Chapter Highlights

On Feb. 9, 2023, Yahoo posted a headline “Missouri Republicans vote to allow children to carry guns.” But according to NASW-Missouri Executive Director Cassie E. Brown, who clarified what really happened, both the headline and the story were wrong.

NASW and our Ohio chapter also stood behind the abortion providers and against the lawsuit. The group and its local chapter specifically pointed to “pervasive, complex and interlaced obstacles that stand in the way of patients” suing to challenge government interference when seeking an abortion.

In a June 9 letter to Mayor David Weiss, executive director of NASW's Ohio Chapter, addressed some of the proposals in the “Charter Amendment to Create a Safer Shaker Heights and Modernize Public Safety.”

“Social workers are not agents of law enforcement,” Danielle Smith wrote on behalf of NASW Ohio, referring to passages in the proposed charter amendment that would put social workers, along with licensed mental health clinicians and medics, on a 35-member Non-violent Community Administrators Team.

A NASW-North Carolina project with local television station WRAL-TV began when the chairperson of the chapter’s Ethics Committee, Ravita T. Omabu Okafor, had the idea of mental health professionals taking calls from the public.

The first DEI workshop received positive reviews, but members wanted more time to dive deeper into the concepts and strategies. So a follow-up program, “Maintaining Sustained Change During Unprecedented Times,” was held June 2022.

NASW-New Mexico celebrated when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law the Indian Family Protection Act on March 3, 2022, as she praised the “historic collaboration between the State and its 23 Tribes, Nations and Pueblos.”

NASW-NJ has launched “Stories of Change: The Social Work Oral History Institute” in collaboration with StoryCorps. These stories will be preserved for generations to come in the American Folklife Center at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Sam Hickman became the NASW West Virginia Chapter executive director in October 1985 and retired 36 years later, in October 2021, as the longest-serving chapter leader at NASW.

The Oklahoma chapter's idea for a mentoring program organically blossomed into a growing support network.