Ideas Festival Emory

Common Good Atlanta (CGA) began in 2008, with one Ph.D. student, Sarah Higinbotham, who felt called to volunteer to teach at a prison as a response to her uncle's incarceration. After writing fourteen Georgia prisons, Phillips State Prison finally accepted her offer to teach a course. That semester, Sarah provided all the books for the course on world literature. The class filled in twenty minutes, with ninety incarcerated men on the waiting list.
 
In 2010, after two years of teaching by herself, her graduate school friend Bill Taft joined the work. Together, they co-direct Common Good Atlanta, which has grown to more than sixty faculty members teaching over thirty-five courses across four prisons.