Adding Staff
In addition to the education sessions we conducted, the donations and membership dues allowed us to bring on a staff person to help coordinate the growing list of activities and meetings. In the early days of operating the the Guest House barn and the Mimosa Cottage as a B&B, Sandra Storrar visited us in search of time away from a hectic life in the city. On one visit she shared that the demands of corporate life prompted her to step off the big business grind due to burnout. I suggested she join our effort as the part time Executive Director for the new Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance. She agreed. What is now room #5 at the Inn was the family art area and we converted it into an office for the Chattahoochee Hill Country.
After a time, the land pulled Sandra in as it has many of us. She didn’t want to go back to the city to sleep, so she rented the house at the corner of Hutcheson Ferry and Atlanta Newnan. In the following years when we moved forward to develop Serenbe the community, Sandra was in the first group to reserve a proposed home at a time when there were only stakes in the forest. Sandra’s home was one of the first completed in 2005 and she became the first resident to move into Selborne at a time when the cows still wandered the streets and our doges, Georgia and Pudge, had to learn to stop canvasing the houses for left over lunch scraps from the construction crews.
I ask Sandra to help me think back to that time twenty plus years ago and remember what it was like as we embarked on the improbable idea of rezoning 40,000 acres in Metro Atlanta.
Sandra shared:
"I left a management position in corporate America where I had been doing 90% business travel for four years. It was more than a breath of fresh air when Steve and Marie approached me about working with them to help form the Chattahoochee Hills Country Alliance.
My office was the art room at the Inn on the top floor so I had a wide view of the grounds of the Inn, the flowers, the pastures and the animals. Sometimes at lunch, I would help Steve feed twin baby goats that were rejected by the mother. What a different way to do lunch! I would send photos to my corporate friends sharing my fun lunch hours.
I helped Steve organize the neighbors and form teams so we could keep everyone well-informed. I drove back to my home in Roswell at night with the sunroof open so I could see the stars in the Hill County. I realized how much I enjoyed all the rural aspects of this land, the amazing people in this area and made the decision to move to Chatt Hills - and did so in 2004."
