Assessing Implementation of Atlanta’s One Region Initiative
“Welcoming America, a nonprofit organization based in metropolitan Atlanta, has grown a membership network throughout the U.S. of nonprofit organizations and municipalities that present their communities as ‘welcoming cities’ for immigrants. In 2018, Welcoming America launched the ‘One Region Initiative’ to cultivate a concept of a ‘welcoming region’ to transcend municipal boundaries,” begins the abstract to our recent article, “Welcoming immigrant integration beyond the local level: Atlanta’s One Region Initiative,” published February 13, 2023, in the Urban Affairs Association’s Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City. Our article’s authorship team consists of Dr. Allen Hyde (Georgia Institute of Technology), Dr. Cathy Yang Liu (Georgia State University), Dr. Paul N. McDaniel (Kennesaw State University), Dr. Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez (Kennesaw State University), and Britton Holmes (Georgia State University).
As the abstract description continues, “The purpose of this paper is to examine One Region member municipalities’ implementation of the plans and recommendations set forth in 2018. We specifically examined Phase I of the pilot program, which took place between 2019 and 2021 amid the broader multiscalar context of changing geographies of immigrant settlement and immigration policy. We do so through [a community-based participatory research design and extensive] participant observation as One Region steering committee members, and applied researchers who have been engaged in immigrant integration work in the Atlanta metro area and throughout the country for over a decade. Overall, we find unevenly completed recommendations across locales (often more tied to resources than actual immigrant population share) and core areas (often tied to business friendliness and government).”
We would like to thank the Atlanta Global Research and Education Collaborative (AGREC) for providing financial support for this research project. AGREC’s mission is to build and strengthen collaborative networks of multi-institutional scholars and practitioners to support global research and education initiatives in the Greater Atlanta region. Our research collaborations have been strengthened because of their funding and will yield promising results for improved immigrant integration in Georgia.
This article is a follow-up to previous work by McDaniel and colleagues:
- “From Municipal to Regional Immigrant Integration in a Major Emerging Gateway: Creating a Community to Plan a Welcoming Metro Atlanta,” by Paul N. McDaniel, Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez, and Jordyne Krumroy, published in 2019 in Papers in Applied Geography.
- “Creating a Welcoming Metro Atlanta: A Regional Approach to Immigrant Integration,” by Paul N. McDaniel, Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez, and Anna Joo Kim, published in 2018 in Atlanta Studies.
- “Receptivity and the Welcoming Cities Movement: Advancing a Regional Immigrant Integration Policy Framework in Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia,” by Paul N. McDaniel, Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez, and Anna Joo Kim, published in 2017 in Papers in Applied Geography.
Continue reading online in Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City here.
