Volunteers stepped up to canvass neighborhoods, staff booths, and ask everyone what they loved about “T-Up” and what change they wanted to see there. She brought the omnipresent chalkboard into existence and towed it to events all over town. Jennifer Greathouse Rogers, a lifelong Thomaston resident who coordinated her town’s venture into Community Heart & Soul, organized an extensive listening tour. Neal thought, “Why not bring it to Thomaston? See what happens?”Ĭreated by Vermont-based nonprofit Community Heart & Soul, its namesake two-year program is designed to help places, particularly economically struggling ones like Thomaston, start making progress. In 2018, Neal Trice, the CEO of the local electric cooperative, Upson EMC, heard that Georgia EMC was promoting something called Community Heart & Soul. One resident described Thomaston as mired in “a mill-less depression.” Two decades later the community was still shaking off the aftermath. “A lot of people struggled and a lot of people left,” he says. Luke Haney, a 21-year-old who works at the local newspaper, remembers how his grandparents, who’d worked in the mills their entire life, were suddenly forced to retire. Just like that 5,000 jobs disappeared-a blow for a town of 9,000 about 65 miles south of Atlanta. Thomaston lost its textile mills in 2000. “I how it feels like home,” someone wrote. “What are your hopes and concerns? What are your ideas for the future?” Residents of all ages and ethnicities would sidle up and scrawl their answers. Every parade, every block party, every public event, there was the chalkboard asking thought-provoking questions.

For two years, that chalkboard, or some version of it, traveled everywhere in Thomaston and its surrounding Upson County, a community of 27,000 about an hour and a half south of Atlanta.

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