How Georgia legislator hopes to achieve bold goals and cut Columbus’ poverty rate
Georgia state Rep. Teddy Reese, a Democrat in District 140, has been tasked with leading a new Columbus initiative with a lofty goal: reduce the local poverty rate by 50% in the next decade.
The state lawmaker and now leader of the new Office of Poverty Reduction, hopes to accomplish this through a community-wide effort. The Office of Poverty Reduction is housed within the United Way of the Chattahoochee Valley, but Reese is a contractor working with a coalition of nonprofits and the Columbus Consolidated Government.
Some of the organizations in the coalition include Goodwill, Enrichment Services, Valley Healthcare and Columbus 2025, which is a group of local leaders seeking to grow talent, business, education and more in Columbus.
“Poverty reduction has been talked about here in the Chattahoochee Valley for many years,” said Ben Moser, president and CEO of United Way.
‘A very aggressive goal’
Community leaders had already begun forming the idea of this office before Moser moved to Columbus, he said. It was part of a mayoral initiative to recognize Columbus had a higher poverty rate than the state and country, and begin conversations about what could be done to reduce it.
The Chattahoochee Valley Poverty Reduction Coalition participated in a roundtable discussion at a Columbus 2025 meeting in 2019 where Belva Dorsey-Mott, CEO of Enrichment Services, set a goal of decreasing poverty by 10%.
“Within that group, a conversation bubbled up that we really needed a very aggressive goal in order to get people’s attention and get all the resources coordinated around the effort to reduce our poverty rate,” Moser said.
The group determined the new goal would be 50% and that the United Way was an organization capable of housing a position to work on this.
United Way worked with the Chattahoochee Valley Poverty Reduction Coalition and other partners to create the position and fund it. The city, Columbus 2025, Goodwill and others provided grants and donations totaling over $1 million, Moser said.
The coalition hired a director of poverty reduction, he said, but that person left last year after being in the position for 10 months.
They went back to the drawing board.
“It would make more sense if this were an office and not one person,” Moser said. “And (it needed to be) a community-owned and community-led effort, not just a United Way initiative.”
They retooled their resources to develop an office, tapping Reese to lead it.
Joining Reese, an administrator/analyst has a been hired to help with the work.
“All of the coalition partners have pledged resources,” Reese said.
What will Columbus poverty reduction office do?
His office has access to analysts, research teams and communications teams from multiple coalition partners, he said. The office doesn’t require an extensive operation on its own because it won’t run programs, Reese said.
“We’re not looking to get out there and do the hands-on work of the actual carving of the poverty,” he said. “What we’re doing is identifying the challenges and looking at it through systemic change and through policy to see how we can curve some of the things that prevent some of our people from lifting themselves from that condition.”
Determining how the office will reach its goal will begin by getting a better understanding of the factors that contribute to poverty, Reese said.
Many people in Columbus have told Reese it’s frustrating when organizations have come in to help them without asking what kind of help they need, he said.
“It’s almost like passing out turkeys on Thanksgiving, but not asking the person if they have a stove or if their gas or electricity is on to even be able to cook the turkey,” Reese said. “We make that assumption without really thinking about the other complications people have.”
The office will also work with the community to determine a foundational definition of poverty, he said, which will help them determine which groups they need to target using more than parameters from a formula.
They will be determining how best to maximize the efficiency of resources in Columbus, Reese said, and help ensure there is cohesion across the different organizations.
The office will run simulations to get a better understanding of what life is like for people living in poverty as they pay their rent, go to work or get an education. These could show what it’s like for people who have to walk or rely on public transportation.
The office will also join leaders in the coalition to begin tackling transportation problems by riding buses to see how long it would take someone who lives in south Columbus to get to a job in north Columbus.
“We need to see and understand what the people in our community deal with,” Reese said.
A ‘hands-on opportunity’
Representing his district in the Georgia House of Representatives is a part-time job, Reese said, and part of that job is to ensure his district has the resources it needs to be successful.
“What this job with the Office of Poverty Reduction is going to do is give me a more hands-on opportunity to accomplish those things for the people in the district,” Reese said.
His two positions complement each other well, he said.
This position will require some influence and a “mindset change” for some people, Reese said.
“The ability of the person in this capacity to get the right folks at the table to make those changes is critically important,” he said. “I think I have that combination.”
His passion for combating poverty comes from his childhood experiences, Reese said. As a little boy, he’d see his single mom leave home wearing a hard hat and steel-toe boots to work a dangerous job climbing into tanker trains and cleaning out residue.
“They had to have oxygen pumping down in there,” Reese said. “So she wouldn’t suffocate on the fumes in that train car. But that was the kind of job my mom was willing to sacrifice to work to make sure she took care of us.”
She made sure her family had food and clothes, even if it wasn’t always name-brand, Reese said.
He could have chosen to work at a major law firm in Atlanta, he said, but his mother was why he chose to work to combat poverty.
“I choose to use my influence to help the community,” Reese said. “And I’m appreciative of that decision.”
