by Visitor Columnist NELL BENN, CEO of Agape Atlanta.

It’s been 25 years since Agape Atlanta Youth & Household Middle first opened its doorways. A program that started as an outreach ministry of Trinity Presbyterian Church is now a five-day-a-week, wrap-around program. Agape’s programming is uniquely embedded within the Atlanta Public Faculty System and serves 225 college students and 110 households in our area people. 

Waiting for the long run, we should ask ourselves, how did we get right here and what work is left to do to realize our mission of empowering and supporting underserved kids and households right here in our metropolis?

Once we set down our roots in 1997 within the Bolton Highway Neighborhood, we had one objective in thoughts: to finish the cycle of generational poverty. We consider that it solely takes serving to a single little one to create an enduring influence on the financial course of future generations. By providing our college students complete programming in teachers, life abilities, and emotional and psychological well-being, we are able to considerably improve their probabilities of educational success and enhance the lives of the generations to come back.

Over the previous 25 years, we have now served greater than 500 school-age kids within the Atlanta space, providing providers that embody in-school, after-school educational applications, summer time camps and extra that help whole households.

Agape’s neighborhood efforts should not restricted to our distinctive programming. We’ve teamed up with different native organizations to facilitate meals drives & fundraisers to set our college students up for fulfillment. We’ve distributed 10,000 turkeys and meals baskets, 55,000 backpacks, toys, and coats, and served greater than 300,000 meals to our college students. 

This complete yr at Agape is devoted to celebrating what we’ve achieved over 25 years whereas by no means shedding sight of the day-to-day influence our applications make for youngsters and households in our neighborhood.

It’s unimaginable to comprehend that, on common, our college students are a part of our program for eleven years. This implies by the point they’re seniors in highschool, we’ve watched them develop up alongside us. The scholars can take all the muse established with Agape past the classroom and into their future. Since 2009, 95% of Agape seniors have graduated highschool and moved on to both school, technical faculty, or full-time employment. Seeing our college students flourish with us is the actual reward.

To look again, Agape‘s origin was the imaginative and prescient of senior pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Rev. Dr. Joanna Adams. It was her effort that led a core group of members from the congregation and different faith-based organizations and neighborhood organizations to set down roots within the Atlanta Mission’s constructing on Bolton Highway in 1997.

The consequence was a one-day-a-week after-school program for 25 college students from the Hampton Oaks Housing Improvement and a day program for senior residents from Marietta Highway Highrise. Standing agency in its mission, we expanded the group over the next years to a five-day-a-week program and added extra applications, providers, and neighborhood initiatives to serve college students from different colleges and neighborhoods in the neighborhood.

As a result of improve within the variety of kids served through the years, Agape supplied after-school applications on the Agape facility on Bolton Highway, Trinity Presbyterian Church and St Anne’s Episcopal Church. At present, Agape companions carefully with Atlanta Public Colleges (APS) and at present serves college students from:

• Bolton Academy
• E. Rivers Elementary Faculty 
• Scott Elementary Faculty 
• Sutton Center Faculty 
• North Atlanta Excessive Faculty 
• Atlanta Classical Academy

After a profitable $8.5 million capital marketing campaign that launched fall of 2015, Agape moved into a brand new 35,000-square-foot facility on Marietta Boulevard in 2018, bringing all our programming below one roof. The brand new facility allowed Agape to extend capability and provide new and enhanced programming. We’re so grateful for our present house, which features a gymnasium, industrial kitchen, laptop lab, library and 10 classrooms.

Throughout the top of COVID-19, Agape pivoted its programming to digital and partnered with Atlanta Public Colleges to supply college students with the required know-how to take part of their on-line lessons. As well as, Agape offered over $125K in grocery reward playing cards, utility and lease help. Throughout the fall of 2020, Agape reopened its doorways and served as a examine pod for college kids offering accountability, steady know-how, and a conducive setting for studying whereas colleges have been nonetheless providing digital education due to the pandemic.

Now in 2022, Agape is laying the groundwork for the following 25 years with a $2.5 million capital marketing campaign as we work to finish the cycle of generational poverty. The funds are earmarked for crucial investments, together with an outside leisure and studying house, upgraded know-how and STEAM tools, new buses, and the creation of a constructing upkeep fund and endowment as Agape seems to safe its future.  

The dedication and help of the Atlanta enterprise and philanthropic neighborhood introduced us to this milestone. We are going to proceed to spend the remainder of this yr devoted to celebrating our previous and securing the long run as we assist our college students and households uncover, embrace, and obtain their full potential.