Endorsed by the advisory board's Executive Committee, the recommendations call for TAP to focus on children and families through a new organizational structure. Instead of operating 20 separate cluster offices, TAP staff, corporate and academic partners, and neighborhood volunteers will designate several community collaboration centers that supersede current cluster geographic boundaries.
When TAP was announced in 1991, original plans called for it to operate for five years. TAP now will enter Phase II in October 1996. "It's official," said TAP Program Director Jane Smith of the advisory board's decision to accept the recommendations. "We can now go to the planning process."
"When TAP was founded, The Carter Center took a risk in establishing an innovative program to help disenfranchised citizens solve some of their own problems," said former President Jimmy Carter. "Some of the initial expectations for alleviating serious social ills within five years were unrealistic. But we have made significant progress. The Atlanta Project was created not to be another service provider, but to bring existing groups together to address complex problems."
The recommendations to restructure TAP are the result of six months of work involving the TAP team and hundreds of community residents and leaders. "It is clear that we will need to make some changes, but one message we have heard loud and clear from numerous people involved with TAP is that the project must go on," Carter said. "And indeed it will."