About Sandy Springs Together

Our mission.

Sandy Springs Together drives awareness and participation of neighbors at all income levels to address the most pressing challenges facing our community.

Our vision.

Sandy Springs is a desirable and attainable community for all income levels where residents are engaged, informed, and working together to solve our city’s challenges. City policies and actionable plans support racial equity and smart growth. City leaders reflect the diversity of the city.

Our Initiatives

    • Sandy Springs faces a critical lack of housing, especially putting pressure on low- and middle-income families, essential workers, and longtime residents.

    • Sandy Springs lacks a dedicated platform for residents to share their housing challenges and community needs. Sandy Springs Speaks bridges this gap by gathering resident feedback and facilitating direct dialogue with experts and local officials.

    • Many residents in Sandy Springs struggle to feel welcome and secure as rising housing costs push them to the margins, making it difficult to find stable, affordable homes. Longtime renters face the fear of displacement, while essential workers—teachers, healthcare staff, and service industry employees—struggle to live in the very community they serve. The sense of belonging erodes when families are forced to leave due to skyrocketing rents, limited affordable options, and redevelopment efforts that prioritize high-income housing. Imagine Sandy Springs addresses this by advocating for policies that ensure all residents—especially working families—have the opportunity to live, thrive, and contribute to a diverse and inclusive city.

Our Values

    • We value everybody and support smart growth combined with the preservation of existing affordable housing, which promotes racial equity in a diverse and inclusive community.

    • We care, we listen, we learn. We share our knowledge to engage and improve our community. 

    • We respect the needs of all the residents in our community, by embracing our shared and diverse narratives. 

    • We stand for integrity in everything we do, we want to have meaningful and respectful interactions with everyone.

A message from Melanie & David Couchman

Founders of Sandy Springs Together

Sandy Springs is a great city, with many assets and opportunities.  We have grown from an unincorporated sprawling area of Fulton County to a city of opportunities.  We have built a city center  complete with a performing arts center, a city green space where free concerts act as a magnet for everyone to gather. We have top rated restaurants, walking paths and parks. We initiated a type of city government that pioneered a public/private partnership and was heralded as an innovative approach for new cities to get up and running quickly.

And all of these things are good and help our city to prosper. But we have some challenges and this is where Sandy Springs Together (SST) comes in.  Our city faces a housing shortage for middle income families as well as those who are our essential workers.  We also lack representation in city government and city committees for residents who rent, despite their large numbers. And, our renters are not aware of their state rights.  

SST offers informational programming to both the broad community and our renters through social media, programs/forums with content experts, surveys and focus groups about pertinent and timely issues facing us.  

We are not experts in the field of housing, but we have spent the last ten   years talking with experts such as Urban Land Institute, Federal Reserve Bank, the Atlanta Regional Commission, House ATL and traveling to other cities to learn  the successes, complexities and challenges of housing and its importance to families and communities.

In our pursuit, the advice we hear most often is that city leaders must make housing attainability at all income levels a priority in their strategic plan so that intentional actions will be taken to achieve this goal.  We also hear that this choice oftentimes is unpopular but necessary to ensure strong economic growth, community continuity and sustainability. 

Housing attainability is an economic development challenge, with employers having difficulty recruiting and retaining employees; it is a community development challenge when the resident majority is not represented in government; it is a public and private school challenge when our schools are closing due to low student enrollment caused by families being priced out and it is a senior resident challenge when our seniors, many of whom are the volunteer engine for our non-profits must move away due to lack of attainable housing.  

Join us as we explore these topics and offer creative successful solutions.

Melanie Couchman

David Couchman