The Georgia Center for Opportunity

The primary pathways to opportunity – strong families, safe communities, quality schools, and stable employment– which historically gave children a chance to succeed, regardless of social and economic background, have experienced a rapid decline in recent years. These are not just public policy talking points – these breakdowns represent a tragic and self-perpetuating loss of human potential. They represent shattered dreams and broken families, and initiate cycles of generational poverty and lost opportunity.

Following what is often referred to as the Success Sequence greatly increases the odds of an individual achieving their potential, virtually guaranteeing their access to the middle class. The result of an academic study, of all American adults studied who got these three things right — finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children— only around two percent lived in poverty. In stark contrast, among those who got all three parts of the sequence wrong, 75 percent lived in poverty, and they were more likely to trigger a poverty cycle that was generational in scope.

To that end, we focus our work at the Georgia Center for Opportunity on ensuring that more individuals are able to access the “success sequence.” Our work is about human potential, flourishing families, and strong communities. Our vision is for Georgia’s communities to be the most vibrant in the country.

Georgia Center for Opportunity is an independent, non-partisan think tank dedicated to increasing opportunity and improving the quality of life for all Georgians. We research solutions to society's most pressing challenges, promote those solutions to policymakers and the public, and help innovative social enterprises deliver results on the ground.

Our research teams identify who in Georgia is falling behind at each stage­—and why—and develops the best policy and community-based solutions for overcoming the failures at each stage. We then advocate policies that enable greater mobility and opportunity, and we invest in leading non-profits and community organizations to deliver measurable change on the ground.

We believe GCO's integrated approach — combining research, advocacy and grassroots delivery — is crucial to
bringing about the change we need, and we've seen it work.

This past year, GCO saw the successful implementation of its recommendations on prisoner reentry reforms. Through a December 2013 report on Increasing Employment Opportunities for Ex-Offenders and a Prisoner Reentry Working Group, GCO promoted common sense proposals for ways the state could remove barriers to ex-offenders securing and maintaining a job. These included such things as lifting driver's license suspensions for ex-offenders convicted of non-driving related offenses, providing offenders with all proper identification needed for employment well in advance of being released from prison, and updating the state's occupational licensing rules and procedures so that ex-offenders have better access to trade licenses and steady employment. After GCO presented its findings to the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform, nearly all of the recommendations were incorporated into the Council's final report to the Governor, and following the 2014 session, several of the recommendations became law when the Governor signed Senate Bill 365.

This is the kind of success we expect to see more of in the coming months. Georgia Center for Opportunity is poised for very strong growth in the near-term.

GCO has worked in many areas of public policy in Georgia, building effective and diverse coalitions
around multiple issues, such as school choice and prisoner reentry:
- In 2007 and 2008, GCO was instrumental in passing the Special Needs Scholarship and the Tuition Tax
Credit Scholarship, programs that are now providing school choice to nearly 18,000 children across
Georgia.
- In 2012, GCO helped lead a coalition of groups that successfully passed the state's Charter Schools Commission constitutional amendment, providing a state-level agency to approve new charter schools.
- In 2013 and 2014, GCO led research and advocacy efforts around prisoner reentry reforms to give ex-offenders
greater access to employment opportunities; many of GCO's recommendations became law in 2014.
- In 2014, GCO released research on ways that charity healthcare clinics in the state could provide
healthcare for uninsured, individual adults in poverty without the need for federal funding.
- During 2013 and 2014, GCO helped a number of direct service nonprofits improve their operations and become self-sustaining, including the Gifted Education Foundation, Every Woman Works, Arete Scholars, and Out of Darkness.

Also, at the request of local community leaders in the Norcross-Peachtree Corners area, for the past two years
GCO has led a coalition of more than 70 nonprofits, schools, and businesses in a collective impact project called
Breakthrough Norcross. The project aims to quantifiably increase specific educational achievements among the
12,000 students served by the Norcross cluster of schools using agreed-upon outcomes, clear metrics, shared
data, and high accountability.