A long-running Haralson County non-profit organization now has a new face as they have hired Jim Winchester to serve as the coordinator for the Haralson County Family Connections Coalition.

Family Connections is an organization that works to bring together community agencies, businesses, schools and community members in a unified effort to improve the quality of life for Haralson County residents.

“The Family Connections Coalition is not a social service agency, that’s what we’re not,” Winchester said. “The organization is filled with people you’ve heard about all your life, school systems, government agencies, health departments, [Division of Family and Children Services], the mental health center, the head start program, and civic groups. [...] The coalition, which is the local organization, is all of these groups sending a representative to meet, view, date, and implement a plan that involves all those agencies in a way that they could not possibly do acting as individual agencies.”

The organization has four main goals: healthy children, school readiness, school success and self-sufficient families. Keeping those goals in mind, the organization works in cycles of three years. The first year in a cycle is used to study statistics relating to social problems and planning programs to address those problems. The second year is spent implementing those programs, and the third year is spent studying the programs’ results.

“The basic idea behind helping families is helping them build a really good foundation,” Winchester said. “About 20 to 23 percent of children in Haralson County live at or below the poverty level. What we do is we try to work on the foundational things that cause that statistic.”

“The statistic itself means nothing, it’s a number. Part of my job is to dig beneath and find out what is driving that statistic, what are the problems that make that statistic what it is [...] Truancy is a huge issue. If a kid can’t get a basic high school education, opportunity is closed to him. Opportunities for his children could be closed as a result. One of the things we work on is how we impact school attendance. [...] What we do is we create programs that help people. While child abuse is down in Harlason County, child neglect is up. What do we do to help impact those things, these are the things we’re about.”

One of the organization’s recent accomplishments is the implementation of a childhood literacy program through the Ferst Foundation. According to Winchester, any parent that signs up for this program, their child will receive one book a month from infancy to age 5.

“This encourages parents to read to their children,” Winchester said. “One of the basic foundation things we can do is teach children to read. If you cannot read, you cannot become educated.”

The group also has many other ongoing programs: mentoring at Haralson County Schools, truancy intervention programs at county schools, a credit recovery program at Haralson County High School, substance abuse prevention education, youth leadership training, General Educational Development classes, the Certified Literate Community, CHAMPS (formerly Drug Abuse Resistance Education), Safe Kids of Georgia, Family Planning, Food and Clothing Assistance and Parenting Education.

The organization also applies for and receives many grants, totaling approximately $1.5 million over the past 10 years. Recently, Family Connections helped to obtain the Mary Elliot grant to start a drug intervention for youth. The grant has served approximately 25 teenagers over the past year.

Since it’s inception, Family Connections has closely tracked statistics that indicate where its programs have succeeded and where more attention is needed. Between 1994 and 2006 teen pregnancies decreased from 50 per 1,000 to approximately 10 per 1,000. Also, between 2002 and 2006 the number of students who graduate high school on time increased from 61 percent to 64.7 percent, and between 2003 and 2005 children absent more than 15 days from school decreased from 21.6 percent to 15.1 percent.

Substantiated incidents of child abuse between 1994 and 2006 decreased from 8 per 1000 to 4 per 1,000, while substantiated incidents of child neglect increased from 12 per 1,000 to 25 per 1,000 between 1994 and 2006.

“Every family in the entire state of Georgia feels the effects of the issues that threaten the heart of families,” said State Senator Bill Heath. “The Family Connections program is in each of the 159 counties statewide and without the efforts of the service providers and community leaders represented within these ‘collaborative’ groups, families in Georgia would have a much greater battle to fight.”

Family Connections is funded by a grant from a state organization called the Family Connections Partnership.

“It’s a combination of tax dollars and private funding, and this office operates on a grant from that statewide organization,” Winchester said. “There are 159 counties in Georgia, and all 159 have a Family Connections program, representing the largest collaborative on a statewide basis in the entire nation.”

Higgin’s General Hospital provides Family Connections with a rent-free office at 100 Poplar St. in Bremen as a service to the community, and the Warren and Ava Sewell Foundation assists with operating costs.

Winchester, who started work at Family Connections on Aug. 1, serves as coordinator and helps provide information for the board of directors and executive committee that run the organization. The board is comprised of 51 individuals from all areas of the Harlason County Community, and it decides what social areas to focus on and what programs to implement. The Executive Committee helps Winchester with his duties as coordinator and guides the board.

“What I think [Family Connections] does is it gets everybody to the table that are somewhat involved in any type of social service organization or organizations that are need-based and helping people in the community,” said Executive Committee member Sumiko Stroud.

“It’s an opportunity for those of us who provide those services to get together quarterly and keep in touch with one another, what programs are available, how things are going as far as their group is concerned. [...] It keeps us from having to duplicate services and it keeps us aware of what types of services are in the community and what holes are there, the services that people are asking for but aren’t being provided.”

“As coordinator, I am a paid staff person,” said Winchester. “My job is to facilitate, to plan, to be a resource person to provide data, provide the venue for meetings, organize the meetings and drive the processes that culminate in plans for us to follow.”

“John Liebowitz preceded me; he was the coordinator for nine years. He still serves on our executive committee and the board of directors and is currently an employee of the Bremen Board of Education. He’s still very much involved.”

Though he is relatively knew to Family Connections, Winchester is not a stranger to serving the local community.

“I was a school teacher for two years, a mental health counselor for three years, and I’ve worked in various positions with West Central Technical College for 12 years,” said Winchester. “[...]One reason I was hired is my knowledge of the community, my involvement with the Chamber of Commerce and my desire to get this position. This is something I wanted to do.”

Winchester hopes that he can bring deeper collaboration and unity of purpose to Family Connections.

“There is room to be better at anything you do, and I hope it will be said that I helped the group move towards something better,” Winchester said. “What that is right now, I haven’t been at this job long enough to know.”

Currently, Family Connections is working on developing its strategic plan for 2010 through 2012. The organization is hoping to receive more participation from the community through a citizens committee made of people who deal with some of the real challenges faced by families on an everyday basis and can help guide Family Connections to address those challenges. Anyone interested in serving on the citizens committee can contact Jim Winchester at 770-537-2726. More information about Haralson County Family Connections can be found at www.gafcp.org.