Griffin Housing Authority held its Strong Families Initiative Saturday, June 1, 2019 in the old baseball field located at Spalding County’s Fairmont Park. The initiative originated as HUD’s Father’s Day in 2011, although it is well known that it’s the mothers that do much of the heavy lifting as it relates to raising families.
In public housing communities where 75% of families are led by single women, that’s an enormous amount of responsibility, and one which should be given due consideration. HUD’s focus on Father’s Day was intended to bring awareness to the grim statistics children living in father-absent homes face. Fatherhood should not only be a topic with which we speak only with men. Fatherhood programs have more recently found that if they only work with men and never connect with their female partners, then there is less reason for the female partner to want to connect with the father.
Our new focus on both parents will aim to connect men and women to resources that will aid in improving these outcomes and unify the family. Involved fathers empower mothers, and by empowering mothers, families succeed.
