Annual Report FY 2022
Leadership Message – July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022
The Georgia Appleseed community has an unmatched passion for building a Georgia where all children can craft their own destinies, free of obstacles created by poverty, bias, discrimination, and racism.
Over the last year, we leveraged that passion with record-breaking pro bono support and successful fundraising to grow Georgia Appleseed’s impact, staff, and revenue. Our larger team, expanded programming, and new partnerships helped us reach more children and families than ever before. And our advocacy efforts saw similar success and growth.
In the pages that follow, we describe some of the legislative and policy advocacy efforts that safeguard children from the school-to-prison pipeline and create new protections from dangerous housing conditions. We share the story of a child in foster care benefitting from our School Justice Initiative (formerly called Dismantling the School to Prison Pipeline) and why they need our support. You will learn about our Housing Justice work that helped more than 3,000 families avoid eviction in Clayton County through our partnership with local courts, schools, government, and non-profits. We tell you about our testimony before the US Senate on the impact of dangerous housing conditions on thousands of Georgians. And much more.
These efforts and those of years past create profound, positive changes for Georgia kids. For example, our School Justice efforts over the last 12 years have spared 377,000 children from unnecessary and damaging school suspensions. These children stayed in class and avoided the cycle of harm that so often occurs when children are kicked out of school, including a much greater risk of ending up in juvenile court.
We are growing our School Justice Initiative to directly support even more children, improve training for case managers, and fight for new legal protections for our most vulnerable kids. We are helping schools establish successful mental health programming. And our housing coalitions are organizing the fight against slumlords and bringing families’ voices to the legislature and local government.
On behalf of the staff and the hundreds of thousands of children and families we work for, thank you for being part of this remarkable Georgia Appleseed community.
