Martin Luther King Sr Community Resources Collaborative

The Martin Luther King Sr. Community Resources Collaborative aims to help families build better lives by providing comprehensive and integrated social support resources at a single location, with the goal of guiding families to self-sufficiency.

The Collaborative was born out of a realization that our clients’ obstacles were particularly intractable because the programs they needed were siloed and the social service landscape— with over 42,000 non-profit organizations and countless state agencies serving overlapping functions in Georgia— was all too frequently impossible to navigate.

We address poverty by addressing root causes. Our clients have exceptional obstacles in their paths and our extensive network, which includes government, faith organizations, the private sector, and other non-profits, allows us to nimbly navigate the siloed social services landscape by providing the direct assistance that our clients need, connecting them to resources they might otherwise never discover on their own, and developing personalized goals to achieve long-term economic mobility.

We use several strategies that dovetail to deliver maximum impact for our community.

First, our programs are designed to work cohesively to promote economic mobility for those that we serve. Whether enrolled in our housing, employment, or mentoring programs, clients are connected to resources tailored to their specific financial and personal situation. Clients often benefit from enrolling in multiple programs within our organization.

Second, interagency collaboration is another strategy that we employ across all programming, out of a recognition that poverty alleviation efforts require whole-of-society efforts. We continually seek out new partnerships to deliver efficiencies in administration and to develop connections that will deliver greater collective impacts.

Third, we are continually seeking to improve our technical capabilities to improve case management tracking and service delivery. Especially in such uncertain times, it is important to be able to reach all clients remotely. That is why we are in the process of developing software and smart phone 'apps' that will enhance our service provision.

Fourth, all programs and services are co-designed with client input. This enables those we serve to have ownership in their personalized journey to economic mobility, which we have found to increase programmatic success rates and sustainable outcomes.

Our innovative model thrives on partnerships and our success depends on community support. The Collaborative works with numerous local and nationally based organizations to deliver reliable, sustainable, and effective wraparound services. Our on-site partners include Casey Family Programs, Operation HOPE, the Division of Family and Children Services (DCFS), and WorkSource Atlanta; these critical partnerships enable us to deliver on the underlying promise to our clients: together, we can achieve economic mobility and create a better future. These partners enable us to offer healthcare, employment, and career-related services to our clients.

We continue to launch new services to meet the evolving needs of the community. Working with corporate and non-profit partners, we are launching a new workforce development initiative this year that will upskill and retrain those experiencing generational poverty and those who have lost employment due to COVID-19. This initiative will have an emphasis on IT and technical skills that are in high demand throughout the metro-Atlanta area.

Our board, executive, and programmatic leadership bring substantial management and non-profit experience to bear on our anti-poverty efforts. Their experience leads us to propose innovation solutions to pressing challenges in the community.

Collectively, our data tracking tools and processes show that we are having an out-sized impact on our community. In 2021, we served 5,509 individuals. We provided 1,328 COVID-19 vaccines, prevented 540 evictions through our Emergency Rental Assistance programming, assisted 1,374 people in receiving legally entitled tax rebates through our VITA program, enrolled 1,016 people in our Atlanta Housing Good Neighbor Program, and provided direct workforce development services to 55 individuals, culminating in a 65% average increase in wages and incaculable gains to family stability. This represents an increase of 60% of people served from our total served in 2020, as we ramped up services to meet the needs of the community during the height of the COVID-19 crisis.

In addition, we regularly review our programs to ensure that we are delivering optimum results. As a result of this diligence, we continue to be re-awarded grants year after year; we have been re-awarded our grant for the Atlanta Housing program twice, our United Way VITA grant seven years in a row, and have also been awarded our Fulton County Community Service grant three times.

Going forward, we are striving to increase our involvement in workforce development and emergency housing response in the metro-Atlanta area. We believe that lasting, sustainable anti-poverty work needs to address professional development and skills-based learning as well as provide direct assistance. We are currently developing partnerships with IT and technology firms in the metro-Atlanta area to create a new workforce development program in which we will certify low-income and unemployed individuals with in-demand skills that will place them in high-paying careers. Relatedly, we seek to expand our curriculum of courses that can be offered to clients and to deliver these courses digitally, so that they can reach everyone in the community who could benefit.