The Coalition to Advance Atlanta (Advance Atlanta) is a 501(c)(4) organization working to gather people together to learn about and fight for better transit in the metro Atlanta region. We engage our members by providing access to information on how to get involved in influencing the passage of legislation, passing funding referendums, and helping good development and improvements happen. We believe that together, we can raise the standard of transit in Atlanta.

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Currently, our transit system only serves 12% of the region, which means that Atlantans waste around 60 hours a year sitting in traffic. That’s 60 hours that could be spent with their friends and families. If they don’t have a car, they could spend up to 2 hours commuting by transit, like Ava, a student at Georgia Gwinnett College. It takes her 2 hours, 3 different transit operators, and a long walk or Uber ride to get from her home in Cobb County to Gwinnett County for class every day. That means, she spends more time commuting to class than she does learning in class. With the population expected to grow, this could have serious consequences for our region.

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Advance Atlanta is a non-profit organization that wants to fix this issue by gathering people together to learn about and fight for better transit. We rely on individual donations, organization donations, and event sponsorships to run our programs and tools. But if we don’t act, the true cost is the region’s economy and ability to maintain our community.

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What makes us different from other transportation advocacy groups in the Atlanta region, such as MARTA Army, Citizens for Progressive Transit, and the Sierra Club, is that we serve the entire region and all demographics. We are also a 501(c)4 non-profit, which means that we can also advocate and lobby for issues representing diverse areas and voices.

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Our leadership is a diverse board of young professionals with legal, advocacy, and technical skills that care deeply about helping others getting engaged in how their communities are built and planned. We’ve been advised by the Atlanta Regional Commission, as an off shoot of their Millennial Advisory Committee, and have been recognized by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Curbed, Creative Loafing, and
Saporta Report for our efforts.

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For us, success is growing the number of people informed on transportation issues, in the form of: our contact list, influencing the passage of legislation, passing funding referendums and helping good development and improvements happen. We’ve already brought 1,000 new voices into the conversation since we formed in 2015.