At this year’s Purpose Built Communities conference, Marvin Nesbitt, FCS Senior Director of Community Development, participated in a powerful workshop panel titled Community Data, Community Impact: Bolstering Early Care & Family Well-Being. Marvin shared how community-driven data collection has become the catalyst for major progress towards improving early care and learning access in Historic South Atlanta.
“For years, we’ve been able to access school performance data,” Marvin said. “But what’s always been missing is data on our youngest children, those ages 0 to 4. We knew we needed to understand the real needs of families before we could build meaningful solutions.”
Working alongside new leadership at Purpose Built Schools Atlanta, Marvin and others launched a listening and data-gathering campaign that revealed a staggering 800-seat gap in early care and learning access, before factoring in any of the proposed or planned development within the FCS footprint.
The urgency became clear: families weren’t just asking for childcare, they needed help navigating resources and accessing wraparound services to support their overall well-being. “In identifying affordable, quality early care and learning opportunities for their children, our neighbors told us they didn’t even know where to begin. That was the real turning point,” Marvin explained.
The team recognized that simply adding more early learning seats wouldn’t be enough. They needed to think bigger. Together with partners, the team has envisioned a Family Resource Center, a hub for not just childcare but also family support, guidance, and holistic wellness. It’s an idea rooted in access, opportunity, and generational flourishing.
With new data in hand and committed partners diligently working together, the momentum is building. New resources are being unlocked, and FCS is just getting started. They’ve already developed a cradle-to-career framework with some initial strategies and are hiring a new Director of Education to keep the work moving forward.
“We’re not doing this alone,” Marvin said. “It’s a group project. Atlanta’s Mayor, Andre Dickens, often says Atlanta is a group project. We’ve made access to affordable and quality early care a group project in our neighborhood, too.”
With collaboration from Purpose Built Schools Atlanta, community groups, and key institutions like Morehouse School of Medicine, FCS is building an early learning movement from the ground up, starting with the voices of the families who live there.
Stay tuned as FCS rolls out its early learning campaign to improve access, enrollment, and resource navigation for families in Historic South Atlanta and beyond. This is the power of data, community, and shared vision in action.
