A Student Lifeline Nearly 15 years in, the Fontaine Center has helped create a safer campus culture.
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Liz Prince is UGA’s director of health promotion and the John Fontaine Jr. Center for Alcohol Awareness and Prevention.
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“For people in general, the positive typically resonates better than the negative,” Prince says. It’s that uplifting approach that drives the Fontaine Center. The center, housed within the University Health Center and the Division of Student Affairs, offers programs focused on prevention, early intervention, and recovery support for issues related to alcohol and other drugs. It also offers programs related to relationships and sexual violence prevention and advocacy. The center has been helping to shift the campus culture away from the kind of high-risk drinking that plagues colleges across the country toward healthier ways to cope with stress and navigate the college experience. Now, the center is playing a crucial role in helping students stay safe and manage anxiety in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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iz prince spends her days helping students navigate difficult situations, traumatic experiences, and consequences of their decisions. But she always focuses on the positive. Even when talking about the ongoing pandemic, which has forced students to adjust to new realities, Prince starts by looking at the bright side. “In the spring, we saw more people getting outside to enjoy fresh air in a social distancing manner and many people adding exercise to their daily routines. For many people, that wasn’t happening pre-COVID,” says Prince, UGA’s director of health promotion and the John Fontaine Jr. Center for Alcohol Awareness and Education. And there were other ways that people, particularly UGA students, have been focusing on selfcare. “In that sense, things probably got a little bit better.” Make no mistake. Prince is not blindly positive or disconnected to harsh realities—she can easily catalog a list of pandemicrelated concerns. But she starts difficult conversations with a sense of hope.
written by aaron hale ma ’16
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hile guided by hope, the Fontaine Center is deeply rooted in an acknowledgment of a serious problem. In 2000, John Fontaine Jr. was only 16 when he got into a car with a friend who had been drinking. Jack M ’79 and Nancy Fontaine got the kind of late-night call that parents dread. The friend had lost control of the vehicle, and it hit a tree. John died instantly. Through their grief, they resolved to take action. Jack, who had been a student at UGA in the 1970s, dropped out because he succumbed to a problematic campus
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drinking and drug culture. The Fontaines saw an opportunity to improve the culture and hopefully have a broader impact through the Fontaine Center. “What happened to John and so many others across this country is totally avoidable,” says Jack Fontaine, who has been sober now for 33 years. “But it starts with awareness. It starts with education with the parent, child, and the school.” Dr. Jean Chin BS ’78 was the executive director of the University Health Center when the Fontaines provided a gift to create the Fontaine Center in honor of
John Jr. She recalls a conversation with the Fontaines in which they laid out their hope for the center. It was pretty simple. “If we could prevent one parent from receiving the tragic phone call we received, that’s how we would see the center as a success.” Over time, the Fontaines’ definition of that “tragic phone call” has evolved. There are other tragedies that happen from substance abuse, Jack Fontaine says, including DUIs, failing grades, or sexual assault. The Fontaine Center aims to reduce all of these.
