♥️ ATLANTA AND THE TURNERS

For twenty years—from 1990 to 2010 – my residence was in Atlanta, Georgia. Of those years, I think I spent a total of about five years in the actual city. The first decade there I was married to Ted Turner who preferred to be fishing in Montana or Nebraska or any one of his many properties. These properties were enormous and they all had something in common besides beauty and vastness: They were suitable for raising bison and they all had rivers, creeks, or lakes for fly fishing. Catch and release. The verb ‘recreate’ was added to my vocabulary.

But I did get to know Atlanta and much of the rest of Georgia because in 1995 I founded GCAPP: The Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, a statewide organization to empower teenagers and address the chronic problem of children having babies. Georgia had the highest rate of adolescent pregnancies in the U.S. when I moved there. While some young mothers turn out to be wonderful parents, too often this is not the case. A fourteen or sixteen-year-old girl likely hasn’t figured out her own life and having a child to raise will make it virtually impossible to take advantage of opportunities that may come along…like a job or schooling.

Here are key things I learned in the thirty years since GCAPP now known as The Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential was created: