Fresh Loaf

Mayor Shirley Franklin was joined by Police Chief Richard Pennington, Councilwoman-turned-Homeless Czar Debi Starnes and a cast of dozens Wednesday to kick off the city’s latest effort to put a stop to rampant downtown panhandling.

Right away, this program seems to benefit from greater support from and coordination with the business community. And its clever slogan, “Give change that makes sense,” is sure to appeal to visitors and residents already reluctant to hand their coinage over to aggressive beggars.

Part of the initiative is a citywide marketing campaign whose goal is to get people to quit giving money to folks who accost them for spare change. There’s even a new website, stoppanhandlingatlanta.com, that directs the generous among us to instead give donations to local social service agencies via the United Way’s Regional Commission on Homelessness.

Starnes put it succinctly: “We want people to understand the difference between the homeless and hustlers.”

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As we’d reported in early August and the AJC repeated Sunday, City Hall has launched something of a crackdown on downtown panhandling. Last month, the city fired the first shot across the bow when police arrested almost 50 aggressive beggars, the first serious enforcement of the downtown “no panhandling zone” in three years.

And this Wednesday, Mayor Shirley Franklin will officially unveil the city’s new anti-panhandling strategy, of which increased police enforcement is only one aspect. Basically, the city – with support from Central Atlanta Progress, the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau and the downtown business community – will launch a marketing campaign aimed at persuading people not to give money to beggars, but rather to social-service agencies that work with the homeless.

The ultimate goal, says Debi Starnes, a former Councilwoman and Franklin’s adviser on homeless issues, is to nudge those who are actually homeless into seeking treatment and help, while discouraging professional panhandlers.

If you’re interested, the mayor’s announcement will be in the City Hall atrium from 10:30-11:30 a.m. Let’s hope this marketing campaign works better than Brand Atlanta.

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Tiny to the point of appearing shriveled, Jessica looks much older than her 48 years. Which shouldn’t be a surprise, considering she has HIV, suffers from mental illness and has been homeless perhaps half her life.

For the past several years, she lived in the bushes outside City Hall, which is where former Atlanta Councilwoman Debi Starnes first met her. Starnes estimates that she had suggested to Jessica on at least 50 occasions that she go to a shelter or ask help from a social-service agency – only to be cussed out.

Last week, however, Jessica said she had changed her mind; she was ready to check in to the city’s Gateway Center, where she could be assigned temporary housing and evaluated for treatment as part of a comprehensive program aimed at stabilizing lives gripped by addiction and psychosis. The last they spoke, Jessica told Starnes she must’ve been sent by God to help her.

Such are the incremental victories in the battle against homelessness.

Read the rest of this article here.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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Former Atlanta Councilwoman Debi Starnes, who has served for the past year or so as Mayor Shirley Franklin’s homeless czar (czarina?), found herself dropped from the city payroll last week.

But, unlike other city employees who fell victim to the latest round of layoffs, Starnes is planning to keep her job. The deal she worked out with Franklin, a personal friend, is that she can stay on as the mayor’s policy adviser on homeless issues as long as she finds private funds to pay her way.

“I have to raise the money to cover my salary,” which totals $96,000, Starnes explains. “It’s the right thing to do. When the city is so broke it’s laying off firemen, it doesn’t make sense to keep funding my position.”

Although Starnes hasn’t started looking for donations yet, she says she intends to find new sources so she won’t cannibalize money that already flows to the Regional Commission on Homelessness, the local umbrella program administered by the United Way. Starnes, a longtime homeless advocate with a doctorate in community psychology, represents Atlanta on the Commission, along with Franklin.

The city’s current budget crunch won’t affect the operations of such city homeless initiatives as the Gateway Center, Starnes says, because it’s funded and staffed by the Commission, which has collected $50 million from public and private sources.

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