Georgia Baptist Children’s Home and Family Ministries

More than 150 years of service

Written by JENNIFER LONDON  |  Photos Courtesy of GEORGIA BAPTIST CHILDREN’S HOME AND FAMILY MINISTRIES

The Georgia Baptist Children’s Home archway was moved from its former location in Hapeville to its current home in Palmetto.

The Georgia Baptist Children’s Home was founded in 1872 in Atlanta, providing care for orphaned and abandoned children throughout the state.

In 1899, the nonprofit charity found a permanent home in Hapeville after relocating several times over its first 27 years.

In the 1960s, air travel was becoming more popular, so the City of Atlanta purchased the 81-acre Hapeville Children’s Home campus in order to expand the operation of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. In 1968, Georgia Baptist Children’s Home relocated to Palmetto where a new campus on 400 acres was opened with more than 200 children and staff members moving into brand new cottages.

As society changed, so did the needs of children and families, according to Vice President of Ministries Ada Cornwell, who says additional programs were added to help support and offer critical services to Georgia residents. By the 1970s, most of the children who were being helped by the organization were coming from the foster care system due to neglect, abandonment or abuse.

“Our ministry has certainly evolved over the past 150 years, in line with the needs of children and families in our state,” says Cornwell. “The children and families we serve today come to us with more complex issues than ever before.”

Those issues range from homelessness to abuse and neglect.

“The trauma that most of them have experienced prior to coming into our care is sometimes unimaginable, but through God’s grace and the dedication of our staff, we are able to help them find hope, healing and a path to a healthy and meaningful future,” says Cornwell.

“Our children have had all types of walls and barriers put in front of them during their lives, and our mission at the Children’s Home is to tear all those barriers down and build each of them back up on the foundation of Jesus Christ,” says President/CEO Brian J. Hawkins.

In 2023, approximately 14,000 children are in the legal custody of the State of Georgia while an average of 240 incidents of confirmed child abuse are reported daily, according to Chris Hobbs, vice president of Communications and Development at Georgia Baptist Children’s Home and Family Ministries.

“Each year, we serve hundreds of kids through our statewide programs,” he says.

Georgia Baptist Children’s Home programs for children, youth and families have expanded with three residential campuses located in Palmetto, Meansville and Baxley. These homes provide various levels of residential care, counseling, educational services and weekend respite care for special needs children.

Says Hobbs: “The majority of our kids go to school on campus, and the reason for that is a lot of times when they get to us, they’ve probably been out of school for a while. They have fallen behind so far that to put them in a public school setting would be almost like setting them up for failure. In our campus school, they work at their own pace with our teachers.”

Camp Hawkins summer camp program serves children and young adults with developmental disabilities at the North and South Georgia campuses, according to Hobbs.

“At first they’re really anxious about it, but when Mom and Dad come to pick them up five days later, they don’t want to go home because they had such a great time,” says Hobbs. “They see that there are kids just like them, coping with the same types of things, and here, they can just enjoy life.”

Another Georgia Baptist Children’s Home ministry is Good Shepherd Center in Warm Springs. The center offers a residential farm-based program for boys and an outpatient equestrian riding therapy program for children and adults coping with various developmental disabilities.

Georgia Baptist also partners with Angel’s House, in Newnan, which provides residential care for teen girls. “We’ve worked with that board as a partner ever since it opened,” says Hobbs. “It’s a great relationship.”

Georgia Baptist’s Family Care program helps mothers and their children forced to leave their homes due to domestic violence and abuse. Families usually stay in the residential program for 9 to 12 months and are provided a place to live, food, clothing, counseling and spiritual guidance while working to rebuild their lives, according to Hobbs.

“They come to us with basically just whatever they have on their back, but we work with them and help them,” he says.

The nonprofit’s Family Foster Care ministry works to place foster children in individual homes throughout metro Atlanta and surrounding counties. With a shortage of available foster families, they work to recruit families via statewide church connections.

According to Hobbs, people often ask how they can help children served by Georgia Baptist Children’s Home.

“I always ask people, first and foremost, to pray for our kids and our staff,” he says. “Especially during the pandemic, those were tough times, and we’re still trying to get staff levels back up so we can serve more kids.”

Hobbs encourages church, social or civic groups to visit the campus in Palmetto to see firsthand how children and families are helped there.

“When you put your boots on the ground, that’s when you really realize more about what it is that we do,” Hobbs says.

With more than 400 acres, the campus is almost always in need of volunteers to assist with landscaping, grass mowing, interior and exterior painting projects, food room organization, and light construction projects. 

Hobbs says many smaller churches that are unable to afford out-of-state or international mission trips will make the trip to their Palmetto campus to volunteer.

As for donations, Hobbs says that Walmart gift cards are like gold.

“If I have a child come in today with nothing but the clothes on their back, we can take them to Walmart and most of the time, they want to pick out their own stuff,” he says. “Those are things we can do to help make things a little more normal.” 

To contribute or for volunteer information, visit georgiachildren.org/donate or call 770.363.3800. NCM