Karen Raymond is almost never in her office in the afternoon. Instead, she can probably be found at a local elementary school.
Raymond is the community partnerships coordinator in the Office of Service-Learning and runs Coaching4Success, a partnership between UGA and the Clarke County School District. The program brings university students to local elementary schools to engage with fourth and fifth grade student athletes in activities from a social-emotional curriculum, teaching them skills — like teamwork, resilience and communication — that can apply both while they play their sport and in broader life.
“I think giving those mentorship opportunities and resources that we have here really helps enrich both the community and the experience of our UGA students as well,” Raymond said. “It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.”
One of Raymond’s favorite parts of her job is seeing “the lightbulb moment” when students really grasp the concept they’re learning.
“We worked closely with the school district to create the curriculum,” Raymond said. “We took social-emotional topics like teamwork, resilience, communication — things that apply generally in the sport that they play — and looked at how we can design activities and games that would help them understand what those concepts mean and how they can apply it in the sports and in academics as well.”
Coaching4Success is a growing partnership with the CCSD. Currently in its third year, the program is in eight elementary schools in the county and works with students on the basketball, soccer and cheer teams. Raymond hopes to eventually expand to all 14 CCSD schools and include more sports as the program grows.
“I view this program as a public health intervention because we focus a lot on social-emotional learning,” Raymond said. “I feel like that is an important social determinant of health when you look at long-term health and educational outcomes.”
Raymond has been in her current role for about two years. She doesn’t really have a “typical day,” but her semesters do follow a general pattern: training retreats and recruitment at the beginning of the semester, meeting and planning with CCSD schools, leading sessions in schools for six to eight weeks in the middle of the semester and then ending with evaluations and wrap-up meetings to get ready to do it all again the next semester.
“It really keeps me on my toes,” Raymond said. “I’m never in one place — I’m all over the district most days.”
Raymond’s job includes training UGA students, recruiting volunteers, meeting and coordinating with the schools and the district, collecting evaluations at the end of each semester — and maintaining relationships of all types.
“It’s different levels and different age groups but learning how to navigate those relationships and building them over time really helps the success of the program,” Raymond said.
During each session, the CCSD students work with UGA students in one of two roles: lead success coaches, who lead the sessions and are paired with a particular elementary school, or volunteers, who participate in the activities alongside CCSD students.
“We have a really good group this semester who are very committed, very responsible and just fun to work with,” Raymond said. “They make this job really exciting because they’re very passionate about what they do, and that drives me as well.”
The public health angle of the program really drew Raymond to the job. She is from Sri Lanka and came to the U.S. in 2018 for college. She earned a degree in psychology from Georgia Southern University before coming to UGA for a master’s in public health.
“Learning about the social determinants of health and how early childhood interventions can set vulnerable populations up for success inspired me to delve into different programs that provide these opportunities for people,” Raymond said. “I use what I learned in those classes daily to coordinate Coaching4Success, from developing programmatic aspects to conducting evaluations.”
Outside of work, Raymond enjoys reading, baking and spending time with her husband, who also works at UGA in the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, also a Public Service and Outreach unit. They have a 4-year-old black cat named Mango, who Raymond described as the light of their lives.
Raymond is passionate about what she does. Her work ties directly to her interest in public health and her academic background in it.
“I see the impact of the work we do with the students on a daily basis, which is what keeps me coming back,” Ramond said. “I get the opportunity to apply what I’ve learned in a very practical and realistic way and observe the ways in which it improves the lives of the students that we serve.”