After founding the Grace & Joy House in Dalton three years ago, Amanda Gillean and her husband Robert quickly realized the needs of children waiting for placement in foster care reached further than just Whitfield County.
That’s one of the reasons why the Grace & Joy House team began work on a facility in Chatsworth earlier this year.
The new facility, originally a long-abandoned residential home, will open in January and will seek to give Murray County’s foster families and the children who are taken into state custody closer access to comfort, care and training.
Ron Johnson, the project coordinator, said the remodeling of the home was a great undertaking.
“When I first saw the (original) house, it was dramatically different,” Johnson said. “It had not been lived in for about 17 years; it’s a 1961-built house and almost everything was original. We came and basically ended up taking out some walls and basically all of the paneling, ceilings, old insulation, carpet and old wiring. It was pretty much a complete rebuild on the inside.”
The project, which saw a budget of around $100,000, was met with an “incredible amount of support and donations,” said Johnson.
“A lot of that came from private donors and local churches in the Chatsworth area,” he said.
The facility will be furnished much like the Grace & Joy House’s Dalton facility, with a dedicated boys room, girls room, living area, kitchen, dining area, bathroom and storage areas. While there, children waiting for foster care placement will be provided with meals, clean clothes, toys, toiletry items and a comfortable bed — all of which will capture that “home feel,” Johnson said.
“Some churches said they would donate toward appliances or towards the roof, things like that,” he said. “It’s been incredible with that kind of generosity. They got us in contact with people who did the air conditioning and electrical; it was just amazing to see people say ‘Hey, we can help out.'”
The renovation included adding a new front porch, driveway and back deck area, which includes a long ramp.
“We had some other agencies help out with those projects,” Johnson said. “Rebuilding Hope (Ministries) came out and did the big ramp with some volunteers. The original house had a deck out front that was really dilapidated and the back deck was basically just a small concrete pad, so we built the ramp going up. We wanted to make everything accessible because there may be people who come here on walkers or in wheelchairs.”
Amanda Gillean said Johnson’s commitment has been amazing.
“I honestly don’t think we could have done this without him,” she said. “He’s dedicated a lot of hours and has definitely been an instrumental part.”
Unlike the Dalton facility, the Grace & Joy House in Chatsworth will be split into two sections, with a door separating the two. One side will contain the rooms and furnishings for children who are awaiting foster care, while a separate side of the house will contain two visitation rooms and a check-in station for parents who are given court-ordered supervised visitation with their child before a judge may grant them custody back.
“It will just be a place where (parents can) come in and we’ll have two rooms set up for them,” Gillean said. “There will be books and games, and there will be a table there so they can eat dinner together if they wanted to. It’s really a place for them to hang out and have some family time together during supervised visits.”
As the term suggests, part of supervised visitation involves monitoring the visits.
“The visitation rooms will have a camera in them and there will be a supervisor with a monitor outside,” Gillean said. “They’ll have their privacy and they can go in there and shut the door, but because it has to be a supervised visit, we do have to monitor them.”
With the inclusion of the visitation rooms, the Grace & Joy House’s Chatsworth facility will be the first child visitation center in Murray County. Previously, parents in the county who were allowed reunification meetings and visitations with their child would have to travel to Dalton.
Gillean said the Grace & Joy House is currently partnering with Compassion House in Dalton, which helps to restore and stabilize relationships between parents and their children who have been taken into custody and placed in foster care.
“We talked to them about potentially becoming an extension of them in Chatsworth, where they can use our facility,” she said.
One of the bigger obstacles that the Chatsworth facility looks to alleviate, Johnson said, is travel.
“In these types of scenarios, one of the big challenges is transportation,” he said. “If you’ve got (a parent) from the south or north end of Murray County and they’ve got to get all the way over to Dalton while also having to get to work, it can be tough to get over there and back in time. So this will be huge for Murray County.”
Gillean said the new facility will not only help serve children but also an all-too-often forgotten piece of the puzzle — foster parents.
“Initially, we hope for this to be a soft landing place for the children when they first come into custody, where we can supply them with all of their immediate needs,” she said. “But we also want to be a support for the foster families. Murray County has more than 70 foster children, but only three foster families; there’s a great need here.
“It’s so important for the foster parents to feel supported because it’s such a tough job. When they can get together, encourage each other and just be with people that really get what they’re doing, it makes a huge difference for them to continue on, because it’s hard and you have times when you think ‘I just need to quit.’ But when you can be around others, it can reenergize you a bit to keep going. So, we want to be a huge support for the foster parents and meet those type needs as well.”
Gillean said the new facility will also allow foster parents the opportunity to complete training with once-a-month sessions.
“I think this is huge to have this opening in Murray County because they usually have less services (available to them),” Johnson said. “Bringing them this service is going to make it much more convenient and accessible.”