Tanesha Door said she doesn’t know where she would be today without the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative and its case managers helping her to get her life back on track.
Door, an Atlanta-native and Grady Hospital baby, moved back to Atlanta in 2018 with her infant son less than a year after leaving the Navy and divorcing her ex-husband. But the family support she expected to come home to never materialized. Within 12 months, she was homeless and had to send her son to live with his father in Montana.
“I just fell into a great depression after that,” she recalled.
She was introduced to PAD in 2021 when she was found sleeping on a roof in Castleberry Hill by the building’s owner, who called the Atlanta Police Department.
“Officer Jackson came out, and he looked at me, and he just automatically knew that it was not a situation where he would take me to jail,” Door said. “So he ended up calling 311, and that’s how I got in contact with PAD.”
Instead of arresting her and charging her with criminal trespass, the officer brought her to PAD’s downtown office, where she began her journey to get her life back on track. This was before Atlanta opened its Center for Diversion and Services downtown in January 2025 to serve as a hub where officers can bring people instead of booking them into jail.
Since the end of March, however, people diverted through the center have not been able to connect with PAD’s case managers due to an ongoing dispute over the agency’s contract. PAD operated at the center for the first three months of the year without a contract, but that ended after negotiations with the city of Atlanta stalled.
At a Thursday meeting of the Justice Policy Board, the body responsible for governing the diversion center, its chairman, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, acknowledged that the contract renewal process should have begun earlier and that moving forward, the board would begin discussion months before the contract expires.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in the room who thinks we wouldn’t be better off if PAD rejoined the fold,” McBurney said.
At the core of the dispute are proposed changes made to the contract by the city that PAD’s executive director, Moki Macias, has said would basically gut the organization’s role in the diversion center.
PAD and other local nonprofits are inaugural partners in the center, which is a joint venture between Atlanta, Fulton County and Grady Health System, with the city and the county splitting the bill.
The changes included removing PAD leaders from the planning and implementation of new protocols at the Center, requiring PAD to limit its case management services to 12 months, and preventing PADs legal navigation team from holding a monthly working group with participants to help resolve any open cases.
“If PAD signed the contract with the Proposed Scope it would prevent PAD from fulfilling our responsibilities under the [Inter-Governmental Agreement], thereby putting both parties at risk of violating it,” Macias said in a March letter to officials days after the agency ceased operations at the Center.
By the end of the two-hour meeting, however, only one of the changes had been resolved. Under the revised proposal, PAD’s case management services for people referred from the diversion center could extend past 12 months. For the time being, however, the center will remain without PAD until an agreement can be reached on the full contract.
During her first two weeks as a PAD client, Door said she was staying in a hotel until the agency was able to find her a bed in a transitional housing facility for women.
“Why I appreciate PAD so much is because it’s not only those kind souls that’s going to be gentle and listen, but they also have those personalities, that are still kind and loving, but kind of pushes you like, hey, this is your next step you must take,” Door said.
With PAD’s support, she began getting mental healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Throughout her years as a PAD client, Door said staff not only pushed her to do better, they also stuck with her when she wasn’t making the best choices. She credits that support with the safety and stability she is able to provide for her daughters now.
Near the end of the meeting, board member Maxwell Ruppersburg, director of the office of supportive housing at the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, reminded McBurney that the board had already voted to extend PAD’s original contract to relieve the pressure while negotiations took place.
“I’m not sure why we’re rewriting what this body voted on with a quorum and a supermajority, and going back to changes that we established were a problem,” Ruppersburg said.
Regardless of the board’s vote, the contract requires the approval of the City Council and Fulton County Board of Commissioners, which are responsible for the board’s budget and funding the diversion center. Since Atlanta has not agreed to extending the original contract, the negotiations remain at an impasse.
