The School of Nursing’s Healthy Grandparent Program and Kinship Care Center provide support and services to 
grandparents and other relative caregivers. The Healthy Grandparent Program provides serves grandparents raising grandchildren in Richmond and Columbia Counties. The program, funded by the Georgia Department of Human Resources Safe and Stable Families Program and the Medical College of Georgia's School of Nursing, is currently one of 3 programs in Georgia.
In addition, a grant from Johnson & Johnson/Rosalynn Carter Institute supported the development of a graduate nursing student education program on mental health problems of children and the initiation of a mental health screening program of children raised by grandparents. The Kinship Care Center, supported by a grant from the CSRA Regional Development Center Area Agency on Aging (AAA), extends the support and referral services of the Healthy Grandparent Program to all relative caregivers in the AAA 14-county region including Burke, Columbia, Glascock, Hancock, Jefferson, Jenkins, Lincoln, McDuffie, Richmond, Screven, Taliaferro, Warren, Washington, and Wilkes counties. Families may qualify for participation in one or both of these support programs depending on their relationship to the child they are raising and their county of residence.
It is estimated that 1.3 million children are currently being raised by grandparents in parent absent homes. Grandparents who are caring for their grandchildren are more likely to be poorer, younger, African-American, unmarried, living in the South, and non-high school graduates than grandparents who are not primary caregivers to their grandchildren. In Georgia, 98,773 grandparents and other relative are raising children in homes without their parents. Children are in the care of their grandparents or other relatives as the result of abuse and/or neglect by their parents; parental drug use, HIV/AIDS, incarceration, mental or physical illness, or death.
MCG School of Nursing is working to provide these caregivers with the support and services they need to rear their grandchildren to be healthy, well-adjusted, productive citizens.
