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A Healthy New Start for Homeless Families

Duke nursing students teach Genesis Home residents

Wonderful things often happen by chance. Just ask Ryan Fehrman, executive director of Genesis Home, a transitional shelter for homeless families in Durham.

An accidental meeting of Genesis Home's board chair, Graham Fitzsimons, and Dr. Dorothy Powell, director of the Global and Community Health Initiative at Duke's School of Nursing, led to a "Raising Health, Raising Hope," a new community service partnership between Duke nursing students and Genesis Home.

The program started this past fall with a founding group of eight students in Duke's accelerated bachelor's of nursing program. The group taught four health education workshops to Genesis Home residents once a month, starting in September.

Since most of Genesis Home's families are headed by single mothers, workshops have focused on family issues, including dental hygiene, healthy cooking, exercise and wellness, nutrition and women's health. "September," a shelter resident with a six-month old baby boy, said she and other residents always left the sessions talking about what they had learned. "We even talked about what the nurses told us when they weren't here," she said.

The nursing students shaped the course curriculum around what the Genesis Home residents told them they needed to know. "The residents had a rowdy 45-minute discussion" at a house meeting in August to learn what health issues concerned residents, Fehrman said.

Often, residents asked the students for more information about the topic covered, said Katie Sligh, co-chair of the founding group.

"We hope the residents get to see what nursing has to offer," said Ryan Davis, the students' other co-chair. Davis added that some have told her they would like to "get into nursing as a career."

Thinking about a career is a big step for someone recently homeless, because, Powell said, "homeless people often feel hopeless, they have a poor self concept."

"These classes have helped raise the residents' awareness of health issues," Powell said.

One of the topics was how to get a quick workout at home. The students used sand-filled water bottles as weights and gave them away after the session was over.

"Later that week while walking through the house, I ran into one of our new moms in the living room watching an exercise show and pumping her sand weights," Fehrman said. "I thought it was inspiring to see one of our clients using the information from the workshop to make her life better in some small way."

The nursing student organizers are graduating, but they've arranged to hand off the program to 10 new Duke students in January to enable the program the continue.

Genesis Home has served Durham since 1989. Fehrman said from 75 to 80 percent of families maintain stable housing arrangements after they leave the shelter.

The shelter receives federal government funding, and foundation grants, but depends heavily on the community for financial and, particularly, volunteer support. "Our largest need," Fehrman said, "is tutorial support for shelter residents" who are all considered at-risk to stay at grade level and pass their EOGs.

For more information, call (919) 683-5878 or e-mail ryan@genesishome.org.