What type of social work do you practice? Why did you choose this area?
For the last 20 years I’ve been practicing macro social work in the area of organizational development and capacity building, workforce development, and education. If you had asked me 20 years ago if that would be the direction of my career I would’ve said, “no way!” It wasn’t part of my own personal vision for the type of social work that I enjoyed. I started in child welfare at a children’s center on the west side of Syracuse. It was a settlement house and I worked in the poorest neighborhoods. I had a lot of CPS cases on my caseload and became aware of child welfare and eventually got a job in child welfare.
I knew I enjoyed working with kids and families in direct practice but being in child welfare and seeing the impact that poverty, abuse, family violence, and drug addiction had on children, and then becoming a parent, to this day has been a driving force for me to stay in this area. I think about the difference between children who have a healthy start and children that don’t, especially with what we know about the neurobiology of child development. Children who miss out on the chance to be nurtured and loved in a healthy way are handicapped for their entire lives in ways that we should be ashamed of. There is no mammal on this planet that treats their offspring in the way that we allow our children to be treated. I think about the karmic balance and that makes me think that my energy should be focused on creating more justice for those children that don’t have that fair start.
So that’s the heart of why I do what I do but then the focus in the workforce area has been really important as well because we send workers in to serve these kids and families without the tools and resources they need. The more we have done this work – it’s not just the workers, it is the supervisors, managers and leaders who have the best intentions but the systems really struggle to figure out how to carry out the work in a way that is healing and whole. For me the work has come full circle. It is at a different level (organizational) but the same goal – creating a better community for all the children and families.
When I came to the university the teaching and field education piece felt like more direct practice but it’s hard for people with experience and ideas to stay on the front line. The organization pulls you in more to work at a different (more supervisory and management) level. I have trouble just saying “no, I’m just going to use my ideas for a small part of the pond.” Now, at the later end of my career, it is fun to be back on the front end, teaching students and doing less management and administrative work.
Who has had the biggest impact on your social work career? Why?
I would say over the years there have been a few people that really stay in my memory. One is the director of services in Onondaga County, Frank Harrigan, who ended up being a family court judge (he was a lawyer and a social worker). He had a really good moral compass and I learned a lot from him about the politics of practice. His partner, Diane Erney who ran Alliance (a coordination agency for child abuse cases), was fantastic. She was a really visionary leader. Then in Syracuse, the little girl that died on my caseload, in many ways she has remained on my shoulder like a little guardian angel saying, “Oh no, you’re not done yet”. One never forgets such a tragic experience. When I worked in the training area, the training team in Albany was small but we bonded with each other and I learned a lot about teaching and thinking about teaching and training. At the university, students have really been the ones that give me the greatest learning. A handful of you that I have stayed in touch with over the years, Evelyn Bautista, Tana Connell, you, were really spark plugs for the work. And now I’m meeting some new undergraduate students, like Devyn Beswick, Sebastian Vidal and Tamika Ramos-Ungewitter. With these students, you see their energy and the perfect fit between them and the profession of social work, and then they go out and do amazing work in the field. Why have a career? Because you want to leave something for the future and I see all of you as that future. I got to be part of your journey but you are unique people in your own right who took that learning and carried it to a whole new level.
What is your favorite part of the profession?
The diversity. The education and training to be a social worker is about listening and hearing and taking what you hear and using it to communicate more effectively, to build relationships, and to support people’s dreams. And you can do anything with that. It’s a great talent for so many kinds of work that it’s just a matter of finding the right place to put that energy. To find the right team of people to be engaged in that work with. But it could be anything. It’s more about the setting and the other partners than it is about the nature of the work itself because the skills are so useful in every part of one’s life.
How do you think your generation has impacted the profession?
In some ways, we have taken it down a rabbit hole. Because we are boomers, and all the things that go along with that (our arrogance, being called “the greatest generation”, there are so many of us) we aren’t getting that the world has changed around us and we need to change as well. Meetings are a good example. Social workers of my generation are so into meetings, and we have to be face-to-face, and we can’t do it any other way. In some ways, the old way of doing social work is obsolete and younger people aren’t engaged in the profession as a whole. This really concerns me a lot. What will the profession be like if we don’t have a national association that’s there for advocacy and outreach and union issues and making sure employers are using fair practices, making sure social workers are ethical and have a code of ethics? As a profession we need those structures, but our ability to engage people in seeing the value of that has diminished. I don’t know that my generation is in a position to figure that out because our way of approaching problem solving has certain structures to it that young people just don’t buy into anymore. They aren’t going to participate. We have to allow other ways of building engagement into the profession. We’re still in leadership roles so it is a real challenge.
We impacted it in the 60s and 70s by creating more advocacy for social change. We have hindered it because our preferred ways of doing business aren’t relevant and not engaging to younger people and we are in leadership roles (e.g. presidents and vice presidents of the national association).
Any last thoughts?
I love being a social worker, but you already knew that!