Jane Fonda headlines upcoming GCAPP fundraiser in Atlanta

ATLANTA - Actress and activist Jane Fonda will join a few of her celebrity friends at the Atlanta History Center next week, raising money for her nonprofit, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential. 

Fonda — along with comedians Wanda Sykes and Heather McMahan and Grammy-winning duo the Indigo Girls — will headline GCAPP’s EmPower Party 2023 on Thursday, Nov. 16. The annual event is a fundraiser for the organization, which was founded by Fonda back in 1995.

"I was married to Ted Turner, living in Atlanta, and I found out that Georgia had the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the whole country," Fonda explains. 

That statistic — along with the Oscar winner’s own childhood experiences — inspired the creation of a nonprofit dedicated to helping teens make healthy choices. 

"My own adolescence was fraught. I didn’t have a mother, and my dad was busy off, and I just didn’t … it was not good. I didn’t know that ‘no’ was a complete sentence. I didn’t understand how to tell if you were in a real relationship or not. It was awful. And so, I didn’t want other kids to go through that, and I wanted to see to what extent we could work with young people to make it easier for them," says Fonda.

In the nearly 30 years since GCAPP’s creation, Fonda says teen birth rates have dropped more than 70% — and today, the organization impacts more than 70,000 young people each year through its various programs. 

"GCAPP is the one organization statewide in Georgia that has remained focused on exclusively on adolescence. So, we’re kind of the go-to organization, and we’re very proud of that. And we’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone on. We now work with boys and girls. We work with parents as well as kids," she says.

For more information on next week’s EmPower Party 2023, click here. And click the video player in this article to hear more from the legendary Jane Fonda.