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EMPOWER ATLANTA During our interview, Rodney Bullard openly discussed changing careers, The Same House, and the Beloved Benefit. Q. What inspired you to leave Chickfil-A after working there for 12 years to become The Same House’s CEO? A. I was inspired not to leave corporate America but to take corporate America and galvanize not just Chick-fil-A but to galvanize other corporate relationships that we have accrued into focusing on our community’s toughest issues. We started The Same House as a public benefit corporation, which is really an effort to do good. We have put on the Beloved Benefit since 2019. We had Bruno Mars, Steve Harvey, TI, and Congressman John Lewis at one of his last public events. We did not know he was ill at the time. He said very profoundly, “We’re one people, one family. We all belong to the same house, the house of Atlanta, Georgia”. That stuck with me in the sense that if we all belong to the same house, then it is our responsibility, individually and collectively, to build this house. When I decided to leave Chick-fil-A to do something different, it was to bring together not just corporate Atlanta but the community, politicians, and others so we could build this house together. I thought that it would be easier to do that from another platform. So it was clear that this was not a brand effort. This was not us trying to aggrandize Chick-fil-A or Coca-Cola.
Rodney D. Bullard CEO, The Same House
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By Towanna Hogue
odney D. Bullard is the CEO of The Same House, a public benefit corporation dedicated to furthering economic mobility and bridging social division. He was the Vice President of Community Affairs at Chick-fil-A, Inc. and Executive Director of the Chick-fil-A Foundation, where he led the company’s corporate community and philanthropic strategy that focused on fostering youth and furthering education.
In a city like Atlanta, we have an unfortunate statistic. We have the greatest economic inequality in the country. If you’re a child born into poverty in Atlanta, you only have a 4.7% chance of getting out of poverty and going to some self-sufficient wealth. That’s the lowest in the country. But the blessing is that we have wonderful organizations, sponsors, and wealth in Atlanta. We can do something collectively about the problems of our city. Q, What is the mission of The Same House? A. The mission of The Same House is to
