Bring the family together and create priceless memories and meaningful input from all family members. Fellow community partner: Strengthen Families Program, Certified Trainer P’Angela Jones is joined by her husband Darryl and the entire Jones family to demonstrate.
Michael Kirkland of Family Ministries joins the HFI team to discuss how to overcome stress and turn toward your family. While you may feel the need to get away, Michael shares ways that you can change your mindset and make the most of this moment.
We need distribute healthy messages in our home not only to our spouse, but to our children, pets, friends, etc. Here are some techniques you can begin using today and continue throughout a lifetime in order to help keep a healthy home and family.
3 times a day
Give the people you love an endearing touch.
2 times a day
Model the behavior you want the people you love to see in the future.
1 time a day
Come to the center and do something together.
Being home with your family presents challenges and opportunities. Join GCO’s Joyce Mayberry and Katherine Greene as they share ways that you can take care of yourself and your community.
It’s an unprecedented time across Georgia, America, and the world as we all grapple with Coronavirus. As schools and daycare centers shut their doors to prevent further spread, millions of parents are faced with a new way of life, alone at home with the kids all day.
At GCO, we believe that family is vital—now more so than ever. So we’re approaching this as a great time for families to connect and interact in new ways. Here are a few ways to do that.
Family Activities
Doing activities together can open up opportunities for conversations and interactions that wouldn’t come naturally.
These resources can help you identify a few ways to stay engaged with each other.
1.
Fun Things To Do In The House
- Play a Board Game
- Start your spring garden by planting seeds indoors
- Build a fort using blankets
- Make colorful slime out of Elmer’s glue and borax
- Learn a language on Duolingo
- Take the “try not to laugh challenge” on YouTube
- Do a family puzzle
- Have a family reading hour
- Watch a streaming movie
- Enjoy as actor, Josh Gad (voice of Olaf in Frozen), reads to storybooks to the kids on Twitter
- Do an arts and craft project
2.
Explore Your Neighborhood
- Take a walk
- Take a hike in an area where there aren’t a lot of people
- Try to discover and write down all of the plants and animals in your neighborhood
- Play yard games like spikeball, badmitton or Boche ball
- Play catch
Online Resources
Explore the world online.
While it’s great to explore museums and parks in-persons, it’s not always an option. That is why many of these institutions provide virtual tours or adventures you can enjoy online.
1.
Tour International Museums (Virtually)
- The Palace Museum in China
- Hallwyl Museum in Stockholm
- Byzantine and Christian Virtual Museum
- The Louvre in Paris
- The Hermitage in Russia
- Westminster Abbey in London
- The Science Museum in London
2.
Explore American History
- National Museum of Natural History
- The Frick in Pittsburgh
- Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan
- American Battlefield Trust
- Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
- George Washington’s Mount Vernon
3.
Online Learning
- Smithsonian Learning Lab
- Watch GCO’s Online Family Learning Series
- The Field Museum
- Exploratorium Science Experiments
- Shedd Aquarium Sea Curious Quiz
- Glazer Children’s Museum Online Activities
- Khan Academy Online Learning
What is your family doing to connect while you are at home?
Let Us Know In The Comments
The kids are on summer break and the parents are looking to make the most of the time together.
What do you do? Family road trip? Go to the park for a barbecue? Head out to the local ballpark and catch a game?
Family Activities Equals Family Values
Whatever you do this summer, do it with the purpose of connecting (or reconnecting) with family. Join GCO’s Healthy Family Initiative as we promote and foster family-promotion.
While many understate the importance of family, we know that a strong family can lead to the support necessary for opportunity. This is especially true to those that are stuck in poverty.
Share and Inspire
Because of this we are asking everyone to share and tag their family fun on social media with the hashtag #HFISummerFun. This lets your followers and all that use the tag view and be inspired by the value of a strong family.
Even if you don’t have pictures of your own to share, simply liking or commenting can go a long way to get out the message of the importance of family.
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.
Healthy families are the bedrock of a healthy, prosperous society. They are the place where children develop the values, skills, and habits that largely determine the kind of adults they will become.
Georgia Center for Opportunity’s Healthy Families Initiative (HFI) launch on Thursday, April 7th was a great success. The goal of the event was to bring together community leaders, certified trainers, pastors, businesses, and GCO supporters for a day of focusing on families and to provide them with news about this new initiative and the work being done in Norcross and Peachtree Corners.
Joyce Whitted, HFI Program Manager, shared detailed information about the five focus areas of the initiative, including:
1. Launching a PR campaign saturating the community with positive messaging about family.
2. Providing relationship education and enrichment courses.
3. Working with local churches and other religious organization to provide mentoring to adolescents and young couples
4. Improving vocational education and apprenticeship opportunities in the area
5. Working with leaders to ensure state laws encourage family formation
Community partners like the A.Worley Boys & Girls Club, Norcross Human Services Center, Robert D. Fowler YMCA, Single Parent Alliance Resource Center, and Community Based Mentoring were in attendance to lend their support for the program. Guest speakers Bishop Garland Hunt of The Father’s House, Greg Griffin, a Christian counselor, and Shay Marlowe, Goodwill Career Services and a HFI Certified Trainer in 24/7 Dad all echoed the importance of healthy families and how it impacts everyone in Georgia.
Beverly Washington, a resident of Norcross, stated that her greatest take-a-ways were “Networking and seeing so many passionate individuals focused on helping our community.”
The certified trainers who have been on the ground helping to educate individuals and families on healthy relationship skills were also on-hand to give personal accounts of their interactions with participants in the programs being offered through the HFI Initiative.
The event was a success because those in attendance expressed their passion to be part of the positive focus on healthy families and, ultimately, to see the negative trends plaguing families in Georgia reversed.
For more information about how to get involved with the Healthy Families Initiative visit www.hfigeorgia@opportunity.org or call 877-814-0535.
I may be dating myself, but there used to be a radio show that I enjoyed entitled “Calling all Cars.” The title of the show was based on a saying used in the show that was merely an order given to all available units that there was something wrong – like a crime in progress – and help was needed immediately. There were two reasons that I liked that show. First, the episodes were based on real-life stories. Secondly, and most importantly, I liked the idea of having a mantra or a call to action that brought people together to help others.
Today there are a lot of families who need help because they are struggling – to form, to remain healthy, or stay together. And the causes for the struggles families face are many – lack of education, unstable employment, communication problems, or misplaced government assistance. Georgia Center of Opportunity is currently working with community partners through the Healthy Families Initiative to remove many of these barriers with the goal of helping all Georgians enjoy a healthy family life.
The Healthy Families Initiative kicked off this month in the Norcross and Peachtree Corners communities as a means to combat the issues in life that keep families from forming and thriving. Through the initiative, we are providing tools to individuals, couples, and partner organizations that will allow them champion and experience healthy relationships and strong marriages.
The collaboration of the community is extremely vital to this program. The community can engage in fostering the growth of this program in a number of ways, including by offering prayer for this initiative, as well as prayer for those teaching and participating in the classes. When this program is successful, the entire community will reap the rewards of more children being born to their married parents, growing up in homes characterized by healthy relationships, and living lives free of poverty and deprivation.
We’re asking for prayer teams to become our partners in prayer for one month. If we can have a church every month praying for those in the Norcross and Peachtree Corners area, think of how many families that can be helped! We really need your prayers, and can provide a detailed prayer list. If you or your organization would like to find out more, please email me at joyce.whitted@georgiaopportunity.org or call @ 770-242-0001 x707. We really need your help!
With the Christmas season upon us, we find ourselves spending more time with family and reminiscing about holiday traditions we started as children. Today there is sufficient evidence to show these traditions play a positive role in families and will have a lasting influence.
Whether the traditions are for the holidays or carried out all year long, traditions provide security, strengthen family relationships, and teach children family values.
In the late 90s when researchers first looked at the importance of traditions, they found that families believed traditions improved the strength of their family. Families recognize the importance of spending quality time with the people they love and how this time fosters family stability.
When families have traditions, they create an environment which enables all family members to feel secure. Traditions give children something to look forward to. It is important for parents to begin traditions that will continue through their child’s early years. Parents provide family unity when they understand and emphasize the importance of family traditions.
When families join together to celebrate milestones, holidays and allow for traditions not only are memories being created, but the emotional health of the family is being improved. When families continue traditions, children have been found to have better emotional health. In a New York Times article, Dr. Steven J. Wolin, a psychiatrist at George Washington University, found that individuals who grew up in a family with traditions, were “more likely to be resilient as an adult.”
Family traditions are more than just joining together once a year at the holidays. They can be carried out all year long, and help families to prosper.
If your family does not have traditions, I encourage you to look for opportunities that can be turned into traditions. It could be having dinner as a family, reading to your child before bed, or visiting your favorite store on a special day every year as my family does. Whatever traditions you choose, know that you are giving your family the most precious gift, your time.
On behalf of everyone here at GCO, I want to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas.