Crisp County Community Council Discusses Community Needs

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Crisp County Community Council, a Georgia Family Connection Collaborative, held a meeting, inviting representatives from different social services to collaborate and share.

Monica Robinson is the executive director of Crisp County Community Council, which works with families that have children in the Crisp County School System. She shared highlights from the meeting, including the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), which seeks data directly from high schoolers. “That is the data that we need to drive us and steer us in the right direction as a Collaborative as to what it is we need to be working on, what resources we need, and where our population is.”

Dr. Christa Raines is a regional director with Benchmark Human Services, which helps people who need mental health services. “We have a new contract, and we service Crisp County. That’s been a part of our service area, and we provide crisis services to people who are in the community who reach out to the Georgia crisis access line, or the 988 phone lines.”

Raines gave collaboration as a key takeaway of the meeting. “It’s good to see people here in the community. We’re getting to know them, so that when we’re actually out there on the ground, you know, rolling and doing our job, we’ll have a resource list that we can refer to quickly. . . to point people in the correct direction so that we can help them and be more effective.”

Raines appreciated the meeting’s pragmatic focus. “I like that this meeting was very informal, because they’re really interested in real topics and how to resolve them and how to provide resources to people.” Mary L. Beal was another attendee at the meeting.

She’s currently working to get Family Living Improvement Plans, or FLIP, off the ground. “I was brought up in this community to loving parents, parents who valued education, who valued economics, who valued health and wellness, and family unity.”

Beal is building the program around those values. “It’s based on six pillars: spirituality, education, finance, economics, health and wellness, and family relations.”

She pointed to a couple of strong mentors as another reason she wanted to support others. “I wanted to share that experience with the kids who are coming up in Cordele and Crisp County, and Dooly County.”

The program is in its infancy, with four families that have already joined. They aim to get three more for their initial trial run. “That’s our goal, seven families to really get empirical data so that we can take it further.”

Read the story on cordeledispatch.com.