We envision a place from which we all acknowledge our vulnerabilities and work towards a more just and equitable world.

Vulnerable Communities Initiative, Inc. (VCI) is a newly created Georgia Nonprofit Corporation with a mission of listening to, learning from, working with, and serving vulnerable communities. Its focus is on communities with historical racial, economic, and ethnic vulnerability and simultaneously with vulnerability to multiple climate change effects, including inland flooding, sea level rise, and storm surge.

We have the capacity for hopes and dreams, for joy and celebration, for creativity and service. We have the capacity to be in community, to serve one another in community, and to lean on the shoulders of others. We also have the tendency to place ourselves at the center of the universe and view all other persons and things as subservient. Alone among all living species, we have the capacity to engage in random acts of violence. The vulnerability of the human condition is manifest in humanity’s ambivalence toward property and the environment. The American ethos is dominated by a myopic anthropocentric world view in which concepts of environmental stewardship, dignity, and integrity are marginalized at best. Far too often the prevailing ethic is that property, land, and the entire ecosystem is to be dominated, used, and consumed by humanity. We use and abuse the physical world for our own purposes, either ignorant of or not caring about the negative consequences to the environment, to ourselves, and to future generations. We lose sight of the fact that humanity is but part of the environment, existing in community with the environment in the deepest sense of community. Every parcel of vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated property is a quintessential example of the human condition and property conditions. It is a symbol of our tendency to use it, abuse it, and discard it.

It is about property, but not just property. It is about housing, but not just housing. It is about life together in a community and as a community. It is about all of us as broken, fragile individuals, with histories of racism and inequalities, learning to be in community together and in harmony with a changing environment. From the steps taken in the last generation, many lessons have been learned about legal and policy systems. Systems have been redesigned and reformed. New tools have been created and new programs and alliances have emerged. The steps taken in all of this growth and change are but a foundation for the next steps to be taken.

Next Steps, Tackling Vacancy and Abandonment: Strategies and Impacts After the Great Recession (2021)