2015

Annual Report

PRESIDENT’S LETTER

PRIMARY PATHWAYS

EDUCATION: School Choice

EMPLOYMENT: Prisoner Reentry

FAMILY FORMATION: Healthy Families Initiative

BREAKTHROUGH NORCROSS

DONOR PROFILE

WAYS TO SUPPORT GCO

EVENTS

FINANCIALS

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A WORD FROM THEPRESIDENT

I am blessed to work at the Georgia Center for Opportunity. I work with great people, strategic partners, and supporters. But in the end, this isn’t about me and whether or not I have an office to go to every morning. Rather, it’s about the thousands upon thousands of Georgians who benefit from our work.

• It’s about students – armed with choices driven by GCO – who have gone from being at-risk of failing or dropping out to having the tools and opportunities to succeed.

• It’s about the seemingly unemployable finding steady work – thanks to GCO-backed changes in the law – and providing for themselves and their families.

• It’s about people – equipped by GCO and organizations we helped create – developing the perspective and skills that make them much more likely to form and sustain stable marriages and families.

In the pages ahead, you’ll read about our three areas of focus – education, employment, and family formation. We’ve found, and research shows, that when people are successful in these three areas, they are much more likely to avoid poverty, lead fulfilling lives and realize their full potential.

You see, GCO isn’t just trying to improve Georgia’s statistics. Our purpose is to improve the well-being of Georgia’s people.

Sincerely,

Randy Hicks President & CEO

RANDY HICKS President & Chief Executive Officer

Pathways to Success

FAMILY

FORMATION EMPLOYMENTEDUCATION

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Too often people talk about negative cycles created by poverty without offering solutions. Georgia Center for Opportunity is shifting the focus to increasing the ability of individuals to seize opportunity and lead fulfilling, self-sufficient, and independent lives. We have found and research shows that the best way to do this is by focusing on creating access to quality education, promoting stable employment, and strengthening families for all Georgians. Together, a good school, a steady job, and a healthy family create a success sequence that greatly increases the odds of an individual leading a flourishing life.

A recent report by AEI and Brookings titled, “Opportunity, responsibility, and security: A consensus plan for reducing poverty and restoring the American Dream,” said it well: “We identify three domains of life that interlock so tightly that they must be studied and improved together: family, work and education.”

GCO studies and understands the obstacles along these pathways and removes barriers that keep Georgians from thriving. Our work includes partnering with policymakers to change laws when necessary and working with community leaders to provide community-based solutions to those in need of help.

PRIMARYPATHWAYSThe primary pathways to opportunity are through quality education, stable employment and strong families.

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SPECIAL NEEDS VOUCHER PROGRAM The Special Needs Voucher Program received a boost with a short documentary film, which was produced to highlight the program’s success and the need for more school choice options.

EDUCATION SCHOOL CHOICEA quality education is key to a child’s future success. Academic achievement paves the way to a good job, self-sufficiency, and the earned success we all want for our children. As a society, making sure children receive a good education is also one of the most effective ways we have of intervening in the lives of children who suffer from cycles of poverty and dysfunction.

Unfortunately, Georgia consistently lags behind much of the rest of the country in academic achievement despite spending that rivals or surpasses many other higher achieving states. That is why GCO has championed school choice for more than a decade, successfully advocating for the Special Needs and Tuition Tax Credit programs that together serve some 18,000 students. We have also been vocal proponents of expanding Georgia’s charter schools and were key leaders of the effort to reestablish the Georgia Charter Schools Commission so that children in the state would have greater access to high quality charter schools.

Despite our success, not nearly enough of Georgia’s 1.7 million public school students have meaningful school choice. Instead, many remain locked into a school that may not serve them well because their parents can’t afford to move to a good school district or send them to a private school.

That is why we continue to fight for parents to have more options. We will not be satisfied until all children in Georgia have a meaningful opportunity to receive the education they need.

2015 UPDATESPrior to the start of session, GCO commissioned a poll by a nationally recognized polling firm to assess public support for school choice. The poll showed that the vast majority of Georgians – regardless of age, race, or income – support school choice by wide margins. Those results were shared with state legislators at a special event hosted by GCO and at the biennial training for new legislators.

During session, GCO was successful in having two bipartisan Education Savings Account (ESA) bills introduced in the Georgia General Assembly. If enacted, the legislation would allow parents of public school students to use the money already being spent by the state on their education to provide a wide variety of education services for their children. Services could include tuition and fees at a private school, tutoring in specific subjects, homeschooling curriculum, and educational therapies, among other options.

As drafted, the legislation would create the most expansive school choice program in the country if it becomes law.

GEORGIA PARENTS ALLIANCE2015 was a big year for the Georgia Parents Alliance Facebook page. The group we established to promote school choice received over 3,000 “likes” raising the overall following to just shy of 26,000 total “likes.”

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BY: MICHAEL SCHULTE | JULY 2015

georgiaopportunity.org

GCO has been working to improve the odds that ex-offenders can successfully find employment, reconnect with families and successfully reenter society.

We spent 2013 and 2014 working with legislators and community leaders recommending policy changes that would remove barriers ex-offenders face when looking for employment. Nearly all of our recommendations were incorporated in the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform’s final report to the Governor and resulted in changes in state law.

This year, GCO continued its commitment to the prisoner reentry program. GCO published a report entitled “A High Price to Pay” addressing the tremendous financial debt faced by many individuals after being incarcerated. The report considers the financial options and circumstances of those returning to society, and makes recommendations for encouraging the payment of back child support, court fines, restitution, etc., while considering their need to be successfully reintegrated and reestablished within the community. In March 2015, the Division of Child Support Services revised their policy to allow the release of suspended driver’s licenses to those who are behind in child support payments in order to remove a barrier to work, consistent with a recommendation made in our report.

GCO also published a white paper titled, “An Alternative to Incarceration: Parental Accountability Courts in Georgia,” which outlines the dramatic, positive impact of Parental Accountability Courts (PACs) in increasing rates of child support payments and parental engagement for participants, while reducing criminal justice costs. Based upon the success of PACs, it is likely that they will be expanded dramatically in coming years, which has the potential of positively impacting thousands of children.

These courts help parents find steady employment, consistently provide for their children, and address underlying barriers that prevent their success. Based on current figures, the new PACs could bring in an estimated $420,000 per year in child support payments that otherwise would not have been collected and save local counties an estimated $2.7 million per year in reduced costs of incarceration. In addition to the financial implications, PACs offer a real opportunity for involving parents in their children’s lives.

Our work on prisoner reentry has also helped shape national discussions. In July, we co-hosted a prisoner reentry conference with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC that brought together nonprofit leaders and government officials from around the country to discuss the challenges recently incarcerated people face when reintegrating into society.

Healthy families are at the heart of our churches and civic institutions which have historically provided for the needs of the less fortunate among us. That is why it is so troubling to all of us at GCO that marriage rates continue to decline and childbirths outside of marriage continue to rise. While this trend costs taxpayers over $100 billion annually, the costs in terms of human suffering is immeasurable.

Our work at GCO has long focused on how to help families successfully form and remain healthy. Recently, we launched our Healthy Families Initiative (HFI) in our own backyard of the Norcross and Peachtree Corners area – one of the most economically and racially diverse areas of the state. This community-based initiative focuses on finding ways to encourage healthy relationships, strong marriages, and stable families.

Our work through HFI includes providing relationship and marriage enrichment training, recruiting mentors to counsel young couples, creating area-wide, pro-marriage media campaigns, increasing employability for local high school graduates, and finding ways to improve public policy to encourage marriage and family formation. The goal is to create a model for increasing family formation that can be replicated in other areas across the state and, ultimately, the country.

We are partnering with local churches, nonprofits, and businesses to ensure HFI is not only a success in the near future but is sustainable for years to come.

GCO has also engaged Dr. Brad Wilcox, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, as Senior Advisor for the Healthy Families Initiative and is partnering with Calvin Edwards & Company, an internationally recognized program evaluation firm, to measure whether we are having the impact on the community that we are hoping to have.

As always, we continue to research trends and factors to understand what we might do at the state level to encourage more couples to marry and to ensure families are as healthy as possible. One way we are doing this is by hosting a working group charged with looking at best practices in marriage and relationship education across the country and exploring policy reforms that might help reverse the negative trends in marriage and family stability, including welfare and judicial reforms.

As Pope John Paul II famously said, “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

GCO’s employment efforts have focused primarily on helping the un-or under-employed, which often includes individuals recently released from prison. While growing criminal justice populations are a problem throughout the United States, they are particularly acute in Georgia. Nationally, 1 in 31 individuals are under some form of state supervision (either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole). In Georgia that number is 1 in 13.

Healthy families are the bedrock of a healthy, prosperous society. They are the place where children develop the values, skills, and habits that largely determine the kind of adults they will become.

EMPLOYMENT PRISONER REENTRY

FAMILY FORMATION HEALTHY FAMILIES INITIATIVE

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The Healthy Families Initiative detailed on page 11 is a part of the larger Breakthrough Norcross Initiative. In addition to encouraging healthy family formation, Breakthrough Norcross focuses on how local nonprofits, schools, and churches can work together to improve graduation rates in the Norcross and Peachtree Corners area. To improve graduation rates, we have focused our attention specifically on two key strategic phases in a student’s development that demand increased and coordinated activity: third grade reading and ninth grade assimilation. We determined these points would allow for the largest impact as research has shown that success in these areas is highly correlated with future success, including higher graduation rates.

We awarded partnership grants to community school and nonprofit programs that provide students focused mentoring and tutoring during school hours and the critical hours immediately after school when many students are unsupervised and have fewer structured activities. We collaborate with community partners to encourage them, receive feedback, assess additional needs, and learn more about what will make their programs successful. GCO is also scheduling meetings with faith and community leaders to plan and coordinate our agenda, as well as organizing a series of meetings with groups that are working in the same areas, such as third grade reading and math, in hopes of increasing collaboration as well as collective impact.

We expect to see the nonprofits, schools, churches and businesses we work with through Breakthrough Norcross increase their impact through coordinated activities and increased and consistent communication. The ultimate goal is to implement community-based solutions to find replicable solutions to community problems.

Our Breakthrough Norcross Initiative provides solutions in a concentrated area that will help the local community where GCO is headquartered, while also allowing us to find replicable solutions to pervasive social problems.

We are bringing together local schools, churches, nonprofits, and businesses in Norcross and Peachtree Corners to promote self-sufficiency, paving a road to success for children and families.

The initiative focuses on all areas of the “success cycle” – increasing educational opportunities, job readiness, and the number of stable families – at a local level, thereby leading to more individuals experiencing social and economic well-being.

BREAKTHROUGH NORCROSS

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Why do you give? We feel blessed – blessed to live in America, blessed to live in Georgia, and blessed to be in a position to help others. We’ve had amazing opportunities and want others to have an opportunity to flourish. We know flourishing happens because of what’s happening in homes, neighborhoods, and communities.

When Barb’s Dad and Rich DeVos started Amway they had a mindset of helping people live better lives and were focused on the values of freedom, family, hope, and reward. We have the same mindset in our own businesses and want to build on that legacy by encouraging earned success, expanding personal and economic opportunity, and inspiring people to dream big.

What brought you to Georgia? We left our home in the Midwest and came to Georgia, partly because we saw Georgia as a place we wanted to raise our family. We saw Georgia as an attractive place because of its weather, the values of the people, and the political and economic climate. It has become our adopted home and we want to contribute to increasing opportunities so that Georgia continues to be a place where families from across the country want to live.

Why did you get involved with Georgia Center for Opportunity? We’ve been supporters of GCO for many years and founded the Policy Solutions Initiative. We saw GCO was getting something done and wanted to be a part of it. They weren’t just doing research papers but were taking action to make their policy ideas a reality.

What led to the founding of the Policy Solutions Initiative? We were already involved with GCO prior to founding the Initiative, but we wanted to increase our investment in generating policy solutions that would benefit the people of Georgia. Eight years ago, we started having conversations with Randy Hicks and others on the GCO team about creating a center within the larger organization that would have a laser-like focus on policy solutions – out of that came the Policy Solutions Initiative at GCO.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done through the Initiative on education, human trafficking, adoption, gambling, and prisoner reentry, among its other important work – and are excited about what’s ahead.

What do you think is the best way to bring about change? We believe in working at that intersection of public policy and community-based solutions and appreciate that GCO recognizes the critical importance of both areas. Public policy barriers need to be removed so that individuals and groups at the community level can provide people with real help. It’s churches, nonprofits, civic groups, and businesses that are best suited to change lives for the better. Public policy should always be encouraging these groups to grow and innovate, while avoiding putting up artificial barriers to their success.

Through our giving, we directly support groups on the ground that are making things happen to improve lives, but GCO is about leverage and making more of that work possible. GCO is serving people too but in a different and very important way.

By investing $1,000 or more a year in GCO, Breakthrough Society members demonstrate their commitment to promoting human flourishing and supporting GCO’s work in the areas of education, employment and family formation. In return, they receive a range of benefits including special updates from the President, invitations to members-only events and receptions, and a special Breakthrough Society lapel pin.

To learn more about becoming a Breakthrough Society Member, contact Kelly McGonigal at 770-242-0001 ext. 705 or Kelly.McGonigal@GeorgiaOpportunity.org

WAYS TO SUPPORT GCO

Other Ways to Support Our WorkIn addition to giving online at GeorgiaOpportunity.org/Donate or by check to Georgia Center for Opportunity, there are many ways to support our work.

Leave a Legacy Gift By making an estate or planned gift, you help to ensure that Georgia Center for Opportunity remains a permanent institute for removing barriers to opportunity, moving people from dependency to self-sufficiency, and creating a better Georgia for generations to come.

You can become a member of the Legacy Society by making Georgia Center for Opportunity a charitable beneficiary of your will, living trust, retirement plan, or life insurance policy. If you have any questions or would like additional information, please contact Kelly McGonigal at 770-242-0001 ext. 705.

Donate Goods or Stock Did you know you can donate stock or property to Georgia Center for Opportunity? By donating stock or property instead of selling it, you can receive a charitable deduction and avoid capital gains taxes.

Have Your Employer Match Your Gift With the median participation rate for employee matching gift programs at

only 9 percent, you don’t want to miss this potential opportunity to increase the impact of your gift. Many employers sponsor matching gift programs and will match charitable contributions made by their employees. Procedures vary with each company so check with your human resources department to see how you can take advantage of this opportunity.

Host an Event Georgia Center for Opportunity staff, researchers, and partners are always looking for opportunities to share their work in your community. If you are interested in hosting an event for GCO, contact Kelly McGonigal at 770-242-0001 ext. 705.

Volunteer Your time and talents can be a great resource for us.

Tell a Friend Share what Georgia Center for Opportunity is doing and invite your friends to learn more about our work at GeorgiaOpportunity.org.

Join the Breakthrough Society

DONORPROFILERichard and Barbara Gaby are trustees of the Richard and Barbara Gaby Foundation. Richard Gaby is Founder and CEO of RD Gaby, Inc. Barbara Van Andel Gaby is Vice Chairman of the Heritage Foundation's Board of Trustees. Her father, Jay Van Andel, started Amway with his lifelong friend and business partner, Rich DeVos. She previously served as Vice President of Amway Hotel Corporation and CEO of Peter Island Resorts before retiring in 2006. The Gabys are members of Perimeter Church, support many local and national charities, and have six children.

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A Real Chance to Prosper We closed out 2014 with our Annual event, which brought over 200 guests together at the new College Football Hall of Fame. The night was in honor of Jack Kemp and his belief that we must reach every heart and ensure all individuals have the opportunity to reach their God-given potential. Guests were able to tour the facility, participate in interactive exhibits throughout the hall of fame, and take part in both live and silent auctions to support GCO’s work.

From Welfare to Opportunity During a special luncheon on April 8, GCO’s president Randy Hicks and the Heritage Foundation’s Jennifer Marshall discussed the issues of poverty and family fragmentation, focusing the conversation on state and local solutions.

School Choice Town Hall Screenings GCO hosted a series of events featuring a film to educate parents and the community on educational choices available in Georgia and the need for more parental empowerment. Events were held at Utopian Academy for the Arts in Riverdale, the Lefont Theater in Sandy Springs, and Rhodes Jordan Park in Lawrenceville.

FeaturingCraig DeRoche, President, Justice Fellowship

Harriet McDonald, The Doe Fund

Bryan Kelley, Prison Entrepreneurship Program

Harold Dean Trulear of Healing Communities

Robert Doar, Morgridge Fellow in Poverty

Studies at AEI

Jay Neal, former state representative and

currently criminal justice liaison to the Georgia Criminal Justice Coordinating Council

Gary Mohr, commissioner of the Ohio

Department of Rehabilitation and Correction

Chauncey Parker, special policy advisor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office

Georgia Center for Opportunity was privileged to partner with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in co-hosting an event on the issue of prisoner reentry at AEI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, July 28th.

The event featured two panels, the first moderated by GCO’s vice president and general counsel, Eric Cochling. The panel consisted of nonprofit leaders who have faced challenges and successes in helping former prisoners successfully reintegrate into society, and the second panel featured government leaders who have similarly faced challenges and successes in working to reform the criminal justice system from within.

EVENTSEvery year Georgia Center for Opportunity hosts multiple events to bring the community together, educate strategic partners about GCO’s initiatives, and showcase the work that is being accomplished around the state and country.

AEI and GCO Co-Hosted Event: Improving Prisoner Reentry and Reducing Recidivism

ANNUAL EVENT A Real Chance to Prosper

FINANCIALS

TOTAL EXPENSES $ 1,212,019

Programs $ 933,255 (77%)Administration $ 218,163 (18%)Fundraising $ 60,600 (36%)

PROGRAM EXPENSES $ 933,255

Policy $ 475,960 (51%)Education $ 335,972 (36%)R&D $ 37,330 (4%)Delivery $ 83,993 (9%)

TOTAL REVENUE $ 1,666,119

Individuals $ 597,941 (36%)Corporations $ 51,500 (3%)R&D $ 5,600 (0%)Foundation $ 1,011,078 (61%)

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The unaudited financial information is from the 2015 calendar year and shows how Georgia Center for Opportunity continues to make an impact in the lives of people in Georgia while remaining fiscally responsible. We remain grateful to the many supporters who invest in our mission of removing barriers to opportunity so that all individuals have a real chance to prosper.

www. GeorgiaOpportunity.org

GEORGIA CENTER FOR OPPORTUNITY(770) 242-0001 Telephone

(770) 242-0501 Faxwww.facebook.com/gaopportunity

We Remove Barriers to Opportunity

© 2016 Georgia Center for Opportunity All rights reserved.