UGA Professor Leads Project to Improve Athens’ Needs

The community-wide Athens Wellbeing Project is partnering with local organizations to enhance the outcomes achieved by local institutions and organizations through collecting and sharing open-access data that is representative of Athens-Clarke County’s population. 

The project partners with The Unified Government of Athens-Clarke County is partnering with the Clarke County School District, the Athens Area Community Foundation, Family Connection-Communities in Schools, the United Way of Northeast Georgia, and the University of Georgia. As part of the Athens Wellbeing Project, Dr. Grace Bagwell Adams, who teaches in UGA’s College of Public Health and in the online Graduate Certificate in Public Health, said the data is used to target the city and citizens’ needs as a whole. 

“It’s really aimed at getting good quality representative data of all kinds of households in our community to help inform the work that organizations are doing,” Bagwell Adams said.

The “Get Comfortable” campaign has stemmed from this data—the philanthropic campaign is sponsored by Creature Comforts among other partners. The funds collected through “Get Comfortable” is allocated to nonprofit organizations in the Athens community. The data collected from Athens Well Being Project is primarily used to create conversations on how to allocate funds to nonprofits in the community. The project also collects data on family’s level needs such as health, housing, education and socioeconomic status. This data is then introduced to the Get Comfortable advisory board.

“The data is being used to really help understand what are the most pressing needs and how to allocate funds to the nonprofits that are meeting those needs.”

Here is a link to the video on Athens CEO and to the Athens Wellbeing Project website.