What’s Going on in South Downtown Atlanta
We are excited to welcome you to South Downtown Atlanta on May 6th for an immersive walking tour. The tour takes a hard look at one of Atlanta's most complex and historic neighborhoods, through the lens of economic mobility, capital, displacement, and community prosperity. After hearing from expert panelists, visionaries and nonprofit leaders, grantmakers will have a chance to design ideas for how philanthropy can support place-based revitalization.
Participants will walk a total of 2.5 miles during this tour, through areas of active construction (your safety will be prioritized!) and on uneven sidewalks. Please plan on wearing comfortable walking shoes.
Program Overview; Our full agenda is below!
Attendee List (coming soon!)
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A pre-tour webinar with Tommy Pearce, Neighborhood Nexus
South Downtown Atlanta is changing faster than the data can follow. And that gap is worth talking about.
In this short webinar, Tommy Pearce will walk through what community data tells us about the South Downtown corridor, and more importantly, what it can't. He'll make the case that for communities in rapid transition, Census-based snapshots miss the story entirely, and that funders need better tools, including real-time local data and community voice, to make decisions that don't lag five years behind reality.
This session sets the data foundation for the May 6th Place-Based Philanthropy Tour and frames a question we'll carry through the day: How do we fund places we don't fully understand yet?
Tommy Pearce, Neighborhood Nexus
As executive director of Neighborhood Nexus, Tommy Pearce is working to do just that. With a background in research, strategic planning, and nonprofit management, he has worked with hundreds of Georgia organizations to maximize their impact with data.
Prior to Nexus, Tommy was a strategy consultant for the Georgia Center for Nonprofits, taught ESL at the International Rescue Committee, conducted public health research at the University of Pittsburgh, and was an intake and street outreach coordinator at a Pittsburgh emergency shelter.
Tommy serves on advisory boards for the Ahmaud Arbery Foundation, Junior League – Atlanta, Learn4Life, Emory University’s Department of Quantitative Theory & Methods, Resilient Gwinnett, and Matt Ryan’s ATL: Advance the Lives.
A lifelong Gwinnettian, Tommy has an MSW from University of Pittsburgh and a BA in History from Georgia Southern.
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Grab a cup of coffee and connect with colleagues across Georgia!
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Brittany Collins, Chair of the 2026 Place-Based Philanthropy Tour and Executive Director of the Betty & Davis Fitzgerald Family Foundation, welcomes attendees and sets the context for the day’s activities.
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Courtney English, Chief of Staff
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South Downtown is home to some of Atlanta's most concentrated poverty and some of its most active development pressure. These two realities rarely serve the same people. This panel asks the uncomfortable question funders often avoid: who is development actually for?
Panelists will map the full spectrum of need in the neighborhood, from people experiencing homelessness to workforce housing residents to small business employees, and trace how housing stability, job access, and public safety are connected. The data is clear: when people have a place to sleep and a place to work, cities get safer. The harder question is how to build the systems that make that possible at scale.
The conversation will ground out in tools and structures that work: LIHTC, permanent supportive housing, community land trusts, and transportation access as economic infrastructure. MARTA is not a convenience; it is a prerequisite for mobility. Neither are safe sidewalks, protected bike lanes, and street design that lets people move through their neighborhood without a car. For low-income residents, the built environment either opens up economic opportunity or quietly forecloses it. What does it take for those tools to reach the people already in place, before the market prices them out?
Moderator: Frank Fernandez, Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta
Panelists: Ashani O'Mard, Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership | Cathryn Vassell, Partners for Home | Paul Supawanich, Global Designing Cities Initiative / Bloomberg Philanthropies
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Highlights include:
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For decades, disinvestment shaped South Downtown, from what got funded, what didn't get built, and the impacts on community. That's changing, and not by accident.
This panel gets into how capital actually moves here. Invest Atlanta bridges public incentives and private markets. Councilmember Matt Westmoreland has been in the room where public-private partnerships get made or fall apart, and he'll speak plainly about what works. Atlanta Ventures is making long-term bets on South Downtown at a moment when most private capital would still walk away.
Moderator Sydney England helps foundations rethink how they deploy capital, including tools like historic tax credits, New Markets Tax Credits, LIHTC, and blended finance that most philanthropy has underused. She'll push the panel past theory and into mechanics.
The underlying question: markets will do what markets do. What can patient capital and philanthropy do that the market cannot or will not?
Moderator: Sydney England, Georgia Social Impact Collaborative Panelists: Eloisa Klementich, Invest Atlanta | Councilmember Matt Westmoreland | Jon Birdsong, Atlanta Ventures
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Walk to the Glenn Hotel
Highlights include:
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AJ Robinson, Downtown Atlanta
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Atlanta ranks last among the 50 largest U.S. cities in economic mobility for children born into poverty. That's not background context. That's the frame.
This session asks the hardest version of the question: when a city prospers, who actually benefits? South Downtown is in motion. Investment is arriving. The question is whether the people already here build wealth from it, or watch it happen to them.
No stage, no talking heads. This is a cafe-style conversation. Bring your assumptions and your skepticism.
What does it look like when anchor institutions act as developers and stewards, not just service providers? What can civic infrastructure do that government and philanthropy cannot? What does street-level small business survival tell us about displacement? And what capital structures, land trusts, community ownership models, CDCs, are actually replicable beyond Atlanta?
Speakers will push on all of it, with one question underneath everything: how do the people already here actually benefit?
Speakers:
Danny Shoy, Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation
Alex Camardelle, Kindred Futures
Saba Long, Atlanta Civic Circle
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Walking Tour
Highlights include:
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This concluding session will put grantmakers/funders in the driver’s seat. How will you show up? As an architect or simply an observer?
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The gathering concludes with reflections from program hosts and participants, connecting themes across economic development, mobility and prosperity.
Enjoy a beer from LaGrange-based Wild Leap Brewery!
