George Lowe Sr. was at the football field at Columbus High School a few years ago for a spring practice game when he saw a group of young men talking on the sidelines.
Lowe, a Columbus native, entrepreneur and former Falcon defensive back, approached the group with a question about their city.
“I asked them … ‘What’s missing here?’” Lowe told The Dispatch on Thursday.
One of the players looked at Lowe and said, “Pride.”
The conversation took Lowe aback, since when he was attending Columbus High School in the early 2000s, he constantly heard about Falcon Pride. Lowe even founded an association with that name to support the school and the current student body in 2014.
But the interaction sparked an idea to bring city pride back to the forefront – the creation of the Friendly City Art Initiative and a “Columbus Pride” mural with community members and artists on Bell Avenue in the Sandfield neighborhood in 2019.
While the paint on the wall the initiative constructed has started to fade over the past six years, Lowe’s love for the city has not. He appeared before the city council during its meeting March 18 to talk about his recent community engagement projects.
Lowe told the council that he recently started circulating a community development survey in conjunction with the current municipal elections, to give citizens a voice that is typically missing when candidates are vying for votes.
“The initiative is like a candidate,” Lowe told The Dispatch. “Your voice is like a candidate. In the midst of everything that’s going on, everyone’s like ‘vote for me,’ and it’s like, ‘Hey, use your voice. Let the people that you will elect know what you think about the quality of life and things you may want to see change.’”
Lowe’s survey – available at developcolumbus.us – gathers basic information about the survey-taker, including age group, gender, ethnicity, education and an annual income range. It then asks questions that are all “centered” on quality of life, Lowe said.
Questions gauge the level of satisfaction with health care facilities, mental health services, law enforcement, infrastructure upkeep, availability of job opportunities, public education and more. The survey includes 30 questions and takes about four to five minutes to complete, Lowe told the council.
Lowe told the city council that his goal is to get 2,500 surveys completed by June 5, after which he hopes to present the information from them to the newly elected city council. So far, Lowe told The Dispatch, he has collected 163 completed surveys.
Lowe said he has shared the survey primarily through a new Facebook page devoted to sharing information in the city, Friendly City LIVE. He said he has been working on spreading the survey with help from his former teammate Stephen Harrison. However, he said he intends to ramp up sharing the message soon through canvassing with others.
“I’m just a kid from Columbus that cares,” Lowe said. “Of course, people have kind of rallied around since I started it. The interest has kind of grown in helping people getting their voice heard.”
Lowe said he has tried to enact change in Columbus in the past, particularly during the last election cycle, when he stood on street corners with a sign bearing the word “develop” as an act of silent demonstration. With municipal elections once again around the corner – party primaries are April 1 and the general election is June 3 – he wanted to find different ways to amplify the city’s voice.
Mayor Keith Gaskin, who has taken the survey, told The Dispatch that he really appreciates Lowe’s efforts.
“(It’s) imperative that we hear the opinions of our citizens and his approach to this is commendable and very welcomed from my perspective,” Gaskin wrote in a text message. “An active citizenry is what makes for great communities, not the politics of (elected) officials.”
Lowe told the city council that he is also working to re-spark his art initiative down the road, both to refresh the mural on Bell Avenue and to identify other places for art installations throughout the community. While Lowe does not have a specific date in mind for the mural refresh, he told The Dispatch he plans to get the community involved in one side of the mural’s design with planning meetings, and to allow area residents to get involved in the actual painting process with an event when the time comes.
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
