Augusta Residents Will Vote on Community Priorities at Sept. 12 Sankofa Assembly

AUGUSTA, Ga. Augusta residents are being invited to do more than attend another public meeting.

At the Sankofa Community Issues Assembly on Saturday, September 12, participants will discuss major local concerns and then vote on which issues should become priorities for future organizing and community action.

The free event is being hosted by Sustainable Georgia Futures, a Georgia nonprofit focused on environmental justice, economic opportunity and community leadership. WJBF NewsChannel 6 reported that the Augusta gathering will focus on six areas: affordable housing, environmental justice, community resources, youth opportunities, safety and economic equality.

The assembly runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Trinity CME Church's Family Life Center on Glenn Hills Drive. Augusta-Richmond County records list Trinity CME Church at 2930 Glenn Hills Drive, Augusta, GA 30906. The event is free, walk-ins are welcome, and breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Residents will help decide what comes next

The structure is what makes the meeting more consequential than a typical listening session.

Participants will discuss local concerns and vote on the priorities they believe deserve the most attention. Sustainable Georgia Futures says its Sankofa assemblies are designed to identify one or two issues that are both deeply and widely felt in a community, then develop county leadership and research-action teams around those issues.

WJBF reported that organizer Toccara Reese said the organization plans to continue campaigning around whichever concerns receive the strongest support from participants.

The six topics scheduled for discussion are:

• affordable housing
• environmental justice
• community resources
• youth opportunities
• safety
• economic equality

Those categories are broad by design. What they mean in practice will depend heavily on what Augusta residents bring into the room.

Augusta is part of a larger Georgia strategy

The September 12 gathering is not an isolated Augusta event.

Sustainable Georgia Futures says its broader Sankofa Community Issue Assembly strategy is designed to build environmental and climate-justice leadership teams in 11 Georgia counties, including Richmond County.

The other targeted counties are Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Gwinnett, Cobb, Bibb, Chatham, Dougherty, Muscogee and Lowndes.

That puts Augusta inside a statewide organizing model stretching from metro Atlanta to Macon, Savannah, Albany, Columbus and Valdosta.

For ALL-N-GEORGIA, that statewide footprint is an important part of the story. The same process being used in Richmond County is intended to create leadership structures in several of Georgia's major population centers and regional hubs.

What Sustainable Georgia Futures does

Sustainable Georgia Futures describes itself as a nonprofit working to create pathways into the green economy for Black and other historically excluded communities while also developing local leadership around climate and environmental issues.

Its programs include climate-justice education meetings, workforce training, organizing, workshops and community issue assemblies.

The organization says its work is centered on expanding participation in economic and environmental decisions that can shape neighborhoods and communities for years.

That mission is especially relevant to the Augusta event because the outcome is supposed to come from participants themselves rather than from a predetermined local campaign topic.

What Augusta residents should know

Residents who attend should expect discussion followed by voting on the community priorities participants believe deserve the most attention.

The Georgia inside the story

A community meeting may look small compared with a major development announcement or statewide policy fight.

But this one is interesting because of what happens after the meeting.

Sustainable Georgia Futures is attempting to repeat the same resident-priority process across multiple parts of Georgia, then build local leadership teams around the issues each community identifies for itself. Richmond County is one of the counties explicitly included in that plan.

That gives Augusta residents an opportunity to influence not only the conversation inside the room on September 12, but potentially the direction of a longer local campaign.

And it gives Georgia something worth watching: whether a statewide organization can build a common civic-engagement framework while still allowing Augusta to decide what matters to Augusta.

What happens next

The most important result will be the vote.

Once participants identify the strongest priorities, Sustainable Georgia Futures says its model calls for forming leadership and research-action teams around the selected issues. WJBF reports that organizers also intend to campaign around the concerns receiving the most community support.

That means the September 12 gathering is better understood as a starting point than a one-day event.

The next question will be which issues Augusta residents choose, and what action follows once those priorities are known.