NASW News

NASW also sent a letter to Mary Wakefield, head of the Health Resources and Services Administration, about home visitation. Recent advocacy efforts by the NASW national office have called for mental health treatment for those adversely affected by the Gulf Coast oil disaster. NASW Executive Director Elizabeth J. Clark, on behalf of the association, stated in a letter to Kenneth Feinberg, administrator of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, that NASW was deeply disappointed by his intention to exclude mental health and substance use conditions from coverage by the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. “Mental and addictive illnesses, includ...

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Joan Levy Zlotnik, left, and Dawn Hobdy, right, were among NASW staff at the CSWE conference in Portland, Ore. “Promoting Sustainability in Social Work” was the theme of the Council on Social Work Education’s 56th annual program meeting in Portland, Ore. The October event featured presentations by NASW staff as well as an NASW Press exhibitor booth. Joan Levy Zlotnik, director of the NASW Foundation’s Social Work Policy Institute, presented “Enhancing the Child Welfare Workforce: A View from Washington” to more than 100 attendees who specialize in child welfare. She highlighted policy and legislativ...

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The North Carolina Supreme Court in October held that school officials’ decisions to deny disciplined students access to alternative education programs were subject to “intermediate scrutiny.” In so doing, it reversed a lower court decision granting, as NASW put in an amicus brief, “largely unfettered discretion” to exclude students from the classroom. The case, King v. Beaufort County Board of Education, stems from an incident in which students who participated in a January 2008 fight at Southside High School in Chocowinity, N.C., were suspended for the remainder of the school year without access to alternativ...

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Technology will help promote and expand the message of this year’s National Professional Social Work Month theme, “Social Workers Change Futures.” The March event is expected to include a social media campaign that will encourage social workers to send short messages via Twitter, blogs and other websites about the positive ways they have influenced someone’s future that day. National Professional Social Work Month encourages social workers from across the country to join in celebrating and educating their communities about the many ways social workers are positive agents of change. Gail Woods Waller, director of com...

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The Sarasota Herald-Tribune highlighted the important work being done by the Cancer Support Community Florida Suncoast. Social worker Laurel Healy was interviewed for the article. The organization’s mission is “to help people affected by cancer enhance their health and well-being through participation in a professional program of support, education and hope,” the story stated. The center recently moved to a new facility in Sarasota. The 5-acre campus has more than 2 acres of gardens bordering a 600-acre nature preserve, the story explained. More than 60,000 visits have been made to the center and its satellite locations th...

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When I entered social work in the 1970s, the “War on Poverty” was almost a decade old, and it seemed to be working. It had been introduced in a State of the Union address by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Jan. 8, 1964. Historians claim he introduced it to expand his Great Society and to persuade Congress to authorize social welfare programs. Critics define it as the beginning of a new era for American liberalism, and they point out that Johnson introduced it when the poverty rate was already in decline, from a high of 22.4 percent in 1959 to 19 percent in 1964. In the decade following the implementation of the Equal Opportunit...

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Tricia Bent-Goodley of Howard University’s School of Social Work: “When it comes to teen pregnancy, we don’t hear the reasons for the choice they made.” NASW is hosting conferences across the country with support from the United Nations Foundation to promote greater attention to the rights of women and girls on a global level. In September, NASW’s Human Rights and International Affairs Division joined the NASW D.C. Metro Chapter in hosting “Promoting Human Rights of Women and Girls Globally: The Intersection of Social Work and Family Planning Services” at the association’s national office i...

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Social worker Shay Sorrells Social worker Kathy Gurland is heartbroken over the lack of social worker characters on TV. “I happen to love ‘House,’ but where is the social worker?” she said. Gurland, a former actress and founder of PEG’S Group, a cancer patient navigation service in New York, isn’t waiting in the wings for change. As a member of the NASW Communications Network advisory committee, she and other social workers try to increase the visibility and improve the image of social workers in entertainment media. Gurland and other advisory committee members met with television producers and writer...

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The U.S. Administration on Aging recently released a toolkit to help organizations, including those that employ social workers, plan and implement culturally competent services for older adults and family caregivers. However, Chris Herman, an NASW senior practice associate, said that “the toolkit should be of value to anyone working with older adults, not just those employed by an agency.” She pointed out that the toolkit’s list of online resources directs readers to several resources on NASW’s own website, including its standards for cultural competency in social work practice. The toolkit lays out a four-step pro...

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Women in traditional Russian dress greet delegation members. NASW Executive Director Elizabeth J. Clark admits that prior to leading a People to People social work delegation to Russia in August, she had a distorted, preconceived idea of what life is like in the former communist country. “After all, I grew up during the Cold War and the space race and watching James Bond films,” Clark said in an interview with NASW News. But when she found herself standing in Moscow’s Red Square, awed by the brilliant onion domes of St. Basil’s cathedral and the massive Kremlin complex, all those preconceptions, like the Iron Cur...

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