by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Oct 11, 2017
Many years ago we began laying the groundwork for the Healthy Families Initiative (HFI), and two years ago we kicked off a public campaign to change the hearts and minds of those in the Norcross and Peachtree Corners areas. Your support, partnerships, and prayers have allowed us the opportunities to continue to expand the HFI program in ways we originally only dreamed about. So, it’s with great excitement we share with you exciting news about the growth of HFI.
Online classes are here! Participants can get all the same valuable information and tools from the FREE community classes, but in the comfort of their home and at their own pace.
It is our hope that having a FREE online option will allow more people to build healthy, happy, and lasting relationships with their spouses, families, and children.
As of today, the following courses are available for enrollment through the HFI website:
- ePrep: Maximizing Your Romantic Relationship
- For Dating, Engaged, or Married Couples
- This course is for couples who want to make their relationship the best it can be. It will challenge you to think about things you’ve never thought about before and help you to see yourself, your partner, and your relationship in a whole new light.
*This course uses material from Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP).
- Head Meets Heart (formerly known as Sex, Lies, and Relationships)
- Primarily for singles
- This program teaches students how to pace the development of a new relationship in a healthy way, and it also covers the five areas in a partner’s life that accurately predict what type of person they’ll be in a long-term relationship.
* This course uses material from Dr. John Van Epp’s How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk or Jerkette.
We know schedules are busy, and the online courses offer a self-paced journey to more effective communication in your life. Plus, they’re all free!
It is our goal to continue to grow the online courses offered – stay tuned for more!
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Aug 25, 2017
Being a dad is one of the greatest challenges in life, but it often gets overlooked. Though the everyday joys of being a father are overshadowed in pop culture by fast-paced news and Hollywood gossip, that doesn’t mean celebrity dads aren’t talking about how their kids are changing their lives for the better.
Beginning August 25, the Georgia Center for Opportunity’s Healthy Families Initiative is introducing #FatherhoodFridays on social media, celebrating fatherhood in pop culture. The launch begins with a series of graphic ads featuring celebrity quotes highlighting the joys of parenthood.
HFI is currently preparing for two fall classes on fatherhood. Conversations of a Father, which is accepting registrations for the dates of September 30 and October 14. The full-day class for men reinforces characteristics they need to be good fathers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The class is free to attend, and breakfast and lunch will be provided.
For more information, visit the Healthy FamiliesInitiative online.
You can check out the series below, or watch for the ads every Friday on Facebook.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Jul 10, 2017
By: Randy Hicks and W. Bradford Wilcox
Although young men and women are taking what seems like a dizzying array of paths into adulthood these days, one path stands out as maximizing their shot at the American Dream: what scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill have called the “success sequence.” The sequence is a three-pronged formula for success in America: graduate from high school, get a full-time job (or have a partner who does), and then marry before having children. Now, a joint report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) shows this “success sequence” works for Millennials as well.
Released last month, the report tracked how an astounding 97 percent of the oldest Millennials (ages 28-34) who follow this threefold success sequence avoid poverty. In contrast, 53 percent of young adults who didn’t follow the sequence at all are in poverty. Moreover, those who delayed childbearing until after marriage are more likely to not only survive financially, but thrive—finding themselves in the middle or upper third of income earners.
These data hold true regardless of family background, socioeconomic status, or race. Seventy-six percent of African Americans and 81 percent of Hispanic young adults who marry first are in the middle to upper third of income distribution, alongside 87 percent of whites. And 71 percent of Millennials who grew up in households in the bottom third of income distribution but put marriage before the baby carriage had the same economic fortune.
Here’s the message for Millennials—success in America is partly grounded on the three pillars of work, education, and family. But what about young people who struggled with one or more of these steps? Over half of Millennials have already become parents prior to marriage, many remain underemployed, and 53 percent of young adults who have not followed the sequence at all are in poverty.
Closer to home, Atlanta scored horrifically low for social mobility among low-income individuals, according to a joint Harvard and Berkeley study, even though middle-class job growth in Atlanta is strong. In our metro area, poverty rates remain unacceptably high, particularly for minority populations. Even though young adults in the metro Atlanta area are about equally likely to miss steps in the success sequence as their counterparts nationwide, young adults in the state of Georgia are more likely to miss at least one step in the success sequence, compared to young adults in the nation as a whole (46 percent versus 44 percent).
However, for both young and old, this new research isn’t justification for giving up on those who have missed one or more steps on the sequence. Instead, we need to understand that each part of the success sequence can work to help individuals; it’s never too late to get life back on track.
For children caught in multi-generational cycles of poverty, a good education can be a stick in the spokes of the poverty cycle that slows it down; for an adult, it’s a job; and for couples, it may be relationship enrichment programs and other supports. When all three parts of the success sequence work together, however, we begin to see significant results in boosting opportunity for the rising generation.
Many of these solutions must come locally. Mr. Hicks’ organization, the Georgia Center for Opportunity, has been spearheading numerous efforts to bring together local employers, community leaders, schools, churches, and nonprofits to advance vocational training and apprenticeships for workforce development, expand education options for the most vulnerable children, and promote marriage enrichment initiatives to help families flourish.
Here’s the bottom line: While no statistical model can predict an individual’s future success perfectly, we can know what’s more likely to happen. The AEI-IFS report points to what both common sense and experience have already told us: particular paths into adulthood are more likely to give individuals a shot at flourishing than others.
At the same time, it’s crucial to acknowledge that everyone who doesn’t follow the success sequence isn’t destined for failure or disaster. Neither does it suggest that every child born into better conditions is guaranteed success. All the success sequence tells us is what paths are most advantageous for human flourishing.
And it forces us to ask some serious questions: If we care about people, are we not duty-bound to communicate the message of the success sequence, and to do what we can to remove barriers to a quality education, fulfilling work, and a stable family life?
W. Bradford Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a coauthor of The Millennial Success Sequence.
by Kimberly Sawatka | Apr 24, 2017
In a recent project spearheaded by the Center of the American Experiment, Georgia Center for Opportunity’s President and CEO, Randy Hicks, tackled the one topic even politicians and religious leaders are shying away from – family fragmentation.
The written symposium “Was Trump and Clinton’s Campaign Silence Regarding Family Fragmentation Golden?” is a collaboration of thirty writers answering two questions.
1. “Was Trump and Clinton’s campaign silence regarding family fragmentation golden?
2. Or was it leaden, especially when it comes to reducing poverty, improving education, and reversing crime?”
Click here to see the full essay.
by Eric Cochling | Mar 23, 2017
We know that to avoid poverty, it is essential to get a high school diploma, maintain a steady job, and marry before having children (see research from the Brookings Institution and Harvard University on these points). Not only are they key to avoiding poverty, upward mobility and financial stability are closely tied to this family-education-work sequence, as well.
That is why our recent reports are so disturbing. They show that most of our welfare programs are systematically undermining two of the three keys to avoiding poverty and are doing so for some of the most vulnerable groups in our society.
In the first paper, Disincentives for Work and Marriage in Georgia’s Welfare System, we show that many of our welfare programs – alone or when combined –actually penalize earning more and create dramatic “welfare cliffs”.
For many parents on public assistance, receiving a raise or working longer hours can result in dramatic reductions in welfare benefits, often completely erasing what they gain by working more or receiving a raise. Even worse, there are times when earning more money through additional work or a pay raise can result in less income to the family because government benefits are reduced so much all at one time.
When families find themselves in this position, they are effectively locked into dependency, unable to work themselves into self-sufficiency without having to endure sometimes long, crippling periods of financial hardship.
To make matters worse, a similar set of perverse incentives exist when a parent on welfare decides to marry.
For many moms on public assistance for example, deciding to marry a boyfriend or the father of their children can mean that family income is dramatically reduced due to an immediate and steep loss of benefits. In many cases, the disincentives to marriage only go away if the potential husband is earning much more money than would be expected or likely under the circumstances. The result is that these moms must choose between forming a family (and the financial and relational stability it can bring in the long-term) or the short-term financial health of their families.
For a parent in this position, it is easy to see why many would simply choose to stay single and cohabit rather than marry. Unfortunately, research also shows that cohabiting couples struggle with relational instability in ways that married couples do not, so the welfare system ends up encouraging people to enter into relationships that are less likely to last and less likely to provide the stability that would allow them to escape poverty.
While the welfare system was not intentionally designed to work this way, it is unjust nonetheless. If it worked as it should, the system would encourage work and family formation at every turn – as the surest antidotes to poverty.
That is why in our next report, we will be setting out a suggested set of reforms that the state and federal governments can adopt to reform the system in a way that creates a sustainable safety-net that encourages the behaviors that we know are needed for individuals and families to escape and stay out of poverty. We will also be providing a plan for a how a state can implement these reforms on the ground if it chooses to take on reforming the system.
If you want to see how the welfare cliff works for different family types and in each of Georgia’s 159 counties, visit www.welfarecliff.org.
by Eric Cochling | Feb 1, 2017
National Marriage Week will be celebrated next week, just in time for Valentine’s Day. The celebration is now in its eighth year and seeks to foster collaboration around the country to “strengthen individual marriages, reduce the divorce rate, and build a culture that fosters strong marriages.”
The Marriage Week campaign website cites to tons of research on the many benefits of marriage and they have provided a list of events taking place in Georgia next week to celebrate marriage.
At GCO, we believe marriage is indispensable to the creation of healthy families and a stable society. That’s why we encourage you to love your family, teach your children to value marriage and the commitment it requires, and to take part in next week’s celebration.
If you want to strengthen your own marriage, check our Healthy Families Initiative and the resources we offer there.
