN) Summer Internship Program, the Community Foundation helped nonprofits build long-term capacity through responsible AI. Four organizations that completed CFGA’s Google-sponsored AI Opportunity Accelerator, The Scholarship Academy, the Latin American Association, Soul Food Cypher, and Georgia ACT, were paired with college interns to implement, strengthen, and document their AI projects.
This internship program ensured the tools and practices developed through the Accelerator can be sustained and shared across the nonprofit sector. This pilot builds on the Foundation’s 2025 investment of $1 million, sponsored by Google, to equip 17 nonprofits with the training, resources, and support needed to responsibly adopt AI and strengthen their impact.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
For decades, the challenges facing Atlanta’s nonprofits have changed. The underlying need has not.
Organizations doing essential community work need the resources, expertise, flexibility, and trust to remain strong.
Philanthropy has an important role to play. Donors can support the causes they care about while also investing in the strength of the organizations doing that work every day. Sometimes that means funding a program. Sometimes it means helping an organization build stronger systems, navigate a difficult period, or prepare for what comes next.
Meeting the moment means ensuring the organizations our communities depend on are strong enough to meet this moment, and the next one.
Because when Atlanta’s nonprofits are stronger, Atlanta is stronger.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Atlanta has grown through collaboration: neighbors working alongside neighbors, businesses investing in communities, nonprofits responding to local needs and civic leaders imagining what comes next.
Time and again, the city’s greatest progress has come when people with different perspectives and resources unite around a common purpose.
As metro Atlanta has grown into one of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, its challenges have become increasingly complex. Housing affordability, public health, economic mobility and neighborhood revitalization cannot be addressed by any single organization acting alone.
For 75 years, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta has helped bring donors, nonprofits, public agencies, businesses and residents together around what the region needs most.
Preserving Atlanta’s history
Key Moment: The Purchase of the MLK Papers (2006)
One of the Community Foundation’s most visible examples of convening came in 2006, when the King family sought a permanent home for the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Community Foundation helped bring together donors, civic leaders and institutions to secure the archive for Atlanta, demonstrating the power of trusted relationships and a community united around a shared purpose.
“There was a feeling of excitement and honor to be a part of the efforts to bring these historical documents home where residents of metro Atlanta could enjoy them for years,” says Wanda Wallace, a Community Foundation staff member for more than three decades. “I was so proud of our role, but it really was a powerful collaboration from a cross-section of the Atlanta community!”
Together, Atlanta ensured one of the world’s most important civil rights collections remained in the city where Dr. King was born and where his legacy continues to inspire generations.
Solving Challenges Together
Key Moments: Forest Cove (2022) and GoATL Affordable Housing Fund (2023)
As Atlanta has grown, collaboration has become increasingly important to address one of the region’s most pressing challenges: housing.
At Forest Cove, public agencies, nonprofit organizations, residents and funders came together to relocate nearly 200 families from a condemned apartment complex and begin imagining a different future for the Thomasville community.
Through the GoATL Affordable Housing Fund, the Community Foundation has also helped connect philanthropic capital with partners working to increase affordable housing across metro Atlanta, aligning donors, lenders, developers and community organizations around shared solutions.
Both efforts reflect the same lesson: Atlanta’s most complex challenges require people and resources to work together.
Meeting Moments of Crisis
Key Moments: COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund (2020) and Nonprofit Sector Sustainability Fund (2026)
That ability to mobilize partners has been especially important when Atlanta faced urgent community needs.
When COVID-19 disrupted life across the region in 2020, the Community Foundation joined with donors, corporations and philanthropic partners to establish the COVID-19 Response & Recovery Fund, directing critical resources to nonprofits serving families facing food insecurity, housing instability, health challenges and economic hardship.
More recently, the Nonprofit Sector Sustainability Fund has brought philanthropic partners together to strengthen nonprofits navigating rising costs, staffing challenges and a changing funding environment. Rather than responding only to immediate needs, the fund invests in the long-term resilience of organizations serving metro Atlanta every day.
Different moments require different solutions. But the Community Foundation’s role remains consistent: helping bring the right people and resources together when Atlanta needs them.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
For 75 years, the Community Foundation has seen what becomes possible when generosity is connected to collaboration.
A donor’s gift can accomplish something meaningful on its own. But when that generosity is combined with local knowledge, trusted relationships and the resources of others who share a common purpose, it can become part of something much bigger.
That is one of the roles a community foundation can play: helping donors understand where their generosity can make a difference, connecting them with people closest to the work and creating opportunities to give alongside others toward a shared goal.
Meeting the moment has never meant solving Atlanta’s challenges alone. It means bringing together people, ideas and generosity around what Greater Atlanta needs most.
Because when Atlanta gives together, Atlanta can do more together.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Atlanta’s story cannot be told without the vision, generosity and leadership of Black Atlantans. From Auburn Avenue and the city’s historically Black colleges and universities, to the civil rights movement and generations of Black-led businesses, churches and neighborhoods, Black communities have helped shape Atlanta’s identity and progress.
Generosity has always been part of that story. Black Atlantans have invested in one another through churches, schools, businesses, civic organizations, scholarship funds and neighborhood networks, creating opportunity, preserving culture and opening doors for generations to come.
Black philanthropy is not a footnote in Atlanta’s history. It is one of the forces that made Atlanta possible.
For the Community Foundation, the opportunity has been to understand and honor that tradition and build meaningful relationships with the Black donors, civic leaders and organizations carrying it forward.
“Black philanthropy has always been part of Atlanta’s story,” said Kimberly Spear, CFGA’s Director of Donor Engagement. “The Foundation didn’t create that generosity; we had the opportunity to recognize it, build relationships, and help connect people who wanted to make a difference with the communities and organizations leading that work. That’s our piece of the puzzle.”
Creating Opportunity Across Generations
Key Moment: George and Pearl Strickland Scholarship (1984)
George and Pearl Strickland believed education could transform lives.
Pearl graduated from Atlanta’s Clark College in 1909 and built a business as a seamstress and dressmaker. George left school early to support his family before building a successful railroad career and investing in real estate. Together, they helped children in their family and community pursue college degrees.
When Pearl died in 1984, her estate established the George and Pearl Strickland Scholarship Fund at the Community Foundation. Their original $500,000 gift has grown to more than $1.6 million and distributed well over $1 million in scholarships. Today, it supports Georgia students attending Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine and Spelman College.
Their success became a source of opportunity for students they would never meet.
Understanding a Tradition of Giving
Key Moments: A Shared Inheritance (2004)
Two decades later, the Community Foundation sought to deepen its understanding of Black philanthropy in metro Atlanta.
In 2004, the Foundation commissioned Giving: A Shared Inheritance, a study of African American giving and volunteering. The research documented a rich culture of generosity expressed through churches, civic organizations, families and communities, as well as traditional philanthropic giving.
Introducing the study, former CFGA President Alicia Philipp wrote, “To the extent that the continued growth of volunteering and giving in metro Atlanta will include an increasing percentage of its African American community, there is hope for a brighter tomorrow.”
The study gave the Foundation an opportunity to listen, learn and strengthen relationships with Black donors and communities whose generosity had long been part of Atlanta’s civic fabric.
Preserving Black Art and Culture
Key Moment: Paul R. Jones Field of Interest Fund (2011)
Paul R. Jones understood that preserving culture was an investment in the future.
Beginning in the 1960s, Jones collected art and photography by African American artists whose work was significantly underrepresented in museums and galleries. He later became a donor and volunteer with the Community Foundation’s Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund and participated in Giving: A Shared Inheritance, which featured his art.
After his death, Jones’s estate transferred hundreds of works of art, real estate and financial assets to the Community Foundation. His gift became the Paul R. Jones Field of Interest Fund, supporting the arts and African American philanthropy.
“Paul Jones understood that philanthropy is personal,” Spear said. “He cared deeply about preserving African American art and culture, and the Foundation helped ensure that passion would continue creating opportunities long after his lifetime. That’s what great philanthropy does—it reflects someone’s values while strengthening the community for generations.”
Building Community Wealth
Over time, the Foundation’s partnerships with Black Atlanta expanded to include economic opportunity, ownership and community wealth.
Key Moment: Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative (2014) and Sweetness of Giving Circle (2023)
In 2014, the Community Foundation helped launch the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, which continues today as the nonprofit Kindred Futures. Working alongside community leaders, the initiative sought to address racial wealth gaps and expand pathways to ownership and economic mobility.
In 2023, the Foundation introduced Sweetness of Giving, a giving circle that brings Black donors together to learn, pool resources and invest in Atlanta communities, with an initial focus on strengthening the Black business and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
“I was inspired to join the Sweetness of Giving circle because of the opportunity to partner with leaders I deeply respect across Atlanta to co-create something meaningful,” says Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital and a Community Foundation board member.
For Solomon, that work starts with those closest to the community.
“Philanthropy, to me, is about proximity and trust,” she says. “Black-led organizations are built by people closest to the communities they serve, and that proximity produces better, more culturally resonant solutions.”
That philosophy continues to inform the Foundation’s investments in Black-led nonprofits and partnerships with Black civic leaders: listen to those closest to the work and support the priorities and leadership already present within communities.
What will this generation make possible?
As the Community Foundation marks its 75th anniversary, its responsibility is to listen, steward generosity with care and connect donors with the people and organizations shaping Atlanta’s future.
From the Stricklands’ investment in education and Paul Jones’s cultural legacy to AWBI and Sweetness of Giving, these moments are different expressions of a much larger tradition of Black Atlantans investing in what comes next.
What will this generation make possible next?
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Atlanta is a city of neighborhoods. We may be known for our skyline, but the life of the region happens neighborhood by neighborhood.
As metro Atlanta grew over the decades, communities experienced that growth differently. Some attracted new investment while others struggled to secure resources for local priorities. Yet residents across the region were already working to strengthen the places they called home.
Over time, the Community Foundation came to embrace a simple principle: the people closest to a community often understand its opportunities and challenges best. Philanthropy can help by listening, investing in local leadership and connecting people with resources and one another.
Putting Residents in the Lead
In the early 1990s, residents across Atlanta were creating community gardens, organizing festivals, improving public spaces, and finding their own ways to strengthen neighborhood connections.
Key Moment: Neighborhood Fund (1991)
In 1991, the Community Foundation launched the Neighborhood Fund, providing small grants and support for projects conceived and led by residents. Over the next three decades, the fund supported more than 800 projects across the region.
The impact extended beyond individual projects. Through efforts like the Neighborhood Summit, residents connected with other community leaders, shared ideas and strengthened their ability to advocate for the places they called home.
The lesson was clear: modest investments can become catalysts for leadership, connection and community pride.
Investing Deeply in Place
Key Moment: Healthy Belvedere (2006)
That commitment to local leadership took another form in south DeKalb County.
In 2006, the Community Foundation launched Healthy Belvedere to address racial and ethnic health disparities. With $2 million in support from Kaiser Permanente over six years, the effort included adult education and youth activities while also inspiring residents and donors to invest in broader neighborhood priorities.
The work eventually included streetlights, sidewalks, a community garden and recurring neighborhood cleanups.
Healthy Belvedere demonstrated that community well-being cannot be separated into neat categories. Health, safety, education, public spaces and relationships all contribute to whether a neighborhood can thrive.
Listening to What Atlanta Needs
Key Moment: Neighborhood Nexus (2009)
Listening to communities is essential. So is understanding the forces shaping them.
For years, important information about housing, education, health, demographics and economic mobility was scattered among agencies and institutions. In 2009, the Community Foundation joined the Atlanta Regional Commission, Emory University and Georgia State University to formalize Neighborhood Nexus, a regional data resource containing thousands of variables about Greater Atlanta.
The goal was not data for its own sake. It was to give nonprofits, governments, funders and communities better information for making decisions.
Former CFGA CEO Alicia Philipp called it, “absolute key to making data-driven decisions and telling Atlanta’s story.”
Neighborhood Nexus reflected another dimension of knowing a place deeply: pairing community experience with shared information that can illuminate both challenges and possibilities.
Leading Across Initiatives
Key Moment: Atlanta Place-Based Funders Initiative (Late 1990s)
By the 1990s and early 2000s, ambitious neighborhood transformation efforts were underway across Atlanta, from East Lake and Whitefoord to Pittsburgh and, later, the Westside. Each community was different, but the organizations investing in them were confronting many of the same questions.
Through the Atlanta Place-Based Funders Initiative, the Community Foundation brought leaders together to exchange lessons on housing, education, community engagement and neighborhood development. The goal was not another program, but a space for people working deeply in place to learn from one another.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
For decades, the Community Foundation’s neighborhood work has taken different forms, from small resident-led grants to deep community partnerships, shared data and funder collaboration.
But the philosophy has remained consistent: strong communities are not built for residents. They are built with them.
For donors, investing in place offers an opportunity to connect generosity with the people who know their communities most deeply. When local leadership, useful information and committed partners come together, philanthropy can help neighborhood ideas grow into lasting change.
Meeting the moment means listening first, investing in local leadership and helping communities build the futures they envision for themselves.
Because a stronger Greater Atlanta begins in its neighborhoods, with the people who call them home.
Talk with us about investing in neighborhood-led work across metro Atlanta.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Atlanta has long been known as a city of opportunity. But economic opportunities have never been equally accessible to all who call it home.
As the region has grown, there have continued to be persistent gaps- research has found that:
- Atlanta is consistently ranked #1 in the country for income inequality
- White households in Atlanta have 46x the wealth that Black households in Atlanta have
- Atlanta ranks #50 out of the top 50 metro areas in economic mobility
Over time, the Community Foundation has worked to better understand and address the causes of these gaps. That meant asking a bigger question: How can we help more Atlantans access economic mobility?
Affordable Postsecondary Education
The Community Foundation has long supported community members in their quest to achieve higher incomes, and the organizations that are supporting them in that quest.
Key Moment: Achieve Atlanta (2014)
In 2014, the Community Foundation partnered with the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation and Atlanta Public Schools to create Achieve Atlanta, bringing philanthropic, civic, and public resources together to help more students reach and complete college.
Each year, we partner with Achieve Atlanta and other nonprofit organizations, schools, and donors to administer millions of dollars to scholarship funds to students across our region.
For too many in our region, the economic opportunities and benefits of college have been stifled by student loan debt.
Key Moment: Student Loan Repayment Program (2023)
In 2023, the Community Foundation launched the Student Loan Repayment Program, providing student loan relief to metro Atlanta residents and giving recipients greater flexibility to decide how to use the money that would otherwise go toward loan payments.
The results of this program illustrate how reducing one financial burden can create opportunities elsewhere. Recipients have reported using those dollars to pay down other debt, cover everyday expenses, build emergency savings, pay for housing, support family members, and start or strengthen small businesses. Some have described being able to buy homes, care for family members, or experience less financial stress.
The Student Loan Repayment Program demonstrates an important part of the wealth-building equation: sometimes creating greater opportunity begins by removing a barrier that makes it difficult to move forward.
Entrepreneurship
The Community Foundation understands that wealth is more than dollars on a spreadsheet for families across our region. Wealth represents many things to many people, including:
- resilience, the ability to withstand a financial emergency or save for future goals like home ownership
- opportunity, the ability to start a business or make an investment
- and sustainability- the ability to pass assets down to family members or retire on your own terms
Key Moment: Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative (2014)
In 2014, the Community Foundation partnered with the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Kendeda Fund to launch the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, focused on closing racial wealth gaps and building wealth in communities with limited economic opportunity through entrepreneurship and business opportunity. That initiative has evolved into Kindred Futures, a nonprofit organization that invests in Black wealth-building throughout the South.
Key Moment: Sweetness of Giving (2023)
More recently, Sweetness of Giving has brought Black donors together to learn, pool resources, and invest collectively in Atlanta communities.
Its early focus on Black business and entrepreneurship connects two important ideas: the power of philanthropy and the power of ownership.
It also builds on a much longer tradition of Black generosity in Atlanta. CFGA’s role is not to create that tradition, but to provide another platform for donors to come together and invest in the communities and opportunities they care about.
Helping Atlanta Meet The Moment
Atlanta’s economy has changed dramatically in recent decades, but ensuring access to opportunity remains one of the region’s defining challenges.
Building greater economic opportunity requires multiple pathways, from education and training to entrepreneurship and homeownership. And no organization can do this work alone.
Philanthropy can help expand those pathways. Donors can support individuals working toward greater opportunity while also investing in the organizations and systems working to make that opportunity more widely accessible.
Meeting the moment means investing not only in what people need today, but in what can help them build for tomorrow.
Because Atlanta’s future is stronger when more Atlantans have the opportunity to build wealth, shape their own futures, and thrive.
Keep the Giving Going.
Be a part of Atlanta’s philanthropic legacy. Whether you’re beginning your giving journey or looking to deepen your impact, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta can help you turn your generosity into lasting change.
]]>Atlanta’s growth has brought new people, businesses, investment, and opportunity to the region. But as the cost of living has risen, finding a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home has become increasingly difficult for many families.
Where we live shapes our access to schools, jobs, transportation, healthcare, and community. Stable housing can give families the foundation to plan for the future, while homeownership can create opportunities to build wealth across generations.
As Atlanta’s housing challenges have grown, the Community Foundation has worked alongside donors, public agencies, nonprofits, developers, and community partners to help expand housing stability and opportunity.
Putting Philanthropic Capital to Work
Key Moment: GoATL Affordable Housing Fund (2018)
In 2018, the Community Foundation launched GoATL, a revolving impact investment fund designed to support long-term solutions to some of the region’s greatest needs.
Housing became an important part of that work.
Through impact investing, philanthropic dollars could do something different from a traditional grant: provide flexible capital for projects creating and preserving affordable housing, then be repaid and invested again.
GoATL demonstrated another way generosity could help address Atlanta’s housing challenges, using philanthropic capital not only to support individual programs, but to help build long-term solutions.
Building a Larger Housing Response
Key Moments: TogetherATL Affordable Housing Initiative (2022)
By 2022, housing had become central to the Community Foundation’s broader strategy for equity and shared prosperity.
That year, the Foundation joined partners including the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Truist, Wells Fargo, and the City of Atlanta in launching a $300 million affordable housing effort, with the goal of creating 6,000 safe and affordable housing units by 2026.
The scale reflected the scale of the challenge. No single donor, nonprofit, developer, government agency, or funder could address Atlanta’s housing needs alone.
Philanthropy could help by bringing resources and partners together around a shared goal.
Responding When Housing Becomes a Crisis
Key Moment: Forest Cove (2022)
That same year, housing instability became urgent for families living at Forest Cove, a condemned apartment complex in Atlanta’s Thomasville Heights neighborhood.
Working alongside the City of Atlanta, the Community Foundation helped galvanize Foundation experts, board members, and partners to secure safe housing for 206 tenant families.
Forest Cove was different from a long-term investment fund or housing development strategy. Families needed help immediately.
But the response reflected the same principle: complex housing challenges require coordination, trusted partnerships, and resources that can move when communities need them.
Creating Pathways to Homeownership
Key Moment: WORTH Initiative
Affordable rental housing is only one part of Atlanta’s housing story. For many families, homeownership can provide stability and a pathway to building long-term wealth.
Through Wealth Opportunities Realized Through Homeownership (WORTH), an initiative supported by the Wells Fargo Foundation, nonprofit housing developers and builders can access funding for predevelopment activities and shovel-ready housing developments across Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett counties.
The work helps strengthen the pipeline of homes and expands opportunities for more families to move toward ownership.
It also reflects a broader understanding of housing: a home can be more than a place to live. It can become an asset that creates stability, opportunity, and wealth for the next generation.
Helping Atlanta Meet the Moment
Atlanta’s housing challenges cannot be solved through one program or one kind of philanthropy.
They require affordable rental housing, pathways to homeownership, flexible capital, strong nonprofit developers, public investment, and partners willing to work together.
For donors, that creates opportunities to make a difference at many levels. A gift can help a family facing an immediate housing crisis. Philanthropic capital can help finance affordable homes. And collective investment can support larger solutions that change what housing opportunity looks like across Atlanta.
From GoATL and TogetherATL to Forest Cove and WORTH, the Community Foundation has helped connect generosity with the partners, capital, and local knowledge needed to expand housing stability and opportunity.
Meeting the moment means helping more Atlantans find not just a place to live, but a place where they can build a future.
Because a stronger Atlanta begins with a place to call home.