Empowerment Center opens with community support

The Community Assistance Center brought its career and adult education services together with the grand opening of its Empowerment Center on Nov. 13.

Executive Director Francis K. Horton III said the Empowerment Center was the first project completed in its $18 million, three-year Compassion in Action capital campaign. CTJ Construction completed renovations of the second floor of the CAC’s building at 1130 Hightower Trail in Sandy Springs. Holder Construction donated all the furniture for the Empowerment Center.

Horton said that in 2024 the CAC looked at numbers and results and saw that 77 percent of the people who came to them for help worked at least one job.

“They needed to upskill, they needed to reskill so they can move their families toward stability,” Horton said.

That resulted in the idea to take CAC’s career services, the elements that help people plug into their careers, and adult education services, and put them together. Horton said that the choice to combine them should better enable clients to move their families to a stable state.

“I’m so incredibly proud of the work CAC continues to do in an area that’s near and dear, not just to my heart, but to my head, because I know you are lifting people out of poverty,” Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch said.

Lifting parents out of poverty also uplifts their children towards a brighter future and an easier path than their parents, Deutsch said.

Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul said if CAC didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it.

“The great thing about CAC is you take our public resources, and you leverage them, and you make them grow, and you expand them. You make them go so much further than we could do it ourselves, in case we did have to invent CAC, so I want to thank you for doing that,” Paul said.

Rep. Lucy McBath, who returned from Washington, D.C., after the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a spending bill to reopen the federal government, said she sees the value of public/private partnerships.

“Places like this new Empowerment Center represent what is possible when nonprofit partners and government leaders come together to address a very urgent need in our community,” McBath said.

McBath sits on the Education and Workforce Committee for Workforce Development. She said she’s focused her efforts on the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). She’s the sponsor of the TRAIN (Training Retention and Investment Now for a Better America) Act, which would permanently authorize funding for community colleges through WIOA.

Karen Leone de Nie, a vice president with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, joined the celebration. She said under its monetary policy mandate, the Atlanta Fed’s role is to support maximum employment by improving economic opportunities for low and moderate-income individuals and underserved communities.

“We provide research tools, and we help build networks of leaders like yourself working to advance economic opportunity for households with lower incomes,” Leone de Nie said.

The CAC’s capital campaign illustrates how to align capital to solve these problems. Well-positioned communities with aligned capital can remove barriers to career pathways, and that can help households become self-sufficient, Leone de Nie said.

The labor market is the relationship between employers and the people seeking work, Leone de Nie said. However, it isn’t a simple matching game. Connectors like the CAC are needed to bridge the gap between employers and potential employees, she said.

Research by the Atlanta Fed with the National Skills Coalition found that 90 percent of Georgia jobs across all industries require digital skills, Leone de Nie said, but only one-third of workers possess the foundational digital skills to be successful.

Employers who provide upskilling opportunities can save tens of thousands of dollars in turnover costs per employee. Leone de Nie said research shows that workers gaining a single digital skill can see a 23 percent wage increase. Programs like CAC’s Empowerment Center can help bridge the gap, she said.