NASW News

Social Worker and NASW Member Meg Kallman had never seen such devastation. “Buildings were flattened like pancakes, streets were impassable with debris, cement and dust everywhere ... just everywhere,” she said, struggling for the words to convey her first impression of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. On Jan. 13, just a day after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake brought that Caribbean island nation to its knees, killing hundreds of thousands of people and injuring countless more, Kallman and her colleagues with the New Jersey-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team received orders that they were to be deployed to Haiti. Eighty percent of Haiti&rs...

Read More

Sarah Gehlert doesn’t need a microscope to figure out your odds of surviving cancer, she can tell from the house and neighborhood you live in. Since 2003, the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Disparities Research in Chicago has been leading a team of social, behavioral and biological researchers in exploring the reason why, despite the fact that white women are more likely to develop breast cancer, black women are more likely to die from the disease. By studying how social and psychological factors influence disease in lab rats and following a cohort of black women with breast cancer living in predominantly black ...

Read More

Jan. 2010 Board's Action Context Finance Accepted the audited financial report for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2009, and received the financial report for the period ending Dec. 31, 2009. As of Dec. 31, NASW’s total asset position was $14.7 million. Assets have increased by $2.2 million from the same time last year. This is primarily due to the increase in the value of investments. Over...

Read More

The Alzheimer’s Association has continued to rely on NASW for social work knowledge in its latest phase of Campaign for Quality Care manuals known as Dementia Care Practice Recommendations. The fourth phase in the series, Dementia Care Practice Recommendations for Professionals Working in a Home Setting, was recently released. These specific recommendations emphasize a person-centered, culturally sensitive care approach to meet the changing needs of each person with dementia and their family living in a home setting. Chris Herman, senior practice associate for aging at NASW, noted the association has worked with the Alzheimer’...

Read More

ACSW members “represent the thought leadership of the profession.” NASW has much in the way of pomp and circumstance in store to celebrate 50 years of the Academy of Certified Social Workers credential. Established in 1960, the ACSW was the first national credential for the social work profession. In February, NASW launched an advertising campaign with a full-page display ad in the NASW News featuring notable achievements throughout the past five decades by ACSW credential holders — among them NASW President James J. Kelly and Executive Director Elizabeth J. Clark. In the 1980s, Kelly oversaw one of the first and longes...

Read More

Judy Lukas Arnold received the 2009 Department of Veterans Affairs Under Secretary for Health Award for Excellence in Social Work Leadership. Arnold was recognized for her 33 years of service to the nation’s veterans. She is one of 7,000 social workers employed by the VA. She is currently the chief of social work service for the VA Eastern Kansas Health Care System, which serves Topeka, Leavenworth, Wyandotte County, Saint Joseph, Fort Riley, Fort Scott, and surrounding areas. Some of Arnold’s career highlights include: 1) being the project lead for “The Price of Freedom: The Military Experience” film, which won two...

Read More

In April, the second Congress of Social Work will be held in Washington, D.C. Convened and supported by 12 social work organizations, this invitation-only meeting will bring together 400 leaders in the social work profession. At the first congress in 2005, the participants focused on determining imperatives for addressing social issues and for setting goals for the profession in relation to health and mental health care, aging and child welfare. These imperatives can be reviewed at 2010 Social Work World Congress. This year’s congress, however, will have a different focus. It will look at issues facing the social work profession itself...

Read More

  Social workers from Tanzania visited NASW’s national office in Washington recently. During their visit, they heard from NASW division managers who discussed how the association’s board of directors, governance and chapters operate. The guests also heard details about the NASW Foundation, the association’s Center for Workforce Studies and other endeavors.

Read More

March is National Professional Social Work Month, and using this year's theme of ''Social Workers Inspire Community Action'' as a springboard, NASW is planning to showcase 100 ''community action heroes'': social workers who have inspired community-wide change. In addition to its internal efforts, NASW is asking individuals to nominate social workers who have created a program or led a campaign to meet an important human service need in their community. Specifically, NASW wants to know what the nominee did to organize people, resources and allies to improve the lives of individuals in their community...

Read More

NASW’s Social Workers Speak! Website has made a big splash. Social Workers Speak! And how! Since launching in November, approximately 20,000 people have visited Social Workers Speak, the NASW Website — some call it a blog — where social workers and others are encouraged to discuss the way social workers and social issues are portrayed in the media. That's a lot of intrigue for such a new presence on the Internet, according to Greg Wright, the NASW senior public relations specialist who manages the Web site. What's more, Wright says people from around the globe are checking out the site's content, not just Internet surfe...

Read More