MOULTRIE — Approaching its 20th anniversary, the University of Georgia’s Archway Partnership has served in 13 Georgia communities with Colquitt County continuing to lead the way.
According to the Archway Partnership website, the program was born of an idea to link the resources of the university to the economic development needs of the state, and Colquitt County was the pilot for the program, which was based on the Cooperative Extension model.
“The Archway is designed really to be a window to the larger university as a link,” said Dennis Epps at the time; Epps was the very first liaison between Colquitt County and UGA.
Chip Blalock, the current chairman of the Archway Partnership in Colquitt County, said that he was on the initial steering committee.
Slated to be only a two-year outreach pilot project, it started in July of 2005 with UGA’s School of Family and Consumer Sciences conducting a survey of applicants of Sanderson Farms regarding their housing and childcare needs.
Sanderson Farms had just announced plans to build its plant and there were some challenges that needed to be addressed including few housing options and no round-the-clock childcare, according to the Archway website.
Two years later, the program was expanded into having a full-time Archway professional in Colquitt County and the program was also extended into Washington County.
Colquitt County officially “graduated” from the program in 2011, however, UGA continued its support through a five-year grant that was funded by its College of Public Health and Colquitt County, the City of Moultrie, the Colquitt County Board of Education and Colquitt Regional Medical Center continued its commitment to funding it, as well.
The Healthy Colquitt County Coalition, a private community group, formed in 2010 and joined with the Colquitt County Archway Project to address childhood obesity. The community organization brought with them a grant that it had received from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically for this purpose.
The support from these entities allowed the Colquitt County Archway Project to continue into its “Phase II” iteration for the next few years.
Once the Colquitt County Archway Project was no longer funded by those grants, the county, the city, the board of education and the hospital continued to fund the partnership so that it could continue its mission to help improve the community.
“We just really believe in it. Our funding partners invest in the program because they know we’ll get a good return on it,” said Blalock, in an earlier interview.
Blalock joined the board around 2014-15, he said, and then became chairman in 2017 and that’s when Colquitt County came back as an official Archway community, added Sara Hand, who started as the newest Colquitt County Archway Professional in September of last year.
After several meetings with the overall director of the Archway Partnership and the local board, trying to figure out how to move forward, keeping the connection with UGA, Blalock said, they came back and said, “What if we just make y’all an Archway community again. Full-fledged. and here we are, seven years later.”
Over the past two decades, the partnership has brought UGA and staff in to assist in all aspects of the community including working with the local government to find the most cost-efficient way to increase its wastewater treatment plant, helping to start the Healthy Colquitt Coalition, sponsoring the High Potential Leaders Program, establishing a mental health committee, organizing the Marketing Issue Work Group, helping to get word out about the US Census and helping to get the Moultrie Police Department’s Co-Responder Team started.
An impact study from March 2017, showed that, from 2005, when the Archway Partnership was launched, through 2017, Colquitt County realized an additional $226.9 million in economic activity.
Blalock said that the community sees a great value in the connection with UGA, across all colleges throughout the campus, and he added that Colquitt County has worked with most of them over the last 19 years.
“Our community buys in from our standpoint and they know they’re gonna get positive results to enhance what we do in the community,” said Blalock. “But the university knows, once we passed that test of the original Archway pilot, that, if they want to try something new, that we’ll take the ball and run with it. and they know that they’ll get good, tangible results out of it.”
Hand added that it’s a two-way buy-in because the community benefits and the students get to test in a real world environment and have that experience.
Blalock said they get a real-world experience outside of the classroom and that a lot of the students were urban kids who were being exposed to rural Georgia.
“It’s just a win-win for everybody,” he said.