Dear partners, please plan to attend the next Community Partnership quarterly meeting on Thursday, May 31 at the Centenary Methodist Church Fellowship Hall, 1290 College Street Macon, GA 31201, at 4:00 pm.

At this meeting, it’s all about connecting as we’ve got lots of infomation for partners including how to engage with neighborhood programs being conducted by Shalom Zones and an update on 2012 Shalom Zone grant funding, You’ll meet the new Promise Neighborhood staff and learn about the model of collaboration being conducted in this federal program. We’ll also have as our guest Kimberlyn Carter, the new Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Bibb County School System who will tell us more about the Welcome Center and how we can connect to support the district’s educational goals.

 Refreshments will be served.  Please call Travis Blackwell at 478-787-7542 if you have any questions.

Monroe County Family Connection (MCFC) is hosting a health fair for the Union Hill neighborhood in Forsyth on Saturday, June 16, 2012 from 11:00 am – 2:00 pm. MCFC will provide a community cook-out in conjunction with the event

Our goal is to educate residents about health and mental health issues and resources while building a sense of community in the neighborhood. This is a great opportunity to increase awareness about the many valuable services your organization provides.

Participating organizations are invited to display information tables, hand out literature, provide health screenings, or deliver other health-related activities.

Please RSVP your participation to Aimee Green at (478) 508-6640 or Travis Blackwell at (478) 787-7542 by June 8, 2012, and don’t hesitate to call if you have further questions or need special accommodations!

In the discussion facilitated by Travis Blackwell, participants explored a “day in the life” of a person in poverty, and came to the conclusions that life in poverty is expensive, takes more time to accomplish tasks, and that the arithmetics of life don’t always add up!

With attention focused on unfolding crisis of the day, “the tyranny of the moment” robs people of future stories and commitment to education.

In the poverty environment, cars and public transportation are often unreliable, low wage jobs come and go, housing is crowded and expensive, time and energy go into caring for the sick, trying to get healthcare and other basic needs met, and interaction with the dominant culture is often demeaning and frustrating.

Participants found that the components of life in poverty are interlocking, with a crisis in one area creating a chain reaction that affects many others.  For example, when the car won’t start or the bus is late, people may miss appointments or be late to work.  This leads to losing jobs, which leads to losing housing, and starts the task of finding the next place to live.

People in poverty find different ways to survive, often by developing relationships of mutual reliance.  Family, friends, acquaintances give you a place to stay, food to eat, a ride to work, and provide childcare.  The importance of relationships in the poverty environment was acknowleged and building relationships was discussed as a strategy for working with people in poverty.

Participants found that people in poverty are indeed problem-solvers, but are forced to use reactive skills, not true choice, in order to survive.

This series of Shalom Zone discussions will continue on April 21 in the Pleasant Hill Shalom Zone.

P. O. Box 812,  Forsyth, Georgia  31029  (478) 994-7981 monroereadswithferst@gmail.com

Robins Federal Credit Union at Forsyth is on a mission to deliver better banking to everyone!  During its Customer Appreciation month in March, the Forsyth branch of Robins Federal Credit Union is donating $25 to Monroe County Family Connection for each account opened!

As part of the month-long event, Monroe County Family Connection and  Robins Federal Credit Union will host a financial literacy celebration on March 29^th, , from 4-6 pm at the Union Hill Community Resource Room.  Staff of Robins Federal Credit Union  conduct a workshop on financial literacy and offer free checking accounts and  savings accounts to residents.  The event will include a community cookout hosted by the Union Hill Baptist Church. 

What are Some of the Advantages of Credit Unions?

Customers are owners.

The executive management of any company must answer to its owners. With a publicly-traded banking institution, shareholders care about only one thing: making money. In these companies, management often makes decisions that benefit the shareholder but inconvenience the customer. Shareholders might be happy when a bank decides to charge a new fee to increase revenue (and as a result, the stock price), but those who use the bank’s services do not want additional fees.

With credit unions, the set of owners and the set of customers are one and the same. All decisions should benefit everyone.

Credit unions are non-profit.

Non-profit status means that more of the profits are shared with the owners/customers. That doesn’t mean that the institutions can’t earn a profit; any business needs to earn money to survive. The difference is that there isn’t a pressure to find ways to make money off the customers. Additionally, credit unions benefit from exemption from federal tax, and that saved expense help more of the unions’ revenue to be put to work.

There are fewer fees and higher savings rates.

As a result of the advantage listed so far, credit unions typically offer free accounts with no minimum balance requirements. Fees are generally absent from credit unions. Interest rates on savings, certificates of deposit, and some checking accounts often significantly exceed those offered by banks. In the same respect, interest charged for loans and credit are often lower. In fact, some credit unions are regulated such that the interest rate on loans and credit cards must not exceed a certain rate.

Monroe County Family Connection has completed its 2012 directory of Monroe County service providers!  Printed copies will be available soon, but you can access the digital version now:

Download the Monroe County Family Connection Resource Directory Here

Directory Compiled by Dawn Freelin of MCFC

Other directories are available on our Resource Directories page and more are being added.

Check back for updates!

 Number of Georgia Children Living in High-Poverty Areas Surges

“Children in high-poverty neighborhoods are more likely to lack access to quality education, medical care, and safe outdoor spaces,” said GaFCP Executive Director Gaye Smith. “The prosperity of our state and country is dependent on having a robust economy, with safe, thriving neighborhoods and opportunities for family economic success.”

According to the ACS, one out of four children in Georgia lives in poverty. The rate of child poverty in in this state has steadily increased during the past four years and is at its highest rate in 40 years. More than 613,000 of Georgia’s children lived in poverty in 2010.

The ACS data show that Atlanta has the fifth highest rate among the nation’s largest cities of children living in areas of concentrated poverty (43 percent). However, concentrated poverty is widespread throughout the state. Half of Georgia’s 159 counties have areas of concentrated poverty. Bibb, Bulloch, Chatham, Clarke, DeKalb, Fulton, and Muscogee counties have areas of concentrated poverty of 70 percent or higher.

Georgia Family Connection collaborative organizations are in every county working with local partners to address specific community needs related to improving outcomes for children and families. Two of those collaboratives are part of the highly competitive national U.S. Department of Education Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which focuses efforts on areas of concentrated poverty. A Promise Neighborhood is a community of opportunity—centered on strong schools—that allows children to learn, grow, and succeed. Promise Neighborhoods wrap children in high-quality, coordinated health, social, community and educational support from cradle to college to career.

“Through the new, geographically focused approach, we are seeing culture change and a powerful new level of improvement,” said Tim Johnson, executive director of Athens/Clarke County Family Connection-Communities in Schools.

“Efforts to eradicate poverty often fail because we focus our strategies on only one cause of poverty—the behavior of the individual, rather than the root causes of poverty which include a lack of social capital, exploitation (i.e. predatory lenders and businesses), and political/economic strutcures” said Blackwell.

The national KIDS COUNT Data Snapshot on High-Poverty Communities, released today by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, includes the latest data for states and for the nation’s 50 largest cities. This information is available in the national KIDS COUNT Data Center (datacenter.kidscount.org).

For interactive statewide data, visit Georgia KIDS COUNT at gafcp.org/kidscount

For more information, please contact Travis Blackwell, Executive Director of Community Partnership at (478) 787-7542 or tblackwell@communitypartnershipinc.org 

  Listen to the podcast from Georgia Public Broadcasting:

Due to a Family Connection training taking place this week in Warner Robins, we will postpone our February Community Partnership meeting until March.  Stay posted for details.  We apologize for any inconvenmience this may cause.