The Putnam County Family Connection Collaborative (PCFCC) held its monthly meeting on August 21 at The Plaza Arts Center in Eatonton.
Adam Swymer, regional manager of the Georgia Family Connection Partnership, welcomed more than 15 new and returning community members from the education, healthcare, business, and religious sectors, among others.
The meeting opened with everyone getting up and moving with a group activity. Attendees were handed pictures and asked not to show anyone else in the group what they received. As each picture zoomed further out of a scene, the images went in a certain order. The goal was to effectively communicate what your picture portrayed to other attendees and place them in the correct sequence.
Swymer did not tell the attendees how to organize and accomplish this task, giving them the creative freedom to solve the problem themselves within a 15-minute timeframe.
“One takeaway we wanted to make sure you had in this activity, was to have a really diverse group in the room that represents the community, both demographically and socioeconomically,” Swymer explained. “Each one has a unique perspective or point of view; that unique perspective only they know about that might help you. Or particularly if you get into a more specific problem, you can have more specific conversations with different stakeholders and bring valuable points of view.”
Next, minutes from the previous month’s meeting were approved, and then, Marcell Johnson was introduced as the new regional manager for Putnam County Family Connection.
“Putnam, I look forward to working with you all,” Johnson told attendees. “I live right now in the metro area, but I’m originally from Augusta. So, Georgia is home. And I’ve worked with many families, both metro and rural.”
In the future, Swymer said, more steps remain to be taken by the collaborative.
“We still need someone to step up and be the chairperson to get the contract with the Department of Human Services so that the funding can come in and then, therefore, pay for the position,” he said.
Swymer also discussed upcoming events, including the Georgia Family Connection Conference, Oct. 2-4, at the Legacy Lodge and Conference Center on Lake Lanier Island in Buford.
For anyone interested, he suggested visiting gafcp.org/conference online for more information.
“That’s open to certainly coordinators and board members, but any collaborative partners that are interested in going and hearing about how collaborators do their work or best practices around things that collaborators work on,” he said.
Following this, Rev. Dr. Craig Williamson, senior pastor of Eatonton’s First Baptist Church, discussed some of the details of the upcoming Putnam Health Fair.
“It is scheduled for November 2nd this year. It will be here at The Plaza,” Williamson told attendees. “We’ll be using some of the indoor space for things like blood donations, HIV screening, and some vision screenings, and other services like that will be available."
“This is a collaborative that happens between the Georgia Health Care Innovation Center, which is located on the campus of Mercy University of Macon,” he added.
Additionally, discussions addressed ways to improve future meetings, such as holding more partner sharing and more distinctly establishing priorities for the collaboration. The group discussed working with neighboring and similar counties’ collaboratives on the top issues.
The next PCFCC meeting will be Sept. 18, again at The Plaza. For more information, visit putnam.gafcp.org.