Atlanta is the city that made the early Developing Country Youth Leaders conferences possible. Emory University hosted the first week in 2017. Georgia Tech hosted the next intensive week in July 2019. Kectil asked youth leaders to come here for that history, those air routes, and those campuses.
Atlanta sits in the southeastern United States as the capital of Georgia. It is a center of civil rights led by Martin Luther King, Jr., an Atlanta resident who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. Coretta Scott King created The King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in 1968. A National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened in 2014. Those institutions gave the conferences a place to talk about justice without treating it as a slogan.
Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport has long been among the world’s busiest, with routes from Africa, Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East — one practical reason an international youth conference could meet here. The city is also home to Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, CNN, UPS, and large offices of AT&T and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. During the 2019 week, colleagues toured the AT&T Drive Studio and Coca-Cola’s world headquarters.
Atlanta’s universities — Georgia Tech, Emory, Spelman, Morehouse, and Clark Atlanta — gave the gatherings classrooms, stages, and a tradition of hospitality. The people of Atlanta are known for welcoming visitors. That southern welcome, now part of a diverse modern city, is still the reason these pages live under Impact: the weeks happened here, then the work went home.