Lipscomb student chosen for federal internship
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Kim Tucker, a senior at Lipscomb University, is not the average student. Tucker, a 37-year-old divorced mother of two boys - Joshua, 10, and Jalen, 8 - decided to return to college in 2001. Disappointed that her marriage had ended in divorce and curious about how to develop a strong family life, Tucker decided to major in family relations. “After all of my studies, I know now that I could have stayed married if I had only had the skills needed to repair my marriage,” Tucker said. “Now my greatest goal in life is to help people gain the skills they need to get have a successful marriage.” Thanks to the help of one of her professors, Tucker will soon have the opportunity to accomplish her goal. At the encouragement of Lipscomb’s Dr. John Conger, chair of the department of family and consumer sciences, Tucker recently applied for an internship with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. To her surprise, she got the internship. Tucker will remain in Nashville as she works on President George W. Bush's Healthy Marriage Initiative, a proposal that has allocated $100 million for states to spend on programs that promote stable marriages. “Different states do it different ways, and what Kim will be doing is setting up a local coalition of agencies and organizations to use research-based practices to lower rates of divorce, out of marriage parenting, and teenage pregnancy,” Conger said. Federal, state, and local government partners, businesses, faith-based groups, domestic violence coalitions, fatherhood coalitions, school systems, media, and foundations will be included in the coalition. Tucker has already had some experience with Bush’s initiative working at the SmartMarriages conference last summer in Washington. “Kim has so much potential and energy for this sort of thing,” Conger said. “She is highly motivated to improve life for Nashvillians--particularly kids--by strengthening families.” Conger thinks that one of the greatest strains on marriages is a consumer culture of individual rights. “The world in which we live says that the individual has the right to be satisfied, but it lacks a willingness to take the time and make the commitment to learn how to have healthy relationships,” Conger said. Tucker wants people to realize that, despite of a consumer culture of individual rights, one can learn what it takes to have healthy relationships. “Healthy marriages promote healthy children and this promotes a healthy society,” Tucker said. “I want people who are considering marriage and those who are struggling in their marriages to know that they don’t have to end up like me without a husband and a father for their kids; I want people to know that there is hope.”