20 People to Watch - Where are they now? 2015
Status updates on 6 of CL’s past People to Watch
2014
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Michelle Nunn, the Political Candidate
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“After the U.S. Senate campaign, I grieved a bit, napped a lot, did some traveling, and immersed myself with family. It was really a time for reflection. But after a few months, my 13-year-old son Vinson started asking me, with some concern, what I was going to do next.
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He advised me that I had three strengths that he had observed. I was ‘good at basketball, reading, and helping people.’ I decided to go with the third strength — helping people — and was thrilled to take on the work with CARE as president and CEO. I am so grateful to lead an organization with an extraordinary history and mission — to alleviate global poverty — that is based right here in Atlanta.
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I’ve spent the first few months getting my arms around this enormous and inspiring organization. I’ve been traveling around the world from Somalia to Ecuador to meet with our CARE staff and the people we serve. CARE operates over 880 lifesaving projects in over 90 countries around the world, helping more than 72 million people. I have visited schools that CARE has built in Somaliland, met women who are saving money and investing in small businesses in the slums of Nairobi, and sat with refugees who are trying to re-build their lives after losing everything.
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During the summer I had the opportunity to visit CARE’s work helping Syrian refugees in the bordering countries of Turkey and Jordan. I was able to meet the people, both refugees and CARE staff, behind the world’s largest humanitarian crisis since WWII. They told me what it was like to flee their homes and showed me the wounds on their children’s bodies and described their ‘journey of death’ to find safety. And they told me that, for many of them, CARE had been their only offering of hope and solace in re-building their lives — offering vouchers for food and support for getting their kids back in school. I think a lot about those families and the moral and historic challenge before us.
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People ask me if traveling to a refugee camp or a slum or meeting with women victims of abuse leaves me in despair. In fact, I mostly feel a tremendous and profound sense of hope for the resiliency, strength and courage that CARE’s team bears witness to every day.”
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Michael Gamble, the architect
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“Everyone wants to know about the Clermont Hotel renovation. We are finally under construction, after a number of delays related to historic tax credits, infrastructure, and financing. As most of you can see as you drive by, the structural repair is underway and the next step will be the replacement of all the windows. A really fantastic team has formed around the project — ownership, construction, engineering, and design. All in all, it should be worth the wait.
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My business partner and wife Lee Ann and I continue to work with a very talented group of creative thinkers, architects, and interiors-minded folks out of our studio in Midtown on a range of projects, almost all of which have some sort of domestic/lifestyle component. Those include interiors at the Saint Regis, townhouses in the Old Fourth Ward, the adaptive reuse of the former Atlanta Daily World building in Downtown, a number of private residences, and a few mystery projects we can’t talk about yet. It must be noted that Lee Ann makes all of this happen. While I serve as creative director for the studio, I’m really along for the ride.
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I’m now director of graduate studies at Georgia Tech and very actively engaged in teaching, shaping the curriculum and research. I work with a very bright group of scientists in the areas of energy, urban housing, demographics, and health.
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We’re building quite a body of collective work that is currently on exhibition in Georgia Tech’s Stubbins Gallery and has also traveled to Los Angeles and New York to be exhibited in the Dwell on Design show. I think the easiest way for any of us to change the world is to take time to teach and to think about education and the legacy we want to leave the next generation. I pinch myself every day at Georgia Tech, because it seems frankly so utopian. It’s a place where you hear the word ‘yes’ more often than ‘no,’ and you’re surrounded by some of the most intelligent people out there, young and old.”
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“My new rap name is Dirty
?because people outside in the Streets that’s what they called me
?people don’t call me Ol Dirty Bastard Jr
?the Gangsters called me Dirty and so did the Ladies
?Just Yesterday my mother called me on the phone Early in the morning
?she was like I can hear the Crowd screaming Dirty in my Dreams
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Rza is Working on Some Special creations for the universe
?with me musically
?A movie about my Father
?Ol Dirty Bastard is being Designed
?That’s all I can tell the planet Earth Today
?Peace and Blessings”
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2015
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Michael Sterling, the Reformer
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“I would describe my life as being consumed by work. The Atlanta Workforce Development Agency has sort of consumed my life but in a good way. I didn’t really set out to accomplish anything specific other than to make progress. In that regard I do feel like we’re moving in the right direction and have made significant progress.
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We’ve increased in every metric and category. The number of customers served, we’ve more than doubled. The number of customers that are attaining degrees or certificates, that’s more than doubled. The number of individuals who are gaining experience to be on a work site, we’ve more than tripled that. We’ve got 30 people who have come through our agency for a program we put together with Mayor’s Office of Film and Entertainment and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees working on sets in ‘below-the-line’ jobs — grips, set design, camera work.
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In partnership with Tech Square Labs, we’re launching an innovative pilot program called the Coding and Cofounder school, where we take youth between the ages of 18-24 through a program learning how to code javascript. They do four months of learning to code, four months of entrepreneurship, and four months of career readiness.
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We’ve completely restructured the agency, resolved outstanding audit findings. We recently finished our five-year working plan, which is available for local comment, that outlines how we will deliver member services and meet the needs of the new economy.
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We feel really good about restructuring and things we’re doing. No matter who I talk to, news media, privately, people in my office, I always say ‘I’m not going to spike the football.’ I just don’t believe it. You know and I know, Atlanta is still the worst city for income inequality. Less than half of children who are born into poverty are making their way into the middle class. We have a lot of institutional issues in this city. And I feel the work we’re doing is moving in the right direction to address those issues. But I still feel we have a lot of work to do.
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Aurielle Lucier, the (free) radical
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“At the beginning of the summer, I was entertaining the idea of going back to Georgia State University. But a friend of mine began talking with me about programs that are reflective of the work that I’m involved in. There’s a program at Evergreen State College, and it’s just phenomenal. The school is pretty much social-justice centered. They really are a pillar of community activism on campus and the surrounding area. It’s outside of Seattle, and it’s crazy. It’s ridiculously scary. It’ll be the first time that I’ve lived somewhere else. I am so Atlanta. I carry this city with me in the way I walk and the way I talk. So I can’t see myself really living long-term anywhere else. But I’m excited. My entire purpose is to go gather the tools and the information necessary to sustain movement work over long periods of time so that I can come back and invest my full self into the community in the way that I want for us to be productive.”
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“Opening Ticonderoga Club has been awesome. It’s been really heartening. First it’s been tremendously humbling because the number of friends and regulars from over the years that have come in over these first few weeks of real business at Ticonderoga has been staggering. It feels very much like there was not a gap since leaving Holeman and Finch, which is saying a lot, because it was a significant gap. It’s been challenging in all the right ways to go into this kind of new format in Krog Street Market. ... It’s been a really fun change of operating procedure. And the bartending ... it’s obviously what I love to do, so it’s been really fun to get back into that. I’m behind the bar every single night.
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“We wanted to slow roll Ticonderoga Club’s opening for a couple of reasons. One is because we were still finishing physical components of the space, and two, what has become the unfortunate circumstance of doing business in Atlanta with regards to the permitting and, in particular, liquor licensing. It was like, ‘OK, we can not open and we can take all these great people that have chosen to come work for us that we’ve already done training with and furlough them all until we open or we could stage our opening.’ So that’s what we elected to do. We opened the sandwich window first, which happens during the week from 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. ... And then we decided, ‘OK, well this obviously isn’t enough to pay for all the staff and keep the lights on and so on and so forth.’ And we were still waiting for the liquor license. We said to the hell with it, and quietly opened for dinner and took that time to really work the bugs out of our kitchen. ... And then once the liquor license came, that was it. I was like, ‘All right, now I get to get back in the saddle and do what I’m supposed to be doing.’ Since then, it’s been awesome manning the stick and going full bore. And the last stage that we have not yet activated but will be happening early in 2016 is when the brunch thing begins and we go, Saturdays and Sundays; we’ll go daytime right into dinner service. That’s the only piece that we’ve not yet given the green light.”