Georgia Power’s $10,000 Dome Fills a Tifton Youth Center Yard

Citizens of Georgia Power crews installed a climbing dome and three benches at the Anthony Bateman Youth Center on January 19, 2026, paid for by a $10,000 Georgia Power grant. The backyard had sat without play gear for more than three years after the building opened.

The same utility had already funded a larger playground at Haire Park, a few blocks of South Tifton away. The dome is the photo from Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The pattern behind it is older, and wider, than one Monday morning with wrenches.

Volunteers Bolted a Climbing Dome Into the Backyard

Members of the nonprofit Citizens of Georgia Power spent the morning of January 19, and hours the week before, assembling the climbing dome and setting three benches in the green space behind the center at 511 17th Street West. Richard Yarbrough and Stuart Jones were among the crew securing posts for the dome.

When I started working in town, I noticed there was not playground equipment here. I know the Anthony Bateman Youth Center knew and they haven’t had time to get to that yet, but we saw an opportunity where we could invest back into the community.

Barbara Grogan, area manager for external affairs, Georgia Power

Grogan’s employee and retiree volunteer chapters did the labor. The grant came from the company those chapters serve. That split (money from Georgia Power, hands from Citizens) is how a lot of these backyard jobs get done across the state, and it is why the Tifton install looks like a local gift when it is also a chapter project.

Dr. Tonja Tift, the youth center’s director, watched children clock the work while the dome was still in pieces. “When the kids first saw them last week, starting to assemble the dome, they were just all pointing, they knew something was happening, and with the benches they knew something was up,” Tift said. “It’s just going to be so amazing whenever they come tomorrow and see that it’s done.”

The 2022 Center Opened Without Playground Gear

The City of Tifton cut the ribbon on October 27, 2022. Construction was paid for by a $750,000 award through Georgia’s Community Development Block Grant program, plus city SPLOST money, the Tift County Board of Education, and local donations. The federal-to-state grant is the same pipeline rural towns still use for community buildings. What it bought in Tifton was a building, not a playground.

SOUTH TIFTON’S BUILDING CLOCK

1. August 3, 2019: Coach Anthony Bateman dies while at a basketball tournament in Tifton.
2. November 2020: The city is awarded the $750,000 CDBG for a youth center in the Matt Wilson Elementary neighborhood, on land donated by the school board.
3. October 27, 2022: Ribbon cutting at 511 17th Street West. Tift becomes executive director.
4. September 8, 2025: Tift County commissioners accept a $30,000 Georgia Power grant for Haire Park.
5. November 6, 2025: Haire Park’s new playground opens to the public.
6. January 19, 2026: Citizens of Georgia Power install the climbing dome and three benches behind the youth center.

From the ribbon to the dome is more than three years (three years, two months, and 23 days). Grogan said the center knew the yard was empty and had not gotten to it. The city’s own description of the building still reads like an indoor program: a multipurpose room, computer lab and craft room, plus an adult learning room and a warming kitchen. No swings. No climber. No benches on the grass.

THE CENTER’S INDOOR ROOMS

• Multipurpose room: The main hall for programs, parties, and indoor gatherings.
• Adult learning room: Daytime space used while students are in school.
• Warming kitchen: Support space for meals and events, not a full commercial line.
• Computer lab: Machines for homework, Open Campus days, and basic skills.
• Craft room: Hands-on art and making, the indoor cousin of the garden Tift wants outside.

Tift, a retired educator, has kept the doors open during school breaks with Open Campus days for reading, computers, games, and art. The scholarship the center awards to Tift County High seniors is $1,000. The building works. The yard, until January, did not.

$30,000 Went to Haire Park First

Grogan tied the youth-center job to Haire Park in the same conversation. Tift County commissioners accepted a $30,000 Georgia Power grant at their September 8, 2025 meeting to buy new playground equipment for that South Tifton park. County manager Jim Carter told the board the quote from supplier Playground Boss was $27,384 for equipment and supplies. Georgia Power recommended the contractor. County Public Works was to install it, along with two benches, rubber mulch, a weed barrier, and plastic landscape timbers.

TWO TIFTON PLAY SPENDS

Together the two grants put $40,000 of Georgia Power money into South Tifton play between September 2025 and January 2026. The delivery method changed. Haire Park ran through the county and a vendor. The youth center ran through the volunteer chapter with wrenches on MLK Day.

Haire Park had been in Georgia Power’s South Tifton file since 2023, when the company hosted a community meeting on a park project with the city and the county. Toni Reid, then the Tifton area manager, said the neighborhood needed a park where children could play. Mayor Julie Smith talked about south-side redevelopment, the new youth center, and new housing at Nine Oaks Apartments. Tift was at that meeting as executive director of the Tifton Urban Redevelopment Agency. Two years later she was accepting a dome in the youth-center yard as the center’s director. The names overlap because the geography does.

Tyler Riddle, the District 5 commissioner and TURA chair, told the Haire Park crowd the site had been an empty lot in South Tifton, a space without purpose. The youth-center backyard was a smaller version of the same problem: a finished building facing grass with nothing on it.

How Georgia Power Funds Playgrounds Across Georgia

Citizens of Georgia Power is the company’s volunteer corps of employees, retirees, and spouses. The Georgia Power Foundation, a separate legal entity, backs chapter “legacy projects,” the hands-on builds that put crews on site. Rita Breen, vice president of the Foundation, wrote on July 20, 2026 that Georgia Power, the Foundation, and employees invested $33.7 million in communities statewide the year before, supporting more than 1,000 organizations and logging more than 88,000 volunteer hours. The company serves 155 of Georgia’s 159 counties. The 1927 line from first president Preston Arkwright, “A Citizen Wherever We Serve,” is still the motto on the wall.

GEORGIA POWER’S 2025 COMMUNITY SPEND

• $33.7 million: Combined 2025 giving by the company, the Foundation, and employees, per Breen.
• 1,000-plus groups: Organizations those dollars reached across the state.
• 88,000-plus hours: Volunteer time logged in hometowns, including chapter builds.
• 155 of 159 counties: The company’s service footprint, which is also its volunteer map.

Playgrounds are a recurring product of that machine. In May 2025 the Atlanta Falcons Youth Fund and Georgia Power put up a $400,000 Georgia Playspace Refresh Fund with KABOOM!, offering communities grants of up to $25,000 to repair or refresh existing play structures. Eligible work included surfacing, shade, equipment repairs, and even a community garden. Tifton’s youth-center grant sits under that cap and did not run through KABOOM!. It was a local chapter install on a $10,000 company grant, the smaller, faster version of the same idea: put play equipment where a grown-up has noticed there is none.

That is the piece a single MLK Day photo does not carry. A climbing dome in Tifton is also how Georgia Power shows up in parks, school yards, and nonprofit lots from Waynesboro-style legacy builds to the Falcons-backed refresh fund. South Tifton got two hits in one season because Grogan, TURA, and the county already had Haire Park in motion, and because the youth-center yard was still bare when she started working in town.

Warmer Weather Was the Garden’s Clock

The $10,000 was not only steel. Tift said the grant would also fund a raised garden, set against the storage building and facing the center, so children would have something to do outside besides climb. She planned lessons with local gardening experts. The Tift County High School chapter of the Future Farmers of America was expected to help build the bed once the weather warmed.

January 19 is not warm in Tift County. Spring is. By the calendar Tift set that morning, FFA students would have had months of workable weather in 2026. The climbing dome is the finished object. The garden is still the part of the grant that has to become a class.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The hardware: The climbing dome and three benches were installed on January 19, 2026, by Citizens of Georgia Power.
• The budget: Georgia Power’s grant was $10,000, covering the play gear and, Tift said, the raised bed.
• The plan: Tift named the Tift County High FFA chapter as the build crew and local gardeners as the teachers.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The bed itself: No city notice or local report after the January install shows the raised garden standing.
• The lesson slate: No public calendar lists the gardening classes Tift described.
• The split: How much of the $10,000 was meant for soil, lumber, and plants versus the dome and benches has not been itemized in public.

If the FFA chapter does build it, the youth center picks up an agriculture lesson it could not run in the computer lab. Tift County High’s FFA already runs floral work, contests, and student fundraisers out of One Blue Devil Way. A bed against a storage wall is a small plot. It is also the only piece of the grant that turns a play structure into a class the coach the building is named for would have recognized as teaching.

Coach Bateman’s Name Is on the Door

Anthony Bateman spent more than 20 years in Tift County Schools as an administrative assistant and an assistant coach in football, basketball, and track. He was on staffs that won three state basketball titles, in 1996, 2014, and 2017. He had no biological children. People who worked with him called the students his. He died on August 3, 2019, while at a basketball tournament in Tifton. Tift County High opened that Monday with counselors on standby.

City council put his name on the youth center on February 21, 2022, while the building was still going up. Freda Bateman, his wife, told council the family would cherish the honor. Tift has said she knew him all her life and wanted the center to do for children what he had done in the hallways. In 2023 the Tifton Council for the Arts brought Athens artist Broderick Flanigan in to paint a mural of Bateman on the building, with student Antron Johnson helping; Johnson later received the center’s $1,000 namesake scholarship.

The original idea for a youth building on that South Tifton ground goes back to 2018, when council talked about replacing Captains Pointe Trailer Park, across from Matt Wilson Elementary, with something the next generation could use. The CDBG arrived in 2020. Harper & Company Builders took the job after bids came in over budget. The ribbon was 2022. The mural was 2023. Haire Park’s playground was 2025. The dome was 2026. Each step filled a gap the last one left.

Tift’s phone at the center is 229-391-3868. The rooms inside still do the work the CDBG paid for. The climbing dome is what a utility manager saw from the street and decided to fix. The benches give parents a place to sit while that happens. Whether the raised bed gets built is the leftover question from the morning Yarbrough and Jones tightened the last post, and it is the part of the $10,000 that does not show up in a photograph of a geodesic climber.