I came to Atlanta for college in the very late nineties with no particular plan beyond showing up. And as soon as we hit the city limits on 85 on move-in day, I felt right at home.
What I felt back then was a kind of permission that I hadn't felt anywhere else. Permission to be exactly who I was, to want things, and to build something that hadn't been built before. Far from home at eighteen years old, it was the first time in my life I didn't feel like an outlier. I felt like I'd finally found where I was meant to be.
After college, my career took me to Los Angeles, back to Texas, and eventually to Shanghai for a short while. I moved through cities known for their arts scenes and culture, and I learned a lot in each of them. But I never stopped thinking about Atlanta, and when I moved back nearly 10 years ago, the city and I picked right up where we left off.
What I've come to understand since returning is that what I felt at eighteen wasn't just the glow of newness. It was Atlanta telling the truth about itself.
And lately, the world has been listening.
The Numbers Behind the Feeling
While coastal cities dominated the creative economy conversation for a long time, Atlanta has rightfully earned its way into those ranks over the past 30 years. Georgia's creative industries employ an estimated 200,000 people statewide, generating $62.5 billion in total economic impact, a figure that places Georgia's creative sector among the most powerful in the country.
Just take the film economy, for example. Georgia now has more than 4.1 million square feet of soundstage space, placing it second nationwide, surpassed only by California. And even though production in the state has dropped since 2022, Georgia's 30% tax credit on film and TV production costs has been used to subsidize hundreds of productions, including Marvel movies like Black Panther and shows like Stranger Things and The Walking Dead, transforming Atlanta into a major production hub competing not only with California and New York, but with the U.K. and Canada as well.
And then there's entrepreneurship. Atlanta was named the top city to start a business in 2024 by Home Bay, cited for low operating costs, a large talent pool, and a strong community of Black entrepreneurs. This followed LinkedIn ranking metro Atlanta the best place to start a business two years in a row.
Atlanta also has more Black-owned businesses per capita than any other city in the country which is what happens when HBCUs like those of the Atlanta University Center (AUC) produce generations of graduates who reinvest in the community they were shaped by. "We are a city of entrepreneurs, innovators, incubators and thinkers who are helping us create a city of opportunity for all,” Mayor Andre Dickens said in his 2024 press release after being named top of Home Bay’s list. “Businesses are started here because they know the power of our talent pool, the strength of our economy and the possibility of growth."
And the mayor's words are far more than rhetoric. Atlanta is full of natives and transplants who chose this city and built something real here. Over the past year, I've documented dozens of them for The Purpose Post. What follows are just three.
The Poet Whose Closed Doors Led to Open Roads
Amena Brown came to Atlanta at eighteen as a Spelman freshman with plans to become a preacher. But a single question from a mentor's husband changed her trajectory entirely: "If you were so wealthy that you did not have to go to college to get a job, would you still go to college?"
"Absolutely," she told him. "So that I could write about it."
Before she could think of what she should say, she just said it. She changed her major within two months, graduated, got rejected from every MFA program she applied to, and built a twenty-year poetry career anyway. Atlanta's spoken word scene, campus ministry networks, and stages gave her a place to become someone worth booking before the rest of the world knew her name. Today she commands five-figure speaking fees, spent five years the chapter host for CreativeMornings Atlanta, and is the author of her forthcoming book, Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl. Atlanta didn't just hold space for Amena, it launched her.
The Cold-Pressed Juice Founder Whose Rawest Ingredient Is Rising to Every Occasion
Tiffany Ellis became the first in her family to leave Miami for college, navigated motherhood as a freshman, lost her mother during her junior year, and still finished on time. She entered the corporate world and built programs for Fortune 500 companies, eventually landing at Amazon, and found the stability her childhood never had. But there was a cost. "Even in corporate, while people got the realist version of what was accepted of me,” she shared with me, “you didn't get the fullness of who I was because the environments didn't allow me to bring that to you."
Soon after, an unexpected career pivot turned her part-time side hustle, born out of family necessity, into her full-time calling. Enter G Ann's Cold Pressed Juices, named for her mother Gillian, the woman who modeled resilience through everything. Tiffany’s business was born in Atlanta, rooted in the belief that wellness should be accessible and bold.
The Speaker Who Can Turn Anything Into Gold
Dr. Ghazi Muhammad spent seven years in prison with about 47 months of that in solitary confinement, and he used books to travel the world in his mind when his body couldn't. He spoke in prison yards weekly, gathering 20 to 30 men to talk about history, culture, and possibility, but he had no idea he was building a career.
After his release, Dr. Ghazi spent years running serial businesses out of necessity from security to a tech and even ice cream trucks, all while speaking to nonprofits and schools for free. It took a professor noticing that not one student hadn’t looked at their phone during his entire talk to ask him: "Do you do this professionally?" He didn't. At least not yet.
His first paid speaking gig was $500 for 45 minutes. Since then, Dr. Ghazi spoken six times in Nairobi, received an honorary doctorate, and built a framework called Narrative Intelligence that helps people trace the origin of their beliefs back to the stories they've been living inside. All of that…built it in Atlanta.
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Why Right Now Is Different
Each story and stat I shared above has been true about Atlanta for years. What's changing is the spotlight.
This summer Atlanta will host eight FIFA World Cup 2026 matches at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, including a semifinal, and the city is expected to benefit from a projected economic impact of more than $1 billion from these matches. Mayor Dickens and the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs have even launched the Atlanta Cultural Exchange — a FIFA World Cup 2026 cultural activation designed to translate FIFA's global visibility into economic opportunity for Atlanta's creative community, strengthening both commerce and community across Atlanta's creative sectors.
We can use the 1996 Summer Olympics that Atlanta hosted as an example. What followed was a permanent expansion of the city's identity and reach. The metro area's population grew significantly in the years after, and the city's global profile has never returned to what it was before.
It’s clear that major events bring both visitors and people who decide to stay, and we can expect to see similar expansion following The World Cup.
The Permission You've Been Looking For
I've spent the past decade profiling professionals who’ve built careers and businesses in the vast creative middle ground that most career advice ignores entirely. And what I often find is that geography can matter more than people admit. Not because opportunity only exists in certain zip codes, but because some cities make community easier than others.
Atlanta is one of those cities.
The HBCUs that produce graduates who stay and invest. The Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs, the world's largest center for Black entrepreneurs, named in honor of Herman J. Russell, a Black construction magnate who transformed his father's plastering service into a multi-state conglomerate and used his growing influence and wealth to fight for racial equality, integrating the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and helping finance the civil rights movement. CreativeMornings. The film infrastructure. The startup ecosystem. The culture.
All of this is the cumulative result of generations of people who decided that this city was worth building in, before anyone was watching.
Well, the world is watching now.
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Move in purpose, on purpose. The Purpose Post tells the stories of creatives and founders who stopped waiting for permission and made their move. If you're already in motion, or getting ready to be, you belong here. Join us. 👇🏾
