On Thursday, July 27, Augusta University’s College of Nursing hosted a school supplies drive in conjunction with the Healthy Grandparents Program to provide more than 150 backpacks to children being raised by their grandparents.
“We get the listings from Richmond County schools so they can tell us what [each grade level] needs, and then we go up to the College of Nursings’ fifth floor and we just pack them,” said Kevin Velez, executive assistant to the College of Nursing’s dean. “We have ones for kindergarteners and upwards. We even have extra backpacks in case the kids don’t like the designs of the ones we already have packed up, they can just switch them out.”
First started by the College of Nursing in 1999, Program Coordinator Mike Patton said the Healthy Grandparents Program was established to provide physical, emotional and social support to grandparents and great-grandparents who are raising their grandchildren, ages 0-17, living in parent-absent homes.
“It’s basically a community outreach program funded by grant money from the state and we provide a variety of support services,” said Patton. “For a lot of our grandparents, they’ve been taking care of their grandchildren for a long time without any support at all, particularly if they don’t have legal custody – so they don’t have access to benefits.”
One way the organization promotes and increases families’ access to resources is by hosting an annual book bag drive where children can also be given blankets and other age-appropriate school necessities, prior to the start of school in the fall.
“I think it’s hard for people to fathom that a grandfather at 60 or 65 years old is responsible for his three, four or five grandchildren,” said Patton. “It’s a full-time job with little to no break times at all.”
Stripped of their traditional position of “spoiling their grandkids,” Patton said, in several cases, these grandparents are the only thing keeping many of the students from being placed in the foster care system. Faced with a daunting task, Patton said many grandparents even question their parenting ability to follow through in the long run due to their age.
“You’ve got grandparents that are retired or about to be, and all of a sudden they could go from raising two grandkids to raising eight,” said Patton describing the hardships and struggles some program members endure. “You can only imagine the stress on that family – financial stress, emotional stress and everything else that’s going on. Grandparents deal with a lot of different challenges when raising children.”
This is where the program’s monthly support group meetings step in to provide a secure sense of community and encouragement for the road ahead. According to Patton, mentors and peer-to-peer communication is the key to preventing parenthood burnout and self-doubt.
“I’ve always said that [members] can get more support from one another than they can us,” said Patton.
Staten Heard, who has been a member of the grandparent program for over a decade, said getting to meet others who understand the situation very clearly, leads to invaluable friendships to be maintained in the future.
“It’s comforting to know that maybe there are others who also struggle to share some of the stresses and other concerns,” said Heard. “After a while, you get to know people and then you look forward to seeing them too.”
Velez said the program not only provided great resources for the grandparents – such as Christmas gifts, wellness checkups, and various other things – but also allowed nursing students to gain real world experience by sometimes participating in the clinics they hosted.
To Patton, the program is nothing without the loving and appreciative grandparents and their wonderful grandchildren.
“One of the best things, for me personally, is being a part of the program for so long that I get to see the kids grow up. I’ve seen some of the kids grow up, graduate high school and come to work at Augusta University,” said Patton. “I love seeing how these children, who have come to live with their grandparents through some very challenging circumstances, get put in the right home and the right environment with the grandparents, and watching them thrive. I love it; it’s the best thing about this program.”
Heard said he was grateful the program existed because it created a unique environment for an usual group of older adults, and Patton has always made sure to check-in with the various families and pay special attention to the children whenever possible.
