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Grandparents get needed helping hand
Published September 13, 2006
MONROE — The fellowship hall of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church is filled with a small horde of excitable children, scribbling out construction-paper greeting cards in crayon and feasting on delivery pizza and sodas.
It is a scene similar to almost any gathering of adolescents, with one notable exception.
The children gathered in St. Alban’s this day are all being raised by a grandparent.
This particular event, held Sept. 8 in anticipation of Grandparents Day on Sept. 10, allowed the gathered children to write cards to their grandparent caregivers and bake cookies to accompany their handmade cards, all under the watchful eyes of local support group Healthy Grandparents.
“There’s a bunch of reasons grandparents may raise their grandchildren,” said Healthy Grandparents Program Coordinator Elizabeth Mazza. “We’re here to provide services to the grandparents and the children.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 5.7 million grandparents live with children 18 or younger, and 2.4 million are the primary caregiver to their grandchildren, 92,000 in Georgia. Many of these grandparents are unprepared to raise a second generation of children, living on fixed incomes or not prepared for the physical effort handling young children can require.
Created as a support net for those grandparents who find themselves raising their children’s children, whether due to death, abandonment, crime or some other event that leaves a child without their biological parent, Healthy Grandparents works to ensure that these extended families remain stable.
“We have a monthly support group for the grandchildren and one for the grandparents,” Mazza said. “We hold health screenings with a part-time nurse. If we can keep families healthy, keep the grandparents healthy, they can continue to raise these children.”
Keeping families together lies at the core of Healthy Grandparents, funded by Promoting Safe and Stable Families through the state Department of Human Resources and managed by the Athens Community Council on Aging, and the programs it offers.
“Many of these children would be in foster care had not their grandparents stepped in,” Mazza said. “We had five adoptions last year by the grandparents. We want these children to stay with family.”
In addition to Mazza, Healthy Grandparents is staffed by three University of Georgia interns, social work majors all, who serves as caseworkers for the 25 families serviced by the organization.
“We call them, check in on them and make sure they’re OK,” said Megan Yarbrough, a senior at UGA and one of the program’s interns. “We’re just a big support system for them.”
Yarbrough has worked with Healthy Grandparents for close to a month and said the experience had been one to remember.
“I’m enjoying it,” Yarbrough said. “They say at the school that it’s one of the most rewarding internships a student can have. It helps out a lot to really see if this is what you want to do.”
No one appreciates Healthy Grandparents more, however, than the grandparents who are serviced by the program.
“It’s really been a blessing,” said Ruth Brewer, who has raised her two grandchildren, Joel and Nicole Cofield, since the death of their father 10 years ago. “It’s nice to have somebody come out and check on you, especially when you’re by yourself and lonesome.”
Brewer, whose older grandchild Joel is now attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on scholarship, said the group was vital to many people.
“I think it’s good for Walton County to have something like this,” Brewer said. “It’s just a blessing for the kids who don’t have anywhere to go.”
As Brewer and Nicole prepared to send some of the cookies they prepared Friday to Joel in Cambridge, Mazza said the support they experienced was the goal for every family in the program.
“We try to provide a safe and stable home,” Mazza said. “That’s the ultimate goal — providing these children with stable homes.”
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