This year’s keynote speakers will be especially informative and instructive in today’s context of the helping professions. Both will focus on important ways workers, agencies, and other institutions can come together to effect change in the larger economic climate affecting children and families.
Thursday, 4/23/09: “Home Is Where One Starts From”
Jonathon Bradford is a veteran Master’s level social worker, author and lecturer on the topics of homelessness and the importance of home and has played an important role in national and state policy-making on the issue.
Housing is where life happens. Yet too little is understood about the role that housing plays in human achievement and life choices. Indeed when housing is sound and affordable it is easily taken for granted. What then are the implications for social work practice when housing is neither sound, safe nor affordable? The course will discuss and assess the key measures of housing sufficiency as identified in the growing body of scholarly housing research and community development practice. The course will also explore how macro-level social work practitioners in the field of community development and clinical social workers can mutually support and extend their respective practices. In conclusion the course will explore how one agency has successfully integrated adult learner-driven housing empowerment services with creative and aggressive real estate development practices toward lasting community development and family impact.
The objective of the course is to understand the strong and direct correlation of housing and community development, safety and affordability in the lives of children, adolescents and adults such that participants will be better able to consider the impact of housing sufficiency in the lives of their clients and be better able to advocate with and for them in their need for decent housing.
Friday, 4/24/09: “Organizing for Change”
Jane Hayes has a PhD in social work and is a professor with Grand Valley State University’s MSW program. She has focused her career on issues of macro-level practice highlighting the challenges and solutions of the helping professions in the 21st century.
This workshop increases the knowledge and skill of participants in social work advocacy and community organizing practice. The discussion will focus on a variety of models and their application in practice situations. The presentation Includes factors leading to social worker involvement in advocacy practice and strategies for understanding the family's issues which need larger-scale help, planning for action, organizing communities, and building political power for change. Additionally, the workshop will explain the place and role of advocacy and client group organizing in the NASW Code of Ethics describe advocacy and community organizing practice models, and apply the models in practice situations.