Cassidy Head has always wanted a career where she could help people, and she’s working toward that goal at the University of Georgia.
After she graduates from UGA, Head wants to become a doctor and work in rural Georgia. Before she does that, however, she is helping rural communities overcome challenges as part of a new undergraduate internship program at UGA.
Through the Elizabeth V. Wight Southwest Georgia Internship, she is working with communities in the region to address their most pressing concerns, like health care and wellness, youth issues, downtown development, workforce and other quality of life concerns. Head, a third-year biological sciences student from Hawkinsville, began the internship last year as the inaugural recipient. The internship is facilitated through the UGA Archway Partnership™.
Elizabeth “Lib” and Neal Quirk provided a generous donation to support the creation of the internship, which is named in honor of Lib’s mother. Wight was a UGA alumna and Grady County resident who cared deeply about her family, friends and community. She co-founded the Grady County Help Agency in her hometown of Cairo to provide a broad range of services and support for those in need.
“We’re so grateful to Lib and Neal for their generous donation to help UGA students build capacity for long-term connections with rural communities,” said Matt Bishop, interim vice president for Public Service and Outreach. “This internship is inspiring and provides another avenue to deliver UGA’s mission of service to the state as we continue to build lasting relationships across Georgia.”
The Archway Partnership, a unit of Public Service and Outreach, helps communities identify their most critical challenges and then connects them with the resources and expertise at UGA to address them, often through student-supported work. UGA students like Head gain valuable experiential learning while contributing to real-world impact in the process.
Since 2011, Grady County has completed over 150 projects in partnership with UGA. Lib Quirk said her mother was excited and proud when she learned about UGA’s presence in Grady County, and that working relationship helped spark the idea for the internship.
Quirk said her mother, who passed away in March 2023, took great pride in her hometown and county, and she felt disheartened by the trend of so many young people leaving for urban areas without considering returning to smaller towns in Georgia. To Wight, small towns offered a wonderful lifestyle, filled with value, great people and opportunities to not only live well but also contribute to making the world a better place.
Quirk hopes the internship produces work that improves the quality of life in Cairo, Grady County and southwest Georgia, contributes to the academic and professional development of the interns, and inspires others to support the work UGA is doing in rural Georgia.
“We believed that bringing together southwest Georgia and the University of Georgia would be a wonderful way to honor my mom in a meaningful way and could potentially make a difference in someone’s life, or even many lives,” said Quirk. “The idea of UGA not just studying these areas but actively working to improve them was something that really resonated with Neal and me, as well as with my mom.”
Archway has been engaging with communities to help them solve their most pressing issues since 2005. Now, as Archway celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, the Wight internship represents a new opportunity to address community-identified challenges from a more embedded perspective while also providing workforce experience for the intern. Wight interns will connect directly with community stakeholders, much like an Archway professional, and work on specific projects that align with the community’s goals.
To learn more about the Archway model and be prepared to take on this work, Head attended Archway Partnership executive committee meetings and met with community leaders and stakeholders to gain insight into the issues they’re focused on. As a result, the collaborative team decided Head will focus her work on a project that helps recruit health care professionals for rural Georgia.
“Building rural communities in Georgia is important, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to work in communities that are similar to where I grew up,” said Head. “I’m excited to combine my passion for public service and rural health care with helping communities in southwestern Georgia—and really, across the state—find solutions to some of the challenges they’re facing.”
Head spent last summer working on health care projects in Cairo to better understand the health care opportunities and the challenges. That helped her design and plan a windshield tour of Georgia that will serve as a pilot study for showcasing the rural health care landscape throughout the state. The goal of the tour is to provide students interested in rural health care with a sense of what working in a rural community would look like from a financial, social and medical facility standpoint. The inaugural tour is set for May and will be attended by students from the College of Public Health, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and College of Veterinary Medicine.
Head researched other communities in the region connected to Archway to see current and past programs, including downtown improvements and efforts to address health and well-being. She saw Archway’s award-winning process of partnering with communities to activate opportunities in action and learned how Archway professionals build lasting relationships by establishing trust between a community and UGA.
“It’s just so important for students to have that community exposure to the key leaders and the key projects,” said Archway Partnership operations coordinator Sharon Liggett, who is overseeing Head’s work in the internship. “Cassidy is seeing that community development or community transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It really does take community investment and leadership to implement a project and see it through.”
