MOULTRIE — After almost two decades, the University of Georgia Archway Partnership is still going strong with several projects in Colquitt County.
Colquitt County Archway Professional Sara Hand updated the Colquitt County Commission and the Colquitt County Board of Education at their meetings this year about some of the things that Archway has been working on lately.
She and Chip Blalock, the current chairman of the Archway Partnership in Colquitt County, sat down with The Observer, as well.
The Foster Care Project is an initiative of the Healthy Colquitt Coalition, which focuses on different health issues in the community. Hand said the coalition has identified foster care as its current focus.
“In 2023, in the fall, we worked with a team of students from UGA’s Institute for Leadership Advancement. and that group of students looked at the needs of foster care and supporting children in care in Colquitt County,” Hand said.
The students came back with a report with recommendations for increasing community engagement and marketing to keep more foster parents involved and to attract new foster parents, she said.
Hand said that they were now using this guide as a plan of action, which included an information campaign on the specifics of foster care in Colquitt County.
In May, a “Foster Care 101” event was held as an introduction to foster parenting, what that process looks like and how to get involved, she said.
“We’re also hoping to do a movie screening, later, in the fall. There’s a new movie coming out through Angel Studios. It’s called “The Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot,” which is a town in Texas, I believe. A church got behind the foster care movement and adopted about 80 children in foster care,” Hand said.
Another project that Archway is working on this year is mental health resources for children — which she said came from Julio Ginel and Tonero Bender of the co-responder program at the Moultrie Police Department. “Some of you may be familiar with the co-responder project the Moultrie Police Department has. They’ve paired a mental health clinician with a lieutenant there and they go out on calls that deal with people in crisis, resulting from mental health issues,” she said.
Hand said that they had asked for Archway’s help looking at resources or programs that could be replicated here.
She said the co-responder team had discovered that several of the cases they had gone out on had involved children and youth experiencing a mental health crisis and there were little to no local resources available for them.
“So we worked with another team of students from UGA’s Institute for Leadership Advancement and they researched what programs, organizations and resources are available that we could bring here to Moultrie and better serve our community and the region as a whole,” she said.
Hand said that a report was presented to Ginel and Bender and the students also offered suggestions for implementation.
“Julio and Tonero were just blown away by the results of their work,” she said.
Working with the Colquitt County School System, Archway is continuing to work on a cultural humility project, which came out of the diversity of students in the school system, Hand said. “That presents some unique opportunities and challenges. There’s a lot more diversity in the community at this time, probably, than years ago,” she said.
The school system started the project by looking for some training for their employees and some other organizations had expressed some similar needs, she also said. “Angela [Angela Hobby, Chief Officer of District and Employee Relations] shared with me about the diversity within the school system and the community. There are students from 17 different countries, speaking 19 different languages,” Hand said.
She said that last year, a student group from UGA completed a guide on how local demographics are changing and best practices to promote cultural awareness within the schools.
Once that project wrapped-up, it led to another project with UGA’s Fanning Institute for Leadership Development.
“They will be working with Angela and others from the district office on how to integrate more inclusive behavior and best practices around cultural humility to make families, students and staff feel more welcome and, in general, just more culturally aware with all these differences that we have,” Hand said.
It will help people in the community learn how to talk to each other, communicate, teach and interact, she said.