Annual Report FY 2025

Leadership Message – July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025

For the last twenty years, Georgia Appleseed has kept justice at our core. We’ve traveled the state, sitting with families, listening to children and caregivers describe how poverty, disability, discrimination, and outdated systems have created barriers to children’s success. We’ve also seen Georgians’ resilience and determination to secure better futures for our children.

Listening pays off. This year, we secured major victories on behalf of children and families in school justice and housing justice, helping pass laws that keep more children learning and more families safely housed. These wins are proof that lasting change is possible when we combine data, legal expertise, and community insight, and when our staff and volunteers bring hope into classrooms, courtrooms, and neighborhoods across Georgia.

Because of our work, Georgia has better school discipline practices, stronger mental health support resources in schools, powerful tenant rights for Georgia’s renting families, and new protections for millions of Georgia’s children.

The scale of Georgia Appleseed’s impact over twenty years is enormous. For example, since 2010, our school justice work alone has kept more than 400,000 children in classrooms, resulting in at least 48,000 additional high school graduates. Each of those graduates will earn about $500,000 more over their lifetime, while collectively saving Georgia more than $4 billion in reduced Medicaid, criminal justice, and other public costs associated with not graduating. All of this has been achieved with just $12.6 million in total donations and gifts since 2005, a return of more than 315 to 1 for our school justice initiative alone. Few organizations can claim that kind of leverage.

The next twenty years will be even more transformative. Georgia can be the first state with a 100% graduation rate. It can also be the first state where juvenile court hearings are rare and where every family has a safe and healthy home. Our goals are bold, but we can reach them.