Bloom Where You Are Planted

By Elyse Hammett, APR, vice president of marketing and communications for Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta

Elyse Hammett, APR

The cherry blossom trees are bursting with color, the jonquils lift their joyous faces for our delight and the sun shines later in the day to allow a few stolen moments to play catch with Rascal in the back yard.

It’s spring. The time of perpetual renewal and new birth. We clamor out from our winter homes to cram activities into our weekends like the Atlanta Film Festival, the Atlanta Dogwood Festival, and the opening of baseball season with our beloved Atlanta Braves. And, while we are downing a chili dog with extra slaw, we’re also inherently aware of the food insecure family just outside the festival gates, or the homeless teenager desperately trying to find a job to afford shelter, or the arts organization struggling to launch an impressive new work. It’s the juxtaposition of life in our region.

It’s this conundrum that drove me to plant new seeds and bloom here at the Community Foundation last year. As a marketing and public relations pro, we are trained to clearly set the goal, research the audiences, understand the audience personas, drive strategies to compel engagement, carry out tactics that cause them to act, and then understand the return on investment – what worked, what didn’t. The region is doing that too, whether it’s following those steps around engagement in the arts, community development, education, health, sustainability, etc., we are all working to bloom ideas and practices that make tomorrow better than today for the region we love.

So, this spring, stop and smell the roses along your way. Celebrate the vibrant community we are, and that we are striving to become. Be mindful of what has helped you to bloom, commit to digging deeper to richer earth, and how you might plant a seed that helps our communities thrive.