Rebuild L.A. and Atlanta Project Share Many Goals : Cities: Jimmy Carter lends his prestige and zeal to pacesetting effort at healing urban neighborhoods.

In the White House, with his talk of sacrifice, his beatific grin and those Southern Baptist Sunday School classes, Jimmy Carter may have seemed to some a little too much the good Christian soldier, not enough the pragmatic, hard-headed politician.

But in the almost 12 years since he left the presidency, Carter’s missionary instincts have had free rein. He has helped build houses for the poor. He has helped struggling farmers in Ghana. He has improved the immunization rate for the world’s children. And he has, say political observers, gone a long way toward rehabilitating his reputation.

Now, after having spent most of that time dealing with international problems, Carter is turning his focus homeward, applying his personal influence and prestige to the seemingly intractable troubles of the nation’s cities. His year-old Atlanta Project, a mammoth undertaking that enlists the aid of some of the nation’s largest corporations, is attempting no less than a radical rethinking of the way social services are delivered in this country.

The project, which he begins to take nationwide with his visit Monday to Los Angeles, is designed “to change the entire system that affects the lives of the underserved,” said one Carter aide.

Its basic thrust is empowerment, helping poor people take control of their destinies.

“We know that the system of human services delivery is broken,” said Daniel E. Sweat, the longtime Atlanta civic leader Carter picked to direct the project. “It must be changed. And that’s what we’re about.”

There are obvious similarities between the Atlanta Project and Rebuild L.A., the organization launched after the spring riots to spur reinvestment in inner city Los Angeles. For one thing, both are aimed at improving life for the disfranchised, in part by enlisting the aid of major corporations. The biggest difference, said Carter associate James Brasher, is that Rebuild L.A. was “created out of crisis. Atlanta has the luxury of being able to develop experimental models.”

The centerpiece of Carter’s plan is its close focus on the discarded people and communities the Atlanta Project hopes to shore up. Residents of the 20 targeted neighborhoods form committees to determine their own goals. Then, with the help of project staff members and generous corporate “partners,” they map out what steps to take in order to achieve them.

So far, 15 corporations and more than 100,000 volunteers have signed on. The project has raised almost $20 million and held more than 2,000 meetings, including town hall meetings and summit conferences of top corporate leaders. But despite all of this firepower, few tangible results can be seen at this point, and certainly nothing that could be called dramatic. While Carter aides say this is by design, some neighborhood participants complain that discussion is all that has taken place so far.

Standing up at a recent meeting in one of Atlanta’s most depressed neighborhoods, site of the Atlanta Project “cluster” that has been organized the longest, Rasheed Hassan, who operates a drug rehabilitation center, criticized the seeming inaction.

“As I said two months ago, while we’re doing all of this people are dying,” he complained, to nods of agreement. “Where is the funding and what are we supposed to be doing?”

Cluster coordinator Mary Dunmore-Brown answered that the project is not set up to provide funds but rather to help identify sources of funds. Her answer did not seem to ease Hassan’s frustration. But project officials, who acknowledge widespread impatience, say it is important to not succumb to pressure--both internal and external--to swoop down upon poor neighborhoods and play savior.

“The tendency on everybody’s part is to go out and play Santa Claus,” said Brasher, but Carter’s aim is to increase self-sufficiency.

“We refuse to be pressured by those who feel we should be out there building houses or doing something you can take a picture of,” said Sweat. “We will not be stampeded by our own impatience or by anybody else’s impatience.”

Another sensitive point for project officials involves the race issue. The hierarchy of the Atlanta Project is dominated by white professional men. And Sweat acknowledges that 90% of the 100,000 volunteers are affluent whites who live outside the targeted areas. One high-level black member of the project board, Georgia State University professor James C. Young, resigned in September, alleging “racial arrogance” and “insensitivity” within the organization.

Because Young made no specific allegations and has declined to publicly elaborate, project officials will say only that racism will not be tolerated. But when a question about the racial makeup of the leadership was raised at a recent public meeting, Sweat responded: “This is a criticism we expected, but it’s criticism that we reject. . . . We’re not going to run and hide because somebody says that Jimmy Carter or I is a white man in a three-piece suit.”

Despite these bumps, and, even though the project is still getting underway in Atlanta, Carter said he is ready to begin helping other cities embark on similar missions. He said he has been deluged with requests for information on the project. A number of cities have sent delegations to Atlanta to study the way it is set up.

He is kicking off the outreach phase of the project in Los Angeles, he said, because he was invited by Lod Cook, chairman of Arco Corp., in January, well before the riots.

“I’m not presuming that we have the answer for Los Angeles,” Carter said last week. “Mainly (we’re going) to learn things that might be applicable to us in Atlanta, to see what (Rebuild L.A. co-chairman) Peter Ueberroth is doing and plans to do. It’s just a sharing process.”

The two organizations have decidedly different approaches. And Sweat, for one, minces no words in saying which he thinks will be successful.

Speaking of the “private enterprise model” he believes is favored by Rebuild L.A., Sweat said, “They’re hoping that they can just go out there and rebuild the buildings and open them up and say, ‘OK. We’re ready for business.’ But if they don’t involve the community, I don’t believe they will have success in the long term.”

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In Atlanta, corporate involvement is being channeled in ways that, it is hoped, will foster self-sufficiency. For instance, in the Crim cluster in southeast Atlanta--where Rasheed Hassan expressed frustration and the neighborhood where Carter has shown the most personal interest--NationsBank has promised to expedite loans to small-businesses that need immediate cash to fulfill contracts.

And the Marriott Corp., the neighborhood’s “partner,” has assigned a staff member to work with individuals and businesses in the community to solve problems. The company makes money and resources available for some projects. But possibly its most powerful contribution is in forging a “reconnection” with a neighborhood that had been written off, said Brasher.

Formerly powerless people will be able to pick up the telephone and call someone who can offer advice and who may be able to put them in touch with someone else who can make a loan, provide a grant or otherwise help solve problems--the sort of thing that well-off people with connections, the people who live in Atlanta’s more affluent communities, do all the time.

“If this takes off it would replace the pimps and drug pushers as role models with business leaders,” Brasher said. “It will integrate the corporate culture into the community.

Also, through their involvement with such neighborhoods, corporations such as Marriott will come to see formerly forsaken communities as a customer and work force base, he said.

The success of the project is far from guaranteed.

Keith R. Ihlanfeldt, an associate professor of economics at Georgia State, said an anti-poverty project of this magnitude is unprecedented. “Nothing like this has ever been tried before,” he said, noting that the 20 clusters include every poor neighborhood in Atlanta.

Ihlanfeldt, who recently was appointed to sit on the project’s policy committee, is part of a team of academics who will track the Atlanta Project’s progress over five years to determine which of its ideas prove successful.

“I can’t say we’re going to eliminate poverty in Atlanta,” said Ihlanfeldt. “But I know we’re going to come away with a lot of information that’s going to be useful on the national level.”

Over the past year, as Carter has delivered speeches with a missionary’s zeal, gone time and time again to Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods to address small gatherings and held meetings across the country with corporate leaders, he has exuded the sense that this is the sort of work he was born for, that he is, if anything, more fulfilled now than when he was President.

“He is primarily a problem-solver, guided very strongly by moral beliefs,” said Erwin Hargrove, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University who wrote a book on Carter in 1988. Noting that Carter was constrained in office by the economy and political considerations, Hargrove said, “He has free rein now to do what he wants to do.”

Carter’s good works after leaving office, if anything, have eclipsed the memory--good or bad--of his presidency, said Hargrove, noting that Carter now scores higher than Ronald Reagan, the man who trounced him in 1980, in public opinion polls.

While he does not want to suggest that he didn’t feel fulfilled while President, Carter, looking fit and energetic in his spacious office last week, said, “Since I left the White House I can choose the issues that are of greatest interest to me and can devote my time to working on them.

“I can do what I like, go where we want to, and I still have a limited amount of the prestige of the presidency, particularly in foreign countries, and particularly in Africa . . . ,” he said.

Carter said he capitalizes on that prestige to gain access and to bring together disparate organizations to focus on solving world problems.

The idea for the Atlanta Project was proposed to him by James T. Laney, president of Emory University, where Carter is a member of the faculty. The Carter Center, which is associated with Emory, is involved in a wide range of international issues, from monitoring elections in developing countries to trying to resolve international conflicts, from helping to ensure protection of human rights to raising the immunization rate of the world’s children.

Laney came to Carter with a suggestion made by a trustee that he use his influence and talents to focus on problems within the United States as well.

Carter had no problem enlisting large corporations such as Delta Air Lines, IBM, UPS, AT&T;, Coca-Cola, Turner Broadcasting and Georgia Power to help, and he has has received government cooperation on every level. He met with President Bush and congressional leaders in July, after which Bush ordered federal agencies responsible for the Southeast to help expedite the Atlanta Project, keeping red tape to a minimum.

Carter also hopes for cooperation from the new Administration.

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Lauded by many as a bastion of racial harmony, its downtown studded with gleaming new office towers, Atlanta might seem an unlikely laboratory for solving urban ills. The city, the nation’s 12th-largest, was ranked by Fortune magazine recently as the best place in the country to do business. It is considered a progressive, dynamic city, the spiritual and economic capital of the New South.

But first looks can be deceiving. An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people here are homeless, drug cases in juvenile court have increased 1,700% over the past five years and violent crime has risen.

And while Atlanta has been spared the devastation of the rioting in Los Angeles, large sections of the city have been virtually abandoned by banks, insurance companies, supermarkets and even social agencies. There are few amenities, jobs or hope.

“These people in the clusters don’t have Boy Scouts,” said Carter. “They don’t have Little League. They don’t have the recreational facilities that we’ve all come to expect. These things that we take for granted for our kids and grandkids, they don’t have, oftentimes.”

A year ago, when Carter announced the project, he talked of Atlanta really being two cities--one for the affluent and well-educated, and one for the poor and disfranchised who lack skills to function in a modern, urban society.

With the Atlanta Project, he said he hoped to harness the energy and excitement generated by the city’s successful bid for the 1996 Olympic Games and channel it to help the poor.

Carter said he is convinced that if the project is successful in Atlanta it also can be successful in other cities.

“Atlanta is quite different from Los Angeles or Detroit or Ft. Worth or Boston or New York or Washington,” he said. But, he believes, basic components of the Atlanta Project can be duplicated elsewhere. To help him spread the message, his staff has prepared a workbook that he plans to take with him to Los Angeles and other destinations.

Carter said basic components of the plan are, first, to target specific problems, such as teen-age pregnancy, drug addiction and joblessness. Then, he said, the city must be divided into manageable target areas. In Atlanta, each targeted cluster is organized around a high school. Then government, universities, private corporations and churches are enlisted to serve in the project.

“The most time-consuming but also most crucial element is to let the people in the communities have charge of the program,” Carter said.

It also helps to have a former President at the helm. “We have a singular opportunity with President Carter’s impressive position in the community and in the country and in the world that probably no other city has,” acknowledges Sweat. But he said every city has respected leaders who can marshal resources. And Carter will make himself available to act as a catalyst in other cities.

Atlanta “is still young enough and unbureaucratic enough that we can work together. It’s sort of a small town. Everybody knows each other. You can sit down and get each other on the phone,” Sweat said.

And gauging the success of the project will be easy, Carter said. “We know how many crack addicted babies are born at Grady Hospital every year,” he said. “We know how many cases there are in the juvenile court system. We know how many families are below the poverty level. . . . It’s easy to quantify how well we’re doing.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.

Atlanta Project’s Grass-Roots Goals

The Atlanta Project is an initiative of former President Jimmy Carter and The Carter Center Inc. to channel the talent and good will of residents throughout the Atlanta area into one coordinated effort to attack the social and economic problems of Atlanta’s most depressed neighborhoods.

TARGET AREA

Twenty metropolitan Atlanta cluster communities, each centered around a high school. The area is home to about 500,000 people, and has been identified as the largest concentration of disadvantaged families in the state of Georgia. These neighborhoods include a high percentage of single parent families and school-age mothers. A large proportion of residents are on welfare, live in substandard housing and suffer from chronic unemployment.

KEY OBJECTIVES

Immunize every child against vaccine-preventable disease

Assure that every pregnant woman has access to prenatal care

Maintain free health clinics in every school

Recruit sponsors, such as corporate or religious groups, to work in partnership with schools and neighborhoods

Encourage university students, businesses, religious groups and civic clubs to build or repair substandard housing

Help parents, teachers, police and others work together to resist violence and drugs

Counsel juvenile delinquents

Source: Times staff