Some 2,000 people came to downtown Dalton on the Monday before Thanksgiving last year for the third Gratefull community lunch.
“It was really amazing,” said Allyson Coker, executive director of Believe Greater Dalton, which sponsors Gratefull. “It gets bigger ever year, and we are always looking for ways to make it grow even larger.”
Hamilton Street was closed and a large table was placed in front of the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce headquarters at 100 S. Hamilton St. for people to sit at and dine, and two other tables were set up where volunteers served food. People sat at the table and enjoyed a meal complete with turkey and dressing, tamales, corn on the cob and many other foods as well as a great deal of fellowship.
At some point, will organizers have to expand the hours the event serves food or expand the size of the table?
“We are definitely at the point where we are thinking about those things,” Coker said. “Can we extend the (table) on either side past Crawford and Gordon Streets? The concept of the one table is what Gratefull is built on. But we are definitely thinking about how we can accommodate more people and make the line move quicker.”
Believe Greater Dalton is a Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce-led effort that focuses on six strategic areas to improve the community: educational outcomes, housing, entrepreneurship, economic development, downtown development and community pride.
The effort started in 2018, and 2023 was the first year of its second five-year plan. Coker said Believe Greater Dalton had a lot of successes in 2023.
The group did an update of the 2016-17 community survey that was the impetus for starting Believe Greater Dalton.
“We can go back and see significant improvement in that time, especially (ratings of) quality of restaurants and dining as well as perceptions of the community’s beauty, esthetics and cleanliness,” she said. “Those are two where we really saw some significant improvement, and that is an important part of the community pride part of our strategy.”
She said the survey used a “net promoter score” question that asked people how likely they are to recommend Dalton and Whitfield County as a place to live.
“There was a significant improvement in that score among our youth,” she said. “We did not see a large improvement among adults.”
Believe Greater Dalton also did an update on its 2018 housing study, which Coker unveiled recently at a Dalton City Council meeting.
The 2018 housing study found the housing stock in Whitfield County was aging. Just 18% of the county’s housing stock was built in the 21st century. Statewide, the average was 31%. That study found Whitfield County had an inadequate amount of housing at all levels of the market.
“Since then, we’ve had a lot of multifamily housing development,” Coker said. “We’ve doubled our permitting in the last five years.”
But she said the county still needs more housing, with two out of every three units being more than 40 years old.
Coker said most of the new housing development has been mid-range housing.
“We are now focusing on low-income and workforce housing and also on the upper end,” Coker said.
Coker said that at the end of the 2022-23 school year, Believe Greater Dalton bought “student success kits” for each rising first- and second-grader in Dalton Public Schools and Whitfield County Schools.
“These were bags that had four bilingual books, a journal with activities for kids, and it had a great parent resource, basically a spiral-bound notebook that had bilingual information for them on milestones their children should be reaching, questions they should be asking during parent-teacher conferences, things like that. We are really trying to impact our youngest learners. We want to help our school systems and help our students be reading at grade level in third grade.”
Believe Greater Dalton also handed out books to children at Gratefull and bought books for children for Sharing is Caring, the Salvation Army-led effort to get Christmas gifts for children in need.