Garrison named to Advisory Council

Calhoun resident Karina Garrison was recently selected to serve as an inaugural member of the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services new Georgia Parent Advisory Council, which will weigh in on strategies for helping the agency promote resources to prevent the main causes of child abuse and neglect.

Committee members are volunteers with lived experience in accessing community-based prevention services available to families in Georgia or with lived experience in the child welfare system. Garrison has both.

As a child, she spent three years in foster care and chose to remain in care after turning 18 to receive assistance offered through the Division’s Independent Living Program for college. With that assistance, Garrison earned an Associate’s Degree in criminal justice.

She is now employed by the Georgia Department of Community Supervision, the agency responsible for supervising about 180,000 adult offenders in communities across the state, and gives back to her community in her personal life through her work with the Gordon County Family Resource Center.

There, she promotes the welfare of children as the parent representative on the Parents as Teachers/First Steps Advisory Board. That board ensures the health and safety of children by matching parents and caregivers with trained professionals who make regular personal home visits during a child’s earliest years in life, from prenatal through kindergarten.

Georgia gets more than 140,000 reports of alleged child abuse each year, mostly related to neglect. Child neglect most commonly results

from social and environmental influences such as substance abuse, mental illness, poverty and lack of parenting knowledge. Community-based prevention services can be effective in addressing these risk factors.

“Determined communities can do something about

child abuse and neglect, and our job is to help them learn how,” said Natalie Towns, director of child abuse prevention for the agency’s Prevention and Community Support section. “The Parent Advisory Council will make sure we’ve thought of every avenue.”

The council’s mission will also include working to expand partnerships between parents and agency staff and to reduce the need for out-ofhome placement of children in foster care. It will provide training to other parents and advocate for improvements in the child-welfare system.