The Georgia Home Visiting Institute was held August 20^th in Peachtree City. This annual training and motivational experience is for Georgia’s home visitors who serve expectant and at-risk families with children from birth until kindergarten. Home visiting uses a strengths-based, family-centered support strategy that helps families raise children who are physically, socially, and emotionally healthy and ready to learn.

Georgia’s Department of Public Health operates several programs throughout Georgia, and CFR provides support services. Led by CFR’s Michelle Lanier, the Home Visiting Technical Assistance and Quality Team Director, CFR helped plan, organize, and lead the Institute.

See: Honoring a Pillar of Service: Steve Beach Receives the 2023 OIBR Service Legacy Award

CFR received renewed funding this fall from Georgia’s Department of Public Health, Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, and the United Way of Greater Atlanta to continue our work helping ensure high quality home visiting services for at risk families, beginning prenatally and continuing through age 5, across the state of Georgia.

Under the leadership of CFR’s Associate Director, Dr. Anita Brown, CFR’s Technical Assistance and Quality Team provides technical assistance and training for Georgia’s Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program which comprises home visiting programs in 62 counties.  The DFCS funds support training and technical assistance for First Steps screening program which links families to community resources and programs, including home visiting if they are eligible. The United Way funds are specifically to support Georgia’s Parents as Teachers (PAT) state office where CFR employee Jessica Gurnow provides technical assistance and training for all current PAT programs and guidance to communities interested in starting a program. The funds also support the annual Home Visiting Institute, a day-long series of workshops available to all home visiting staff across the state and organized by CFR’s Home Visiting Technical Assistance and Quality Director, Michelle Lanier.

Sierra Carter on the importance of

understanding how racism impacts health

Dr. Carter describes her line of research studying racial trauma, accelerated aging, and the promotion of health-equity research during a presentation at UGA.

We have confronted racism in new ways in recent years, but “historically,” says Dr. Sierra Carter, “we have not had conversations about what that means for livelihood, what that means for trajectories of life.” She set about explaining why it is important to study the effects of racism on health in her presentation to faculty, staff, and students gathered at the Miller Learning Center’s Reading Room on October 12th. The presentation, entitled, “Black people deserve to grow old: Racial trauma, accelerated aging, and the Promotion of Health-Equity Related Research,” was co-sponsored by the Center for Family Research, the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, and the departments of Human Development & Family Science and Psychology.

Carter says there has been important research in recent years on things like how racism-caused stress gets “under the skin,” some of it by people in the room she noted, but she says there is much more to do. “I think there’s still research to be done around the biological embedding of racism,” she explained. “We look at it in isolated spaces, and we don’t think about its life course impact.”

Carter’s research integrates psychology, biology, public health, and developmental science providing evidence that: (1) racism is a multi-level influence that undermines health across the lifespan and over multiple generations; (2) the existence of entrenched racism requires development of culturally-informed, prevention-oriented interventions among underrepresented populations, and (3) the deeply entrenched nature of racism requires dissemination of findings to affected populations, policymakers, as well as to fellow scholars.

Dr. Carter is an Associate Professor of Clinical and Community Psychology at Georgia State University.