Partnering with Tech's Brightest
CreateATL’s partnership with Georgia Tech through Service Learning Seminars and SCoRE connects students, research, and neighborhood practice. This article explores how applied learning and urban inquiry intersect inside a working community space.
Student Work in Practice
Over multiple years, Georgia Tech students working through Service Learning Seminars (SLS) and the SCoRE program have contributed directly to understanding Adair Park and southwest Atlanta as lived, interconnected systems.
Their work has included neighborhood surveys designed to capture resident priorities, concerns, and patterns of use. These surveys informed broader conversations about access, mobility, housing pressure, and local assets in ways that purely top-down data often misses.
Students have also produced GIS maps of Atlanta’s neighborhoods and Neighborhood Planning Units, visualizing boundaries, overlaps, and disparities that shape how civic participation functions across the city. These maps became practical tools for understanding how policy, infrastructure, and lived experience intersect at the neighborhood scale.
Additional research focused on how challenges in southwest Atlanta align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Rather than treating the SDGs as abstract benchmarks, students examined how issues such as food access, transportation, environmental quality, and economic opportunity appear locally—and where gaps persist.
Learning Beyond the Classroom
In addition to desk-based research, CreateATL hosted multiple site visits as part of the internship experience. Students spent time at visible destinations across the neighborhood and surrounding areas, grounding their academic work in physical context.
These visits helped translate data into place-based understanding. Seeing how people move through neighborhoods, gather, and use shared infrastructure added dimension to the research and informed how findings were framed and presented.
Continuity Beyond a Single Semester
The impact of this work did not end when the internships concluded.
Several students who engaged with CreateATL through Georgia Tech later reappeared as part of the City of Atlanta’s Sustainability Ambassador Program, continuing lines of inquiry that began during their time at Tech. That continuity reflects how applied learning can carry forward into civic and professional pathways, particularly when students work in real environments rather than simulated ones.
For CreateATL, these experiences reinforced the value of being a site where academic inquiry, civic practice, and neighborhood life intersect—not as a pilot or showcase, but as an ongoing place of work.
Why This Matters to the Space
Hosting students has required coordination, openness, and time. It has also sharpened how the space understands its role within larger systems—educational, civic, and urban.
The projects students completed here were not exercises. They were contributions that remain part of how the neighborhood is understood and navigated today.