On Thanksgiving, remember that gratitude makes good citizens, heals divisions

by Cierra Johnson | Nov 26, 2025

Georgia news, in the news, current events, Georgia happenings, GA happenings

On Thanksgiving, remember that gratitude makes good citizens, heals divisions

Originally published November 20, 2025

President Abraham Lincoln officially made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, during the Civil War that threatened the very existence of the United States.

He wanted to unify the nation by encouraging Americans to count their blessings, give thanks and reflect on our shared national purpose.

A century and a half later, America is once again tearing apart from within. Political polarization is deepening, exacerbated by both parties framing each election as an existential fight for the country’s future.

Civil discourse — the ability to engage in respectful conversations with people we disagree with — seems like a thing of the past. The uptick in violence has left many of us increasingly and rightfully unsettled.

We know we’re treading on dangerous ground when harm toward others becomes an acceptable way to achieve political goals.

Lincoln’s belief in gratitude as a way to mend internal divisions is as relevant today as it was 162 years ago. As we step away from our daily routines to celebrate Thanksgiving, we would do well to heed his call — and recognize that gratitude remains an important tool for national healing.

The Roman philosopher Cicero said gratitude was the greatest of all virtues — one that makes all others possible. He believed gratitude creates humility, which makes you aware of your strengths, your limits, and how much you depend on others.

When you appreciate the good in your life, you recognize that it comes not just from yourself, but from other people.

That is the key: gratitude reorients our attention outward. It pulls us away from ourselves and helps us realize just how much others enrich and shape our lives.

When we pause to give thanks, our first thoughts drift toward our immediate family and friends, but it naturally emanates from there, to the people in our neighborhoods — the teachers, coaches, cashiers, librarians, nurses, and countless others that keep our communities running.

Giving thanks for these neighbors forces us to see their humanity. Their politics is a distant and largely irrelevant trait. We see them first as human beings, as mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, aunts, uncles, friends — people who love, hope, and struggle just like us.

During the shutdown crisis, people came together to help each other

That recognition strengthens the relationships that are key to holding our communities together. It’s this strong social fabric at the local level that Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed sets America apart from other countries — and is key to why our nation has endured for more than two centuries.

That strength was on full display in recent weeks during the federal government shutdown. When Washington’s dysfunction led to confusion and uncertainty over whether 42 million Americans would receive food assistance in November, people didn’t wait on Republicans and Democrats in DC to resolve the impasse.

Americans came together in their cities and neighborhoods to ensure vulnerable families would not go hungry. Churches, charities, and neighbors organized food drives, donated food, and stepped up to help their neighbors in need. Elizabeth Baptist Church in Atlanta fed thousands of people during its Operation Uplift food drive, just one example of communities coming together to respond to needs at the local level.

Gratitude for the people in our communities helps us focus our energy here, at the local level, where it can actually make a difference. A healthy society is built on strong local relationships — bonds not formed by ideological alignment, but through daily interactions and the shared work it takes to improve our communities.

This Thanksgiving, cultivating a sense of gratitude for those outside our immediate circle will go a long way toward planting seeds of respect and neighborliness that have the power to heal our country. Appreciating our local librarian, the cashier at the grocery store, one of the parents at our child’s school, the neighbor who sits behind us in church makes it much more difficult to define them by their political preferences or as the “other side.” It builds trust and fosters cooperation — qualities that we desperately need in today’s political moment.

In a world overwhelmed by loneliness, suspicion, and anger, this is how we can make our communities good places to live. This is how we can reconnect with one of the best sources of hope and joy — each other.

How fitting that Thanksgiving — a truly American holiday — is dedicated to a virtue that helps hold us together as a nation.

Gratitude strengthens our communities and makes them work. As President Lincoln understood so many years ago, it’s essential for shaping not only good people, but good citizens.

Rebecca Primis is Vice President of Communications at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

The safety net ‘system’ that isn’t

by Cierra Johnson | Nov 26, 2025

The safety net ‘system’ that isn’t

Eric Cochling in Governing

Originally published November 20, 2025

Starting in 2027, work requirements kick in for certain beneficiaries on Medicaid, while new work rules for the SNAP food assistance program took effect on Nov. 1. These reforms mandated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reflect a growing effort to make the safety net not only an important source of support but also a pathway to more opportunity and a better life.

The states, however, face significant challenges in implementing these new rules. America’s safety net “system” isn’t really a system at all. It’s a patchwork of more than 80 separate programs, each with its own database, rules, processes and hoops to jump through. These programs rarely coordinate or talk to each other and often feel inhumane to recipients.

For struggling Americans, accessing needed benefits means navigating a bureaucratic maze: Section 8 for housing assistance, SNAP for food support, Medicaid for health care and workforce programs for job training, for example. Each program brings a different caseworker, different eligibility requirements and endless paperwork. Caseworkers can’t see the full picture of what benefits a recipient receives or easily verify whether someone is working.

To implement new work requirements, these state systems must share information and coordinate, something they weren’t designed to do. A handful of states are starting to explore ways to consolidate their programs and integrate workforce development into the safety net. In doing so, they are creating the beginnings of a blueprint for other states to follow.

In June, for example, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the One Door to Work Act — the first step in a multiyear effort to align the state’s workforce and social services systems. The process began with a performance audit of key welfare programs that uncovered inefficiencies and a lack of coordination among agencies. Lawmakers then created a task force to recommend improvements, which ultimately led to the passage of One Door, bringing workforce development programs together under one roof while also integrating state SNAP and Medicaid eligibility systems.

With these reforms, Louisiana has made the most significant progress toward streamlining its safety net since Utah pioneered the One Door model in the 1990s, combining safety net and workforce development programs. Utah now boasts the lowest percentage of residents on Medicaid and food stamps, while simultaneously having consistently low unemployment rates.

Read the full article here.

Eric Cochling is chief program officer and general counsel at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.

A legacy of healing — Documentary tells ReCAST Lawrenceville’s journey through residents’ stories

by Cierra Johnson | Nov 17, 2025

A legacy of healing — Documentary tells ReCAST Lawrenceville’s journey through residents’ stories

Excerpt from Gwinnett Daily Post profile:

Originally published October 15, 2025

Funded four years ago with a $5 million federal grant, ReCAST Lawrenceville has been an invaluable resource to a host of city residents as it works with its partners — Impact 46, the Georgia Center for Opportunity and Viewpoint Health — in promoting resiliency and wellbeing in the community.

To provide awareness to those not familiar with ReCAST and to remind those who are familiar with the agency’s reach and impact, a 17-minute documentary has been produced that amply displays three examples of the role ReCAST has played in the areas of housing, employment and behavioral and mental health.

“We just wanted to celebrate the success of the work that’s been going on through the grant program since October of 2021,” said Marcus Thorne, program manager of ReCAST (which stands for Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma).

The documentary — which was produced by award-winning communications company JComm, Inc. — focuses on three Lawrenceville residents and ReCAST clients — Josiah Hardy, Success Bonds and Nadia Hill — as they navigate their way through potential crises with guidance and assistance from ReCAST’s three partners. Hardy is aided by the Georgia Center for Opportunity’s Jobs for Life program while Bonds receives housing support from Impact 46 and Hill describes the helpful counseling she received from Viewpoint Health.

Read the full article here.

About the Georgia Center for Opportunity

The Georgia Center for Opportunity is a nonprofit organization that works to remove barriers to ensure that every person—no matter their race, past mistakes, or the circumstances of their birth—has access to safe communities, a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life.

###

Georgia Center for Opportunity (GCO) is independent, non-partisan, and solutions-focused. Our team is dedicated to creating opportunities for a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life for all Georgians. To achieve our mission, we research ways to help remove barriers to opportunity in each of these pathways, promote our solutions to policymakers and the public, and help effective and innovative social enterprises deliver results in their communities.

Send media inquiries to:

Camille Walsh
Georgia Center for Opportunity
camillew@foropportunity.org

The fantasy that cutting prison populations saves a lot of money

by Cierra Johnson | Nov 10, 2025

The fantasy that cutting prison populations saves a lot of money

Joshua Crawford in Governing

Originally published October 31, 2025

State leaders hoping to trim budgets by reducing prison populations are in for some disappointment. Proponents of decarceration often tout potential savings, but despite a 24 percent drop in state prison populations since 2010, corrections spending has continued to rise.

Over the past decade, states have enacted hundreds of criminal justice reforms — from reclassifying drug possessions to reducing mandatory minimum sentences — often with the promise of both greater fairness and lower costs. Yet while these policies have succeeded in driving down incarceration rates, they have failed to deliver the taxpayer savings that many conservative lawmakers expected when they pushed for criminal justice reform.

This is because incarcerating criminals is expensive. Using the aggregate division method — taking the total cost to incarcerate for a year and dividing it by the average number of inmates a state houses in a year — state per-prisoner expenditures range from $22,981 per prisoner per year in Arkansas to $307,468 in Massachusetts. So reducing the prison population by 100 people, decarceration advocates argue, should yield an annual savings of over $2.2 million in Arkansas and over $30 million in Massachusetts.

But in the years since the wave of reforms, neither overall state budgets nor department of corrections budgets have declined. In fact, state budgets increased in every state and state corrections budgets increased in all but two states. So why didn’t the promised fiscal benefits to taxpayers come to fruition?

First, it’s important to understand that state corrections budgets have always made up a relatively small percentage of overall state expenditures — never more than 5 percent. This is far below the cost of education (25-35 percent), public welfare (20-25 percent), highways (5-10 percent), and hospitals and health care (5-10 percent). It was always going to be hard to cut overall state spending by reducing one of the smaller budget items.

Read the full article here.

Joshua Crawford is the Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity and the author of “Kids and Community Violence: Costs, Consequences, and Solutions” in the edited volume Doing Right by Kids.

New Report: Corrections spending rises in Georgia even as prison population declines

by Rebecca Primis | Oct 13, 2025

New Report: Corrections spending rises in Georgia even as prison population declines

PEACHTREE CORNERS, GA—Georgia’s prison population has shrunk in recent years, but a new Manhattan Institute report written by Joshua Crawford, a Public Safety Fellow at the Georgia Center for Opportunity, shows that the decreasing number of inmates hasn’t translated to meaningful savings or improvements in public safety for Georgians.

Instead, the report reveals that corrections spending has risen as Georgia’s prison population has declined. The number of incarcerated Georgians dropped by 11.7% between 2010 and 2023, but corrections spending increased by 23.6% over the same period. The trends in Georgia are consistent with those in almost every other state—incarceration rates are falling while corrections budgets are growing.

The data confirms that reducing the number of people in prison isn’t the answer to decreasing the state budget in Georgia or elsewhere.

As Crawford says, “Georgia lawmakers should focus conversations about criminal justice where they belong: on protecting the public and creating a fair and just system that values the lives, liberty, and property of Georgia families. Those are things lawmakers can meaningfully impact immediately, while criminal justice budgets are more complex and fixed.”

At a glance: facts on the prison population and corrections spending in Georgia

In 2023, 49,814 people were incarcerated in Georgia.
From 2010-2023, Georgia’s prison population decreased by 6,618 people, or 11.7%.
From 2010-2023, Georgia’s corrections spending increased by $258,546,766, or 23.6%.
In fiscal year 2023, Georgia’s Department of Corrections budget was $1,354,962,683, or 2.2% of the state’s total budget.

A closer look at Georgia’s inmate numbers and corrections spending

The number of people in Georgia’s prisons decreased by 6,618 to 49,814 from 2010-2023, but corrections spending in Georgia increased by $258,546,766 during the same time frame.

Notably, Crawford points out most individuals in Georgia’s prisons are violent and repeat offenders, and the majority have had five or more prior arrests before incarceration. Because these offenders pose higher public safety risks and drive most of the system’s costs, reducing inmates at the margins does little to generate savings.

Even with the growth in spending, Georgia’s overall Department of Corrections budget in fiscal year 2023 was $1,354,962,683, just 2.2% of the state’s total budget. The vast majority of state dollars went toward other initiatives that help Georgians prosper, including education, public welfare, healthcare, and highways.

Regarding corrections spending, Crawford explained that “because prison budgets are driven by fixed costs like payroll, maintenance, and facilities, modest reductions in the number of inmates don’t free up meaningful savings. Unless states close prisons or dramatically cut staffing, costs remain largely unchanged.”

Reshaping the conversation on criminal justice policy

Long-standing arguments continue about reducing the prison population as a way to decrease Georgia’s overall spending. But the data shows that policymakers need to focus instead on building a more effective criminal justice system that addresses the true costs of crime and helps Georgians flourish.

One crime was committed every 2 minutes and 33 seconds in Georgia in 2024. The effects of this criminal activity are devastating for local communities. Violent crime, in particular, takes a huge toll on property values, employment, economic opportunities, and people’s upward mobility.

Ensuring safety is a core government responsibility, and it’s the first step in creating more prosperous communities throughout Georgia. Public safety is essential to improving economic opportunities, building healthy relationships among neighbors, and enabling Georgians to thrive.

With effective reforms, policymakers can make safety a reality for Georgia’s residents, breaking the interconnected cycles of poverty and crime and transforming communities for generations to come.

About the Georgia Center for Opportunity

The Georgia Center for Opportunity is a nonprofit organization that works to remove barriers to ensure that every person—no matter their race, past mistakes, or the circumstances of their birth—has access to safe communities, a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life.

###

Georgia Center for Opportunity (GCO) is independent, non-partisan, and solutions-focused. Our team is dedicated to creating opportunities for a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life for all Georgians. To achieve our mission, we research ways to help remove barriers to opportunity in each of these pathways, promote our solutions to policymakers and the public, and help effective and innovative social enterprises deliver results in their communities.

Send media inquiries to:

Rebecca Primis
Vice President of CommunicationsGeorgia Center for Opportunityrebeccap@foropportunity.org

National poverty rate fails to Capture the problem of poverty concentration in Georgia and beyond

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Sep 9, 2025

National poverty rate fails to Capture the problem of poverty concentration in Georgia and beyond

PEACHTREE CORNERS, GA—The official poverty rate fell 0.4% to 10.6% in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest report on poverty. The data shows that 35.9 million Americans were living in poverty last year.

These numbers suggest trends at a high level, but they don’t reflect the biggest poverty-related issue, both for the nation and for Georgia: the concentration of poverty in specific neighborhoods. Instead of affecting only certain individuals and families, poverty is enveloping entire communities. This is leading to significant geographic and societal separations among Georgians—not only financially, but also in terms of opportunities for education, work, and family formation.

Randy Hicks, the Georgia Center for Opportunity’s President and CEO, also shared that:

“The national numbers don’t tell us much about poverty from the perspective of the person or community experiencing it. They fail to convey that poverty is much more than a material issue for those who are struggling. Research has shown that people living in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty lack the essential local network of supportive relationships that’s crucial for helping them thrive and rise out of poverty.”

At a glance: facts on concentrated poverty in Georgia

Georgia’s poverty rate: 13.5%—2.9% above the national average, ranking 38th.
Poverty exceeds the national rate in 133 of Georgia’s 159 counties.
Atlanta’s poverty rate: 18.1% overall; 27.2% among children.
Lawrenceville’s poverty rate: 17.2%, compared with Gwinnett County’s 10.5%.
Southern and central Georgia show especially high concentrations of poverty.

Breaking down Georgia’s poverty landscape

Georgia’s average poverty rate was 13.5% in 2023, per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or 2.9% higher than the national rate.

This difference may seem slight, but it puts Georgia 38th in the country when it comes to poverty. Poverty rates in 133 of Georgia’s 159 counties also exceed the national rate.

Within counties, concentrations of poverty exist in particular cities. For example, Atlanta, the county seat of Fulton County, has a poverty rate of 18.1%. Poverty is even more concentrated among the city’s children, with 27.2% living in poverty. These numbers are significantly higher than the county’s average poverty rate of 12.6%.

Lawrenceville, in Gwinnett County, also struggles with concentrated poverty at a rate of 17.2%. The county’s average poverty rate is just 10.5%.

In many cases, poverty rates are higher than the state average in central and southern Georgia, suggesting concentrations of poverty in communities in those regions.

Impacts of increasing concentrations of poverty

In neighborhoods with higher poverty levels, residents experience many negative impacts, including limited access to quality education, healthcare, and employment opportunities. They also struggle with increased crime and inadequate housing and living conditions. These factors significantly hinder social and economic mobility and contribute to cycles of poverty that are difficult to escape.

Eric Cochling, the Georgia Center for Opportunity’s Chief Program Officer and General Counsel, noted:

“Poverty has an especially big impact at the local level. It’s a crisis of human well-being. These neighborhoods are often missing the vital community connections and social institutions that help people navigate life’s challenges. As social isolation and disengagement from work increase, people suffer from the loss of purpose and belonging that work and relationships provide.”

About the Georgia Center for Opportunity

The Georgia Center for Opportunity is a nonprofit organization that works to remove barriers to ensure that every person—no matter their race, past mistakes, or the circumstances of their birth—has access to safe communities, a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life. Learn more at foropportunity.org.

###

Georgia Center for Opportunity (GCO) is independent, non-partisan, and solutions-focused. Our team is dedicated to creating opportunities for a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life for all Georgians. To achieve our mission, we research ways to help remove barriers to opportunity in each of these pathways, promote our solutions to policymakers and the public, and help effective and innovative social enterprises deliver results in their communities.

Send media inquiries to:

Camille WalshGeorgia Center for Opportunitycamillew@foropportunity.org