New family justice center in Macon wants to be one-stop shop for abuse victims
A family justice center in downtown Macon, which has been heralded and backed by multiple county departments and non-profit organizations, continues to wait for its launch as its previous start date in late 2025 has come and gone.
The partners that will work with the family justice center all operate around criminal justice, healthcare and social services.
The Georgia Legal Services Program, for example, provides free legal counsel to indigent individuals at one of its regional offices in downtown Macon. While that office is relatively close to the other services that will be under One Safe Places’ umbrella, the purpose of the initiative is to bring them even closer.
“The idea of a family justice center puts all those resources and services under one roof. If transportation’s a barrier, if childcare’s a barrier, it eliminates some of those because you’ve just got to go to one place and get what you need,” One Safe Place Director Sarah Schank said. “When you go to that one place, you’ve got a person who’s there to support you and help coordinate all those services for you.”
One Safe Place is a subsidiary of the Crisis Line and Safe House of Central Georgia, which provides shelter, legal counsel and other tools to victims of sexual assault and domestic violence.
Crisis Line offers a 24-hour hotline that connects its callers to resources in the community over the phone. The physical building for One Safe Place, when complete, will extend that service by providing those in need with access to each service’s office.
One Safe Place is slated to be the third of its kind in the state, with the other two located in Waycross and Cobb County. Fulton County, Schank said, is in the beginning stages of planning its own family justice center.
All told, the project will house 18 agencies in a 30,000 square foot, century-old building in downtown Macon, which was purchased in June 2024. The building’s renovation at 1120 Second Street, Schank said, is the source of the delay in launching the initiative, and “at least a phase” of the construction is expected to open in the next 12 to 18 months.
The One Safe Place initiative, Schank said, hopes to open a pilot office in fall 2026 before folding it into the full office space when it is ready.
“It’s really just an opportunity on a much smaller scale to test run, as well as go ahead and start serving folks who need this type of support,” she said.
The idea was born in 2020, when the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, a state agency, offered a grant to communities that wanted to establish the first family justice centers in the state.
Schank said another motivation came in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she said agencies “realized, ‘We can do things differently and our collective worlds won’t end in terms of how we work.’”
Sen. Raphael Warnock also helped secure congressional appropriations for the project through the Department of Justice, Schank said. The $1.2 million grant was awarded in August 2023.