Richland DDA

05/08/2026

PLEASE SHARE........Thank you.

04/03/2026

Our team had a fantastic time celebrating the ribbon cutting at our new Richland location this week! Thank you to everyone who came out, and special thanks to the Richland DDA for helping make it a success. 🌟

As a reminder for our Richland area members, our new Richland financial center is located at 818 Wall Street.

03/31/2026

FIVE STAR CREDIT UNION!!!

Five Star Credit Union celebrated the official opening today of its new location at 818 Wall Street.

The ribbon cutting ceremony and reception was attended by Five Star executives and staff as well as Richland City officials and the public.

03/23/2026

Join us for the official ribbon cutting of our NEW Richland location on Wall Street! We look forward to continuing our purpose of brightening the financial futures of the communities we serve.

📅 Monday, March 30 at 11 AM
📍 818 Wall Street, Richland, GA 31825

Thank you to the Richland DDA for partnering with us for this event. We’d love to see you there!

12/15/2025

11/30/2025

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The cities of Richland and Lumpkin, in collaboration with Stewart County, have been selected as one of the communities to participate in the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing (GICH) 2026 program.

The official announcement of the GICH 2026 cohort took place at the recent Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA) Fall Conference and GICH Fall Retreat, November 10–17, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Savannah, GA.

Participation in the GICH program is an exceptional county-wide opportunity to work together with other communities and resources to improve our housing stock, economic
vitality, and quality of life.

To learn more about the GICH program, visit http://www.fcs.uga.edu/fhce/gich.

The GICH selection committee visited Stewart County on October 1 as part of the process. The following is the slide presentation prepared by the local GICH team.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uez2Lp_6lmaezrJWtP-ltQe90pDyOf2jnEjRc0oRC0A

Current local GICH team members include:
Honorable Jimmy Babb, Mayor, City of Lumpkin
Bobbi Boynton, Chair, Richland Downtown Development Authority - GICH Coordinator
Darius Brown, Chair, Stewart Board of Education
Joyce Campbell, Richland City Council
Pastor Justin Frederick, Richland First Baptist Church
Honorable Kenneth Josey, Mayor, City of Richland
Billie Mallory, Lumpkin City Council
Mac Moye, Stewart County Manager
Donna Wadsworth Quam, Richland Business Owner
Brandy Stuart. Manager, Five Star Credit Union
Dennis Thomas, Lumpkin City Council
Pastor Annie West, Richland Gospel Tabernacle Church
Tonya White, Richland Zoning
Cassie Young, Director, Stewart UGA Extension

10/31/2025

Nothing worth obtaining happens overnight. Real accomplishments demand time, discipline, and a metric s**t ton of effort. There’s no secret formula. You want to be successful? Work harder than everyone else for a bunch of years. Want to get in shape? Move your body and eat like someone who gives a damn. Want to learn piano or Spanish? Practice every single day. Want to build wealth? Make sound financial decisions for the rest of your life.

Sure, it’s boring. That’s the point. The path to improvement isn’t dramatic, winding, or exciting. It’s a long, straight road that you walk every day and when you step off, you start back at the beginning. Most people don’t fail because they’re dumb or unlucky. They fail because it’s hard. It’s easier to scroll than jog, easier to eat wings than salad, easier to wish than to work.

The things that bring pride are always the ones we’ve earned. No one can hand us confidence or fulfillment. Those are forged through effort and repetition. For better or worse, we are the sum of our decisions.

And what’s true for people is true for places.

Our communities are just collections of people which means they behave exactly like we do. There are no civic secrets, no shortcuts, no miracle projects. Cities don’t improve because of a single game changer. They get better the same way people do, through steady, relentless work over time.

If a town has been in decline for decades, no stadium, parking garage, or world-class civic center will change that. We’ve tried that approach for 70 years and it has failed every single time. You can’t reverse years of neglect with one grand gesture.

Real progress happens incrementally. Picking up litter, repairing sidewalks, planting flowers, cleaning facades, these are not small acts. They are daily rebellions against decay. The natural state of everything is decline and every brushstroke of care pushes a place back toward life.

You can’t get in shape in a day but you can get stronger today. You can’t fix your city in a week but you can make it better before sunset. Every small act changes the trajectory. The secret is relentlessness.

So stop waiting for the silver bullet or the next big project. The magic is in the daily effort. The victories are in the repetition. Civic pride doesn’t come from a ribbon cutting, it comes from the satisfaction of showing up again and again.

Improvement isn’t a mystery. It’s just hard. But we can do hard. We always have. The people who built our towns did it with grit, not grants. They used their hands, their sweat, and their stubborn belief that the work mattered.

It still does.

10/29/2025

🍁🍁BRING THE FAMILY!!🍁🍁
FOR FUN AND TREATS

Downtown Richland is spookin' up for TRUNK-OR-TREAT!!!

BE THERE: Friday, October 31
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

SPONSORED BY: Richland Bee Beautiful Garden Club

10/23/2025

Every decision a community makes should be guided by one question: Will this help our residents care more about their town?

We should always be looking for ways to move people along the continuum from apathy to pride. Yes, paving matters. Trash pickup matters. But so does joy, beauty, and a sense of belonging. Those are the things that make people fall in love with the place they call home.

Imagine what would happen if residents truly loved where they lived, if they looked around their town and felt proud, not indifferent. Everything would get a little cleaner, a little kinder, a little better.

The goal isn’t just maintenance. It’s affection. Because when people care, everything else follows.