Category: Upcoming Speakers

Joy Logan, Executive Director of Crittenton Youth Services

 

Mrs. Logan has dedicated fifty-five years to education through teaching, counseling, training youth and teachers to instruct in the classroom, writing curriculum, and serving as a United Way Agency Director. Her mission is to promote and provide intervention for youth issues that have a negative effect on learning and future success for youth ages 10-13 or grades 5-8. She graduated from Mississippi College for Women and The University of South Alabama.

She is very passionate about our youth and loves to research topics affecting them, talk with teachers, counselors, business leaders, police administrators, and others who can offer their opinions about issues negatively affecting the performance of youth in schools, colleges, and the work force. Classroom teaching and observations offer a reality check to how youth handle life skill problems. Along with Judge Naman, Chief Battiste, and Children’s Policy Council’s commitment to prevent bullying, she was one of the first trained to implement Olweus Bullying in schools.

Feeling the need to offer students in the classroom a new way of learning prevention information, she and her staff created a program that trains High School Juniors and Seniors as Ambassadors, accompanied by an adult instructor, how to present curriculum teaching social and emotional skills to youth in 5^th thru 8^th grade.  Fourteen high schools (Public, Private, Parochial, and City Schools) participate and nominate teens who have strong character skills and enjoy working with their peers. The program began in 2010 and celebrates with an Ambassador Awards Banquet in April of every year.

Civic Leadership participation includes Assistant Coordinator of the Bullying Coalition of Mobile, Assistant Chair of the Alabama Abstinence Coalition, Member of the Children’s Policy Council, Board Member of Evidence to Success, Member of Envision Mobile and /Baldwin County, Member of Community Board for Mobile Area Education Foundation. She has been recognized as Teacher of the Year for Hamilton Elementary, and Nominee for Jacksonville State Elementary.  Other Awards include James Strickland Community Award and the Bay Bears Charities Community Hero Award.

 

Rachel Webb is the founder and Executive Director of Fostering Together Gulf Coast. Originally a Texas native, Rachel graduated with a business degree from Texas A&M University in 2005 and moved to Birmingham to begin a job as an Event Coordinator with Student Life Camps. Alabama quickly became home as she found the love of her life and began a family. After having two children of their own, Rachel and her husband Stephen became foster parents in 2013 with the hope of providing a safe, loving home to children in need within their community.

 

While their intentions were noble, it only took a few months of fostering to realize this calling required much more than good intentions. Foster care was a whole new world of parenting traumatized children while also having to navigate the child welfare system, the juvenile court system, and families in crisis. It would have been easy to become discouraged by the overwhelming needs of the kids and the dismal lack of resources available. But rather than give up, Rachel sought out ways to make things better. Fostering Together Gulf Coast was born out of this desire to help children in foster care and to provide support to the families who have taken up the charge to care for them.

 

Begun in 2019, Fostering Together Gulf Coast now has foster care resource centers located in Mobile and Spanish Fort that help to meet the needs of children as they come into foster care and also provides ongoing parent trainings, support groups, and fun family events to foster families. Each month over over 3,000 pieces of clothing, toiletries, school uniforms, birthday presents, toys, and more are passed along to these kids and families. The organization is also a bridge for the community to get involved in helping with foster care by donating clothing, sponsoring Easter baskets and Christmas gifts, volunteering at the centers, and providing financial support. It really does take a village to raise a child, and together we’re making a big impact in the foster care community where we live.