Arthur Blank Family Foundation

By Maria Saporta/Staff
msaporta@ajc.com

With new leadership and a fresh strategic plan, metro Atlanta's quality of life will become an even greater priority of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. The foundation, which has given away more than $130 million since it was founded in 1995, will focus on fewer programs and communities going forward. A big winner in this refocusing will be Atlanta.

"There definitely will be more dollars spent in the Atlanta region and the state than what we did before, " said Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons, of his family foundation. "It's where we live, and it's where we work."

Metro Atlanta continues to be dependent on philanthropic dollars to propel its community initiatives into reality.

For decades, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation and its related foundations were the only game in town when it came to setting a community agenda. Now there are more players on the scene, and the Blank Foundation has emerged as one of the most influential. The foundation gives away about $30 million a year.

The timing of Blank's refocus is fortuitous, said Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

"The contributions of the Blank Foundation reverberate through the city, " she said. "They are interested in quality-of-life issues. Given the awful economy we're in, having [new foundation President] Penny McPhee, Arthur and Stephanie Blank and the entire Blank Foundation engaged in improving Atlanta is a triple blessing."

While continuing efforts in the areas of education (early childhood and high school), green space and the arts, new initiatives will be more targeted. "Rather than go as broad as you can, go deeper and try to be more effective, " Blank said of the foundation's new strategy.

Its early-childhood program, called "Better Beginnings, " will focus on children from prenatal care to 3 years old. Since this is a relatively new area for the foundation, it is still developing how best to serve that community.

The high school program, called "Pathways to Success, " will target students making a transition from high school to college or career. In Atlanta, the foundation has picked Carver High School to "test some strategies and really follow these kids and track them over time, " McPhee said.

Because of family ties, the foundation also will work with high schools in Phoenix and Beaufort, S.C., for this initiative. Other than those two communities, the giving will be in Georgia.

"At one point we were giving grants in Boston, New York and California, " Blank said, adding that the new focus areas "represent the passions of the family."

Green space and the arts will build upon work the foundation has been doing for years.

"We've worked for four years in the parks and green space initiative, " McPhee said. "By any measure, it's been a success. We have preserved 1,100 acres of green space in Atlanta that didn't exist before the initiative."

But that initiative will undergo some change. It will continue to focus on areas inside I-285, but the foundation will look for ways to connect existing green space.

"We will not think of just isolated parks or green space but how it connects, " McPhee said. A perfect example is the proposed Belt Line, which seeks to create a green circle with mass transit and development around the inner city.

Blank hopes that "at some point and in some fashion, " the community will rally around a parks district to help maintain its green areas.

The arts also will continue to be a priority, with Blank continuing to drum up support for a new symphony hall for Atlanta.

"I think Symphony Center will happen, " he said. "When it will happen, I'm not sure. It's typical of most symphony centers in the country. All have taken longer than expected, but eventually it gets done."

McPhee, who was with the Miami-based Knight Foundation since 1990 before coming to Atlanta earlier this year, knows how true that is.

"In 1988 or 1989, Miami started a campaign for what was going to be a $140 million performing arts center, " she recalled. "They didn't break ground until 2003, and it will end up costing $350 million."

McPhee, a native of Louisville, Ky., believed she was destined to be a journalist. She was editor of the student newspaper at Wellesley College when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton served as president of the student body.

She moved to Miami upon graduation to work for the documentary unit of a TV station. That led to a job with public television as a cultural affairs producer, which then led her to the Knight Foundation, where she ended up as vice president and chief operating officer before accepting the Blank Foundation post.

But McPhee has spent time in Atlanta during her career. In 1976, she partnered with a Time-Life photographer to write a book, ''Martin Luther King Jr.: A Documentary: Montgomery to Memphis." It was a "real life-changing opportunity for me, " she said.

And then in 1986, she was asked to write another book, called "King Remembered." For that one, she came to Atlanta to interview many of the civil rights leaders who had worked with King.

Although she spent 30 years in Miami, where she loved its diverse and cosmopolitan population, McPhee said that after five months in town, she's finding Atlanta to be "a very exciting community" and "an unbelievably beautiful city."

She looks forward to helping make sure it stays that way.

"To me, Arthur and this foundation represent foundations of the 21st century," McPhee said. "It's much more of an entrepreneurial opportunity to work with a living donor to help determine what his legacy will be."

It appears that that legacy will be a better quality of life in Atlanta.