Devin Heath grew up in Washington, D.C., but had never been to the National Cherry Blossom Festival. Then he began dating the woman who would one day be his wife. He thought the cherry blossoms would make a good date.
“I was amazed at how awesome it was,” he said of one of D.C.’s premier events. He was a young man in love, of course, and that also may have colored his view.
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But the lesson Heath drew from the experience is that you can easily miss what’s around you in your own city by looking through a lens of “the grass is always greener on the other side.”
Heath is CEO of DistiNCtly Fayetteville, a job he started in December, and he believes Fayetteville has a heavy dose of that perspective. The organization, formerly the Fayetteville Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, and located on Gillespie Street downtown, promotes tourism and has studied people’s attitudes about the city.
Heath said some of the data was eye-opening for him, like finding out just 56% of people surveyed in Cumberland County had a positive opinion of Fayetteville. He was surprised “how low it was,” he said.