About the Partnership!
The Healthy Lumpkin Community Partnership recognizes that good health is a community-level task.
It takes all of us working together to ensure good health--which we have defined broadly, in all of its aspects.
Our goal in starting the Partnership was to create a self-sustaining consortium drawing upon the collective strengths
of the NGCSU graduate programs and community service providers.
The Partnership has become an even larger endeavor. Why not create partnerships among all of the various groups in our
community that have the same goal of good health? It seems like an obvious idea now, but at the time it seemed rather
innovative to start conversations to explore how to serve the health needs of all of the citizens of Lumpkin County.
After all, we all have something at stake. We need support in adopting healthy lifestyles and habits. We need mutual
encouragement to stay healthy. We need one another's vision in finding solutions for the health issues of our day.
Origin of the Partnership
“Two events sparked the idea for the Healthy Lumpkin Community Partnership. First there were a series of presentations on Leadership. In this series, Charles Hawkins spoke about Servant Leadership, a concept not unfamiliar to me, but surprising to hear in an academic forum. Then, the Faculty Leadership Grant invitations came out and they described only opportunities for undergraduate venues. That bothered me a bit, for I felt that our professional graduate programs had so much to offer our community, particularly if they were to include a service learning component. I was also interested in community outreach by some kind of consortium of our graduate professional programs. In meetings during the fall of 2003, this idea received encouragement, especially when we discussed ways to test the concept, leading to a Faculty Leadership Grant proposal.
So, bottom line, three motivators: (1) Charles Hawkins' presentation on Servant Leadership in an academic environment; (2) the initial invitations for Faculty Leadership Grants not describing opportunities for graduate level venues; (3) my conviction that graduate professional programs could provide an important outreach activity for the institution and the community, coupled with encouraging and participatory leadership support.”Robert J. Laird
www.ngcsu.edu
