A Forever Home

A Forever Home: The legacy of Carrie Steele-Pitts and her home for Atlanta orphans

Photo: Myrissa Williams

By Myrissa Williams

In the 1880s, it was not unusual for an orphaned child to grow up along a railroad track. At the time, death rates were high, parents were dying from diseases, and kids were left to work out West on “orphan trains.”

“There were six major railroad stations during that time, one originally in Decatur,” Lavizzo said.

This was the norm for many kids in the 1800s and it took one railroad worker, Carrie Steele, to see these conditions and decide to take the children under her wing and raise them.

Her dream expanded and she sold her house and raised money to buy a shelter for her special family. Piece by piece and brick by brick, the orphans helped renovate their new home.

Today, the Carrie Steele-Pitts organization is 131 years old. Over the years, the home has serviced 27,000 youth and averages 150 youth each year.

Originally an orphanage, the Carrie-Steele Pitts home grew into a boarding school, in the 1930s and 1940s, where parents paid money for their children to live while they worked. During this time, the United States was going through the Great Depression and, shortly afterwards, World War II.

By the 1950s Pitts had became sick and her daughter took over as director. And the transition began from a building where all the kids stayed in one building to a non-coed cottage set up in 1964.

Then came Ms. Allison Ollivette, a Booker T. Washington, Spelman, and Atlanta University alumnae, who became director in 1976 and retired in 2007. The current director is Ms. Evelyn Lavizzo who has been with the home for 31 years and proudly represents the organization with pride.

The current home has five buildings. Four are living quarters and one is a classroom for the younger children who go to school on campus.

The home serves youth ages 13-24 who have experienced either trauma, money issues and more in their original household. “We support them all,” Lavizzo said.

A few of the opportunities given to these kids is they are shown how to manage money, get a job, make a resume, learn how to start a relationship with the opposite sex, shown how to work for everything they have and be an active citizen to society.

They are supported all the way through college and some even go to the military and serve. The majority of the kids are African-American, and the other races vary.

The kids are fully equipped with people who love them and treat them as if they are their own and the goal of the organization is to build the kids up so that they can accomplish their individual goals, without focusing on the negative parts of their lives.

“We are making sure they are becoming who they want to be, we focus on their spark,” Lavizzo said. ”We work in the children’s home, they don’t work where we live.”

Each kid is supervised on a case by case basis. However, if they are older and in college they are allowed to stay on the college campus, get a car or an internship and begin their individual lives outside of the home.

The younger kids are in extracurricular activities or they enjoy their time at the newly built life center, swimming, using the gym, using the computer lab or simply attending Wednesday or Sunday religious services.

Every day is an opportunity for each child to get one step closer to their dreams.

“ God, love, and respect,” Lavizzo said, are three words that describe the home/

Without these three things, Lavizzo said, one cannot properly raise a child.

Myrissa Williams, a journalism major and U.S. Army enlistee at Georgia State University, is a product of the system. A Tennessee native, she has been in the system since she was born in 96’but found out that she was adopted on March 26, 2011 after the loss of her mother.