Group of young professional teaming up to improve Milledgeville

MILLEDGEVILLE, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Fifty young people from across the state are teaming up to improve Milledgeville this fall. They’ll work for five months with GeorgiaForward in the Young Gamechangers program, coming up with solutions to some of the city’s persistent problems.

“We’re bringing real world solutions to real world problems,” Kris Vaughn, Executive Director of GeorgiaForward said. “We quickly realized that this would be a great place to do our program.

One third of the group lives in Baldwin County – the entire group of fifty is between the ages of 24-40. Andrew Strickland is one of the Young Gamechangers who lives in Milledgeville; he’s eager to work on finding a solution to the mostly vacant campus at Central State Hospital.

“We’ve been looking at the same thing for so long, and sometimes we get stuck in a groove and stuck in a mission and sometimes you can’t see what’s beyond the blinder,” Strickland said.

He and the group are looking to tackle other issues like education and employment with fresh ideas. Consolidation, which failed to pass in Milledgeville and Baldwin County in Nov. 2015 will likely be something the Young Gamechangers will address as well.

“I’m somebody who’s trying to raise a family in Milledgeville, has children here in Milledgeville,” Strickland said. “I want this place to be somewhere they can get a world class education and a world class job.”

The group met at Georgia Military College on Thursday, then went on a tour around the city.

“We have a woman from the CDC, we have an attorney, we have the school board chairman, we have people from non-profits, we have people from universities, we have a pastor in the group,” Vaughn said.

The Young Gamechangers will come up with three ideas to four problems in Milledgeville, and pitch them to community leaders in December. Vaughn says this is the sixth city the program has visited, and each past city implemented at least one or more of the group’s ideas.