CENTRAL SOUTH REVITALIZATION PROJECT

The City of Macon, Mercer University, and other community agencies and institutions are partners with the Central South neighborhoods of our city to support their improvement. This partnership started with a number of community meetings in the spring of 1998. On the basis of these meetings, four areas for improvement were selected:

1) to build the capacity of the local community to help itself,

2) to increase the public safety of the Central South area,

3) to expand opportunities for neighborhood youth, and

4) to clean-up and rebuild the Central South neighborhood.

1)     COMMUNITY CAPACITY

A number of local organizations have become part of this partnership. Mercer faculty and students are working closely with these organizations to increase the resources available to them. Long-established organizations include the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Georgia (Mike Killen, Executive Director--743-4153) and the Inter-Neighborhoods Residents Association, which represents public housing residents across the city (Debra Kleckley, President--788-0091). More recently formed organizations include the Willing Workers Association of Central South (Daisy Rawls, Chair--746-3857) and the Central South Task Force (Rev. Morris Sandifer, Chair--477-5919). The Willing Workers Association is made up of residents and homeowners in Central South who are working together to promote cooperation, to improve and clean-up the neighborhood, and to care for their neighbors. The Central South Task Force represents businesses, churches, and organizations in Central South. Its mission is to plan for neighborhood improvements, monitor progress towards revitalization, and communicate both with the local community and with city-wide agencies and institutions. A number of churches are also active partners for revitalization. The Mercer Center for Community Development (Dr. Peter Brown, Director--301-5370) in October 1999 received a three-year U.S. Department of Urban Development grant of $400,000 to support building the capacity of these organizations. This Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) grant was matched with $549,705 in community resources and will also support public safety initiatives, youth initiatives, and planning for redevelopment in the neighborhood.

2)     PUBLIC SAFETY

Members of the Willing Workers Association are strong supporters of Neighborhood Watch in their neighborhoods (Eunice Richards, Coordinator--751-2797) and are participants in Citizens On Patrol (COP). With the support of Mercer’s COPC grant, the Macon Police Department is extending its Police Athletic League to include Central South youth. As part of the housing redevelopment planned for the neighborhood, financial support from the City of Macon and Mercer University will be made available to encourage Macon police officers to purchase renovated homes in Central South. The Mercer University Police Department will also enter into a memorandum of understanding with the Macon Police Department to share communication frequencies and to add Mercer University Police patrols to the neighborhood. The Willing Workers Association is also working with law enforcement agencies to attack drug trafficking in the area, an effort coordinated by William Gifford, Assistant United States Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia (752-8178).

3)     OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUTH

As part of the revitalization project, Mercer students and faculty are tutoring reading in John W. Burke and Ingram-Pye Elementary Schools and will offer a Junior Great Books program at McEvoy Middle School. Montessori-based preschool childcare is available to low-income neighborhood residents through the First Street Arts Center (Dr. Thomas Glennon, Executive Director--745-3760), and quality, affordable after-school care will be available to Ingram-Pye students through Communities In Schools (Susan Milam, Executive Director--765-8663). Mercer professors Dr. Linda Hensel, Dr. Hope McIlwain, and Ms. Joan Burtner have received grants of $110,000 from the American Honda Foundation and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation to offer math/science summer camps for Burke and Ingram-Pye students. Dr. Michael Smith of the Mercer Medical School will train teen peer counselors from Central South in an internationally-recognized teen pregnancy and risk reduction program, STAND (Students Together Against Negative Decisions). Finally, Mercer University is offering scholarships to the University to highly-qualified high school students from Central South neighborhoods as part of a new service leadership program.

4)     NEIGHBORHOOD REDEVELOPMENT

Mercer students and faculty, together with a wide variety of community agencies, have joined the Willing Workers Association in a successful and on-going clean-up campaign in Central South that is producing noticeable results. Systematic code enforcement in the neighborhood by Property Inspector William Mander (751-7192) is effectively bringing substandard houses up to code and demolishing abandoned structures. The Central South Task Force will work with the Bibb County Road Improvement Project and a number of other agencies to ensure that planned road improvements in Central South will contribute to neighborhood revitalization and economic redevelopment. The City of Macon, Mercer University, Renaissance Housing Partnership, the Macon Area Habitat for Humanity, the Macon Heritage Foundation, and First Liberty Bank, Wachovia Bank, and First Union Bank, in cooperation with the Macon-Bibb County Land Bank Authority and the Macon Housing Authority, are planning and seeking financing for 92 units of single-family housing in Central South. This project will substantially rehabilitate 20 dilapidated houses for sale to homebuyers, build 40 new scattered-site houses on vacant lots for sale to homebuyers, and repair 32 presently owner-occupied homes. Forty percent of the houses for sale will be targeted to middle-income families, thirty percent to moderate income families, and thirty percent to low income families. The goal of the project is to increase home ownership in the target neighborhood. Mercer will also offer down-payment assistance to as many as twenty of its faculty and staff to purchase homes in the target neighborhood (this assistance will also be extended to Macon Police officers). Macon City Council’s neighborhood revitalization program places a high priority on this initial Central South revitalization project as a pilot project for the redevelopment of other inner-city neighborhoods. (This home ownership project is also closely coordinated with the application by the Macon Housing Authority and the City of Macon for a HUD HOPE VI grant that would replace Oglethorpe Homes with townhouses and single family homes, while providing extended social services to residents to support family self-sufficiency. This mixed-income, multi-family project would include opportunities for home ownership as well.)