There is a tendency to talk about Georgia's success as though it simply happened. It didn't. Someone built the Georgia we love, generations who invested in roads and schools and ports, recruited factories to courthouse-square towns, opened businesses, and cared for land they hoped to hand down to their children.  

We inherited the results, and now it is our turn to pay it forward. 

Nowhere does that responsibility matter more than in rural Georgia, because the next real measure of this state's success will not be how much prosperity we concentrate in one corner of it. It will be whether Georgians in every community can build a good life, grow a business, and raise a family close to home. 

Governor Brian Kemp understood that, and he made rural prosperity a defining piece of Georgia's economic strategy rather than an afterthought to it. In fiscal year 2026, three-quarters of the state's economic development projects landed outside Metro Atlanta, and since the program launched in fiscal year 2025, Georgia has put $28 million into the Rural Site Development Initiative, helping communities get sites ready before an employer ever comes looking.  

Speaker Jon Burns, members of the General Assembly, and economic developers in every region have been partners in that work, and together they have shown what the Georgia Way looks like when corporate citizenship meets good government. 

That legacy is worth continuing, but the next chapter has to be bigger than recruiting the next large project. 

A young entrepreneur in Tifton should not have to move to Boston to find capital, mentorship, or technology. A family-owned manufacturer in Dublin should be able to adopt automation and compete globally, and a farmer should have the technology, infrastructure, and market access that keep the family farm viable for another generation.  

But to do that, it takes roads, broadband, energy, water, and housing, and it takes strong schools, technical colleges, and hospitals that stay open. It also takes access to capital, research, and the kind of entrepreneurship programs that turn a good idea into a going concern.  

Economic growth must also be balanced with preserving the land and character that define rural Georgia.

The goal is easy to say and hard to do: you should not have to leave home to build something. Growth also has to be squared with the land that makes rural Georgia what it is. Our farms and forests are not empty space waiting on development. They are working lands that produce food and timber and jobs, protect watersheds and habitat, and anchor tourism and quality of life. Georgia can keep growing without spending down its natural resources, and economic development and conservation have always been parts of the same long-term strategy rather than competing ones. 

Achieving this requires something that has gotten harder to find in public life: steadiness. The work described here does not get done in one legislative session or one news cycle. It gets done by people who understand how an economy actually functions, who can hold a course for years, and who know that a business deciding whether to expand in Moultrie is making a bet on predictability as much as on incentives. 

This is why the Georgia Chamber's Free Enterprise Fund has endorsed Rick Jackson for governor. 

Rick spent his career building a Georgia company, which means he has met a payroll, absorbed a bad quarter, and seen how a change in costs or rules lands on the people who work for him. He has been a member of this Chamber for years, and so has his son, so this is not a case of business leaders getting to know a candidate in an election season. He has committed to continuing the economic security and prosperity agenda of the Kemp years, with real attention to rural economic development and quality job creation, and he has been a consistent voice for free enterprise. Under the leadership of Governor Kemp, Georgia has spent eight years building a reputation as a state that does what it says it will do. Rick Jackson is the candidate most likely to keep it that way. 

Someone built the Georgia we love and passed it down to us. Our responsibility is not simply to preserve what we were given, but to leave our children and grandchildren a Georgia with the same extraordinary promise: the same chance to work hard, build something, raise a family, and believe their best days are still ahead. 

We will not inherit that Georgia. We have to build it, and rural Georgia has to help lead.