- Thank you so much.
I know it's kind of a pain in the neck
to come out on a Saturday morning,
but we know that you're here, most of you,
for other annual conference programming, and it's our
only chance to actually get you together as a class.
So, here you are, the class of 2015,
and you are-- (laughs)
(cheers)
and you are, as of last week,
a student of mine pointed out,
now halfway through your program.
You're halfway through summer, too. (laughs)
(cheers)
You're half way done.
It's actually fun for us to see you all here,
and we're happy to bring you together as a class.
Just a couple of, it's our only chance to talk to you
about any kind of updates or changes that have
happened since we saw you last as a whole group
in your first year orientation.
So it's been an incredibly busy year here.
As you know, we have a new president of the college.
We have a new provost who arrived here
two days ago, and we have a new dean
of the School for Social Work who arrived on Monday.
I got to meet the provost last night
'cause we're in the middle of annual conference,
as you know, and she is just a trip and a half.
She's just smart and funny
and relaxed, and the new dean arrived, as you know,
on Monday, and she is smart and funny and relaxed,
and I think we're all really gonna enjoy
working with each other.
It just feels really, very, very, very good.
So you've met Maryanne, did many of you get
to come to the reception and meet her?
Yeah, I think you're gonna have a good time with her.
So we're very, very pleased about that.
Importantly, I wanna introduce to you more formally.
Some of you have met, informally,
Maria Del Mar Farina.
(applause)
I can't tell you how happy I am about this.
Katelin Lewis-Kulin joined us a year ago, December,
as a full-time Associate Director of Field.
She can't be here today because of family illness,
and sends her regrets.
Maria joined us as a half-time
Assistant Director of Field in May.
She's a graduate of the MSW program here.
She's in the middle of her doctoral program here.
She teaches at Westfield State.
She teaches here.
She has been on the Counseling Service staff
over here at Smith College, and she's now
with us half-time, I don't know how, all of this.
She must have,
and her daughter's here, so she could attest.
Maria has more energy
than most people on the planet.
But she's here half-time, and in part,
I don't mean this in, I know I sound a little jokey
about the computer stuff, but part of Maria's job
is to drag me into the next century.
I told people my daughter says,
"Mom, you crawl into the 1970s
"and then applaud yourself." (laughs)
And I said, "Yes, that's about right."
But I'm not great on all this,
all this newfangled computer stuff,
and Maria and Katelin have done just
an extraordinary job of getting materials up online,
to get learning platforms up online.
She's gonna be showing you much of what she's done
and I think it's gonna help enormously.
Even though I don't understand a lot of it,
I think, the fact we have students spread all over the
country, and your lives are getting more complicated.
We know that the work in clinics
is getting more complicated,
and it's hard for people to access information.
I see, I know from my practice class,
somebody from my class wrote to me
at one in the morning with a paper.
It's like you guys are going
all hours of the day and night.
And having some of this stuff up online
is gonna make it far more accessible to you, I think.
Maria has taught here for how many years?
10 years?
She teaches second year practice as well.
We're really glad she's here, really glad to have
a gifted teacher, clinician, and educator here with us,
so thank you.
And it's great fun for me to have
more of a team around me.
It's been a one-woman show for too long here.
So these are very, very important additions,
I think, here to our staff and faculty.
I wanna acknowledge for you as second year
students, how complex the land of Field is.
We know full well that you're going out into agencies
that, I think, very well represent what
social work practice looks like these days.
They're very much preparing you
for the land of social work.
But we're very aware that agencies
are increasingly strapped financially,
supervision hours are not billable,
reimbursable hours for these supervisors,
and I think we're pushing up hill often times,
to get the required supervision hours.
We have a few more agencies where we've
made planful, we don't want it to be careless,
planful decisions to have an hour-and-a-half
of individual, plus an hour-and-a-half of group.
And the clients are more compromised in some ways
by the time they're accessing care.
We know full well that gone are the days
where supervisors will carefully select a caseload
for students, based on what the students' learning
needs are, and that more and more of you guys
are going into agencies and seeing
whoever comes in the door.
And that by the time people come in the door,
they're often times in dire straits.
Maria and I teaching second year practice,
we're both very aware of it, as we look at your papers
and your case studies, and your in-pass papers,
how incredibly difficult the clinical work is
that you're dealing with.
I want you to feel free to be students,
and to be in process with that.
I think, asking students mid-point
in their training to work with such incredibly complex
mental health issues can pull you off-center a little bit
as learners, and to feeling like you have to act like
you know more than you do.
Please know, you get to be learners.
You get to turn to your supervisors.
Use your faculty field advisors
who are there to really help make sure
you're getting what you need.
I think, sometimes, students aren't getting
what they need, and then they're afraid to speak up,
or they say they're afraid they'll get in trouble
if they speak up, or they're afraid they'll get
their supervisor in trouble if they speak up.
Use your field advisor, 'cause their job, really,
is to serve both you and the agency, in terms of
making sure you're getting what you need.
And it really should be a balanced caseload
of about 12, 15 in the second year.
Sometimes direct service hours should be a mix,
if it's approprate to the setting
of individual, group, and or family.
You should be getting two hours of supervision.
If it's not all individual, at least two hours
of some combo platter of individual and group.
And we want the caseload that's assigned
for students to be a caseload that's designed
to meet your learning needs.
For example, if you're a Spanish speaker
and you want to work with predominantly
Spanish-speaking clients.
That's great, we're happy to have you do it.
If you're a Spanish speaker and the agency suddenly
starts assigning you every single Spanish-speaking
client who comes in the door, because they've
not done what they should do around the staffing,
that's not in the service of your learning needs.
Does that make sense?
So we want you to have as best as possible,
a racially, ethnically, class,
diagnostically varied population as possible,
that you're working with, and again,
that it be on behalf of your learning.
Makes sense?
It's an increasingly competitive world out there
for interns, we have very long-standing relationships
with agencies that serve us well,
but you do need to know that
for most of the 96 years of the school,
30 of which I have been here,
students did not need to interview.
Smith students didn't need to interview for these
field placements, agencies just to saved spots for us.
And this one agency in California said,
"We've got two training spots.
"We save one for Smith, uninterviewed, save it
"for you guys 'cause your students are great.
"Send the other spot out for competitive interview."
and they said to me, "We turned away 55 qualified
"applicants for that other spot."
So you guys who've not had to interview,
need to know that, that you're sitting in spaces
that have been preserved for you because
of the relationship they've got with the school,
because of the faith they have and the fact that
you're clinically and theoretically grounded
by the time you get to them, in some ways.
You're there twice as many hours.
I think about other schools who send students out
into internship in September, before they've even
started any course work, and it makes me worry.
You guys have a lot of coursework under your belts.
So, you're well prepared to go out, but just know
you're sitting in spots for which 55
other qualified candidates were turned away.
We did, in the last couple of years, agree to let
some students go out on interview, which is
a mixed blessing in some ways.
It's allowed us to be competitive at some
very, very top-notch places in the county,
but it has forced us into an interview situation
with a number of these agencies.
And that's tough, because it means we have
to identify students who might be interested
in these spots really early, prepare you,
get you out for interview.
It means going through,
some of you went through many hoops,
go through one interview, thank you very much,
come back and go through another interview.
It becomes very, very competitive.
And not every student who interviewed
for a spot got it, and that's a very different
experience for us at Smith.
And most students who didn't get them,
didn't get them for any reason
that is the fault of the student at all.
They didn't get them because there were 150
other applicants and somebody else had more years
experience, does that make sense?
So I don't want people feeling badly
if they didn't get a spot through interview.
And many of you, over half of you
are just tucked into spots without that.
But just know, we have one place that converted
into an interview-only spot, because two years ago,
we had a student go out there, and every other
student in this very high-powered setting
had had to competitively interview.
Our student didn't, they just popped right in
to a Smith-saved spot, and our student,
this is several years ago now,
said to the rest of the student group,
"I'm from Smith. I didn't have to interview."
And the training director got on the phone and said,
"Now you do."
(laughter)
Just be gracious with your colleagues, I guess,
is all I'm saying about that.
I think you guys had student org elections
this last week, is that a true story?
Did I hear that?
No, you haven't. You have.
(students speaking)
Pardon me?
At the end of last term, ok.
Since this is your only meeting though, as a class,
I wondered if student org folks might stand
and introduce themselves to your class,
and tell us who you are, and what you represented.
(applause and cheers)
Right.
(applause)
Jessica, starting with you,
people probably know you,
but tell people your name
and what you're work will be.
- I'm Jessica Summers
and I'm the field rep for our class,
or one of the field reps.
- It's great, I'm glad. (laughs)
(applause)
- I'm Katie Forman, I'm the secretary.
- Katie Foreman, secretary.
(applause)
- (mumbles) I'm Jackie,
I'm one of the members of (mumbles).
- (mumbles), great, congratulations, you guys.
- I'm Amanda White.
I'm the other field rep (mumbles).
- Hello, Amanda White, other field rep.
(applause)
- I'm Janay Peters, I'm a member of the (mumbles).
- Hi, Janay.
(applause)
Where did we lose you here?
You were standing and then you sat?
Ok, up in the back.
- I'm Christine (mumbles)
and I'm also a member of (mumbles).
- Ok, Janay, thanks, and thanks Christine.
Yes.
- (mumbles).
(applause)
- I'm Jennifer Jimenez and I'm house rep.
(applause)
- Hi, I'm Vanessa, I'm (mumbles).
- Great.
(applause)
- I'm Danielle Franks, I'm (mumbles).
(mumbles)
- Ok.
(applause and cheers)
Where are they? (laughs)
Anybody else?
This is great.
You know Smith has an incredibly,
I think, well-organized and invested student org
and we have a curriculum day in the fall
where all the reps come to campus
and work with faculty on curriculum.
I think it helps really link curriculum with real life,
with what you guys are really doing in the field,
and flowing that back to us.
And I think it's important to meet your field reps
as we're talking about field stuff here today.
What we ordinarily do, and we'll touch base
about this, is to have a monthly phone conference
with the field reps, where Katelin and I,
and now Maria, Katelin, and I talk with the field reps
once a month about what's going on,
and what kinds of issues you guys are dealing
with the field, and we can also flow
information from us back the other way,
here's how placements are happening,
here's when placements are happening.
I think you can use your field reps, also,
much as I want us to be, and I mean it,
for people to be able to call us
if you're in a jam in the field.
People don't get in trouble for calling us.
We try to be problem solvers.
Katelin and I divide the universe in half,
so if you're in New England and New York,
Katelin's your person here.
If you're anywhere else in the country,
I'm your contact person.
Most problems, really, as they come up
can get dealt with with the supervisor,
and if that doesn't work, with the training director.
But we know that you've had situations
in the field where it's not working.
You're not getting enough supervision,
caseload's out of control, something crazy
is happening in the agency, whatever.
So we do want all of you, at that point you call
your FFA and to feel that then you can call us.
But I think students, sometimes,
just inevitably will feel nervous about that.
Sometimes they wanna just think it through
with somebody else or problem-solve it a little bit.
And the field reps have been a great resource
around that 'cause students sometimes
will call a field rep and say,
"Just don't know what to, does this sound
"right to you? Here's what's happening
"in the agency and it feels pretty funky to me.
"It just doesn't sound right. What do you think?"
The field rep will listen to it and sometimes
call us and say, "Student's not wanting to come
"forward quite yet, but what would you think
about a situation where," fill in the blank.
We can talk with the field rep
about what we would do,
and they can go back to the student,
and sometimes that just eases for the student
I think that line of communication.
We might say, "We would get in
"secondary supervision, or we would move
"the person to a different unit, or we might
"actually have to change the placement, or whatever."
So use your field reps and we'll stay
in good communication.
So welcome to the two of you.
I think what I'm gonna do, at this point,
is turn things over to Maria, who's gonna show you
those incredible work that she has been doing
with the Moodle course that she understands
and I'm starting to learn about.
So Maria, thank you.
(applause)
- Good morning.
I wanna keep this brief 'cause I'm very excited
to have some third year students
that have volunteered to come and talk
to all of us about their anti-racism projects.
How many of you have found this link
for the field department resources
and material course in your Moodle page?
Does everybody have it?
If you don't have it, please let me know.
This is an effort that we're trying to make
to incorporate your suggestions from first year
and to really respond to the resources
that we have available and how we can stay
more connected when you're in field.
Some of this material may not pertain to you as much.
It may be more relevant for first year students
and some of the material,
it really is assigned for second years.
So one of the things that we did, for example,
was to upload all of your placement description forms,
so that first year students could have access to it,
so that you can have access to the opinions of
other students that have been where you have been.
In response to the need to interview,
we develop interviewing resources,
and I believe that some of you actually
may have used some of this that was sent
by Katelin or Carolyn this year.
And it includes a PowerPoint
and some files with some possible tips
for the interview process.
One of the things that I wanna highlight
is something that we're gonna be developing,
which are the integrative seminars.
Those exist for most of you
but we're gonna be adding descriptions
as well as identifying who is the person,
the instructor that will be running them,
and when they're meeting.
And we're also gonna be trying to do some remotely.
For some of you that may be placed, for example,
one person, if I'm correct, you're over there,
that may be the only Smith intern, for example,
in Vermont, to try to connect
all of you in some way.
But the focus of today, largely,
is the anti-racism field assignment.
I've uploaded here the most recent guidelines.
We have made some changes to it, and by the way,
we're gonna continue to review this project.
We have been doing it for twenty years.
I, myself, sat there and I also was part of that
in this anti-racism assignment.
But rather than me talking to you about it,
I thought that it would be best to actually
have students that have already done it.
I have uploaded for you the abstracts
of all of the anti-racism field projects
that were done in this academic here.
And with consent, I've also uploaded
some of the projects themselves.
There's the Edith Nourse VA project and you're gonna
be listening to them speak about their project,
and also some videos that they used
for you to look at if you're curious.
The Addison County Mental Health Services'
Samuel Lurie will be talking about his project,
and you have here, the PowerPoint
that he will be using as well as his own project.
Without further introduction, if the panel members
can come up and I will introduce you,
and then the rest is just gonna be
them presenting the project and you
asking questions that you may have.
- Thank you, Maria.
Let's trade places just for a second.
- We'll trade. - We'll trade.
As they're getting set up, we are twenty years in.
We're on the 20th anniversary
of our anti-racism mission, which is,
you've heard it say a thousand times, is very meant,
deliberately to be a statement about
our commitment to being in process around this work.
We don't mean it in an arrogant way.
We don't mean to suggest that we're there, somehow.
We would like these anti-racism projects
that you're gonna hear about, to be,
to the extent, possible, small, manageable,
and successful for you in the field.
It's actually an anti-racism assignment,
not an anti-racism project, and we fall
into the language of calling it a project
which makes it sound like the community project,
which makes it sound like it should be taking
three hours a week, which makes it sound like
it should be taking eight months to do.
We mean to be an assignment
within your field placement.
It falls within the 30 hours.
It doesn't need to be a long-term project.
It can be a one-shot piece and you're gonna hear
a range from your colleagues here.
And it is meant to be constructive to your agency.
This is not about deputizing you to go out
and write out the racist in your field placement
'cause it doesn't work.
We know that we're asking students who have,
in some ways, the least power in a system,
to have the most difficult conversation in the system.
So we wanna be mindful about that.
We're mindful that if you're a student of color
going into an agency and being asked to do
anti-racism work, that that can, in some agencies,
put you in a very unique and complicated position.
And we know that asking students to do this
risks you putting yourself in a position with an agency
if acting like you're an expert about something
that can be a bit of a setup for you.
So we very much encourage you to think about
partnering with existing resources in the agency,
partnering with allies in the agency,
and picking an assignment that is small,
manageable, and potentially successful.
You need to do a proposal that goes to you FFA.
They'll give you feedback.
Often times the FFAs have to peel people back
and say, "Make this a little bit smaller.
"You're taking on something too big,"
which comes from your enthusiasm
and your passion which we appreciate.
I'm gonna let Maria introduce our panel.
You'll hear some real-life examples
and then we'll have lots of time, I think, for questions.
So, great, thanks.
- Thank you so much for accepting the invitation.
By the way, after you do your anti-racism
assignment this year, I will be reading
each and every one of them.
So after reading all of them,
I reached out to all of you, and thank you.
So we have Todd Chan and Jilda Bernadetta
that will be talking about their experience
in Edith Nourse VA--
- Maria, you need to get behind the mic
'cause we can't hear you.
- Ok, here I go.
Ok, better now.
I'll start all over again.
So, Todd Chan and Jilda Bernadetta
from Edith Nourse.
They will be talking about their assignment.
Samuel Lurie from Addison Community Mental Health,
Addison County Mental Health Services.
Jamie Daniels from the University of Massachusetts,
the Center for Women and Community.
Annabelle Lane, Dina Pasalis, Laura Wardner-Larson
from the Cambridge Health Alliance.
Did I encapsulate everybody?
Ok, whoever would like to start first.
- Can we make a couple of requests before we start?
- Yes.
- One, is there a way to turn off the projector?
- I'm gonna do that right now if I can get it to respond.
- And the other--
(Carolyn speaks)
And the other thing, I know this is not gonna be
a positive request, but this is panel discussion
and we would love for it to be a discussion,
and you guys are so far away.
If you would be willing to move forward,
it would be great.
- Good idea.
- So thank you for moving forward.
I'm gonna start our group project.
In the last year we were sitting
in the same seats that you were sitting in.
And it was really helpful to have the people
who had been in our placement share,
in a really real way, what their experience was.
They were describing the challenges of implementing
their anti-racism assignment, and it was painful.
There was shame in their description,
and frustration and disappointment.
I think it was something that we could identify with
'cause they were the challenges of creating
change on a complex and really charged topic.
It was in an institution where they knew very little
about what the norms of the institution were,
or how it operated, and in which
they had really no tested allies.
In addition, they could've been perceived as people
who didn't have a lot of stake in the organization
because the expectation would be that
they would only be there for nine months.
So it was helpful to get some advice, and at least,
from what they described, it also seemed
like members of the organization had experienced
a similar sort of pain, given the way that
their anti-racism project or assignment played out.
It was really clear to us at the beginning,
even before we started, that our major goal was,
basically, to repair a rupture, that our job was
to meet the organization where it was at,
and repair the relationship.
Although we may have had grand ideas
about what we wanted to do
and whatever the language was around,
rooting out the anti-racist, or whatever,
we were clear about keeping our expectations
in alignment with what the strategy was,
which was to really repair what the rupture had been.
I think, I don't know if I went two minutes but I'll stop.
- Ok, great.
So we entered our placement
not really knowing what to expect in terms of
the agency's attitude about the project.
I think that because there was
a fraught history with our project,
it was a unique experience
but that is true for all of the placements.
They've seen the project over and over again,
and that was especially evident
in our case because
it turned out that they were very,
the whole year, it was a very long, slow,
bureaucratic process of developing our project
and getting the go-ahead from this
mysterious system of
upper people in the agency.
When we arrived, we were presented,
we were introduced to a staff member
who was gonna be our guide,
and she framed her role as supporting us
and helping us so that what happened to the interns
before us wouldn't happen again.
(laughter)
But as the year progressed, it became clear
that her role was also to make sure
that we didn't do anything that might be
too provocative or cross the line or,
basically we would write drafts for our project,
and she would take it up
to the unknown group of people in the sky,
and they would review every word,
and then it would get sent down back to us.
So there were some, in case you can't tell,
there were some frustrations in terms of feeling
a bit micromanaged and it did feel like
our original idea for the project was to facilitate
a discussion or a series of discussions in our agency
around the use of language with race,
with a focus on the word Caucasian.
We wanted to, we had heard it a lot
and we wanted to bring awareness
of the problematic origins of that word,
but that seemed to feel threatening to the agency.
So our project became even more scaled down.
Finally, we did receive the go-ahead in April
to actually do some discussions. (laughs)
I guess to say what I felt like
the key learning was from that development stage,
one of us, and we can't remember who it was now,
one of us reframed the micromanaging as a positive,
that the agency was actually invested in the project
and taking an active leadership role,
even if sometimes to us,
it felt a little too controlling.
Yeah. (laughs)
But, along those lines, the project doesn't
have to be this solo thing that only
the Smith students are responsible for,
because the agency staff people, they're the ones
who are gonna be there year after year.
So now we can move on to the next part.
- So what we actually ended up doing was
two separate discussions
with same content each, about an hour long
on different days and times of days.
So it happened mid-April, early April,
very close to the actual end of our internship.
The goals that we had at that point,
were officially unblending the categories
of race, ethnicity, and nationality,
really spread understanding of race as a social
construct but one that has very real power,
and we still had our covert object of unmasking
Caucasian as a non-scientific concept.
So the events were both guided discussions
on racial categories, their history,
and how and why we use them clinically.
And the content and delivery,
we had some historical information on what context
the racial categories originally came from,
as probably all of you know by now, hopefully,
the term Caucasian comes from 19th century
European Pseudoscience that was trying to prove,
scientifically, the superiority of white Northern
European people versus everybody else.
So it's extremely politically motivated and
it really hurts, at least, me personally to hear it used.
Then we had a discussion piece on how
the participants identified themselves.
We were constantly pretty conscious of the fact
that we were four white women
initiating a discussion on race,
and concerned that we really wanted
to focus on critical whiteness studies
and that we couldn't do that.
Another part was a radio clip from NPR,
discussing how racial identifications can shift
during an individual's lifetime,
which was really helpful.
I think that we had very different kinds of materials.
We had audio, we had experiential exercises,
we had discussions, and we had a little bit
of a didactic piece in it.
And then we collected feedback
from the participants as they left,
which is part of the anti-racism project,
asking for one thing they were taking away
with them, and what they had wished
had been discussed but wasn't.
The feedback was quite positive.
We had, I think, 12 or 13 people in the
first discussion, and a little bit less in the second,
so it wasn't a great, huge success
in regards to participation but we felt
that we actually had really good conversations.
So that's what we actually ended up doing.
- Hi, good morning, everyone.
Jil and I, we worked at the Bedford VA Hospital
for this past internship.
I know we have a limited amount of time
so I'm gonna get to the three most
important things that I thought were
the most important part of our assignment.
The first thing is collaboration.
From the very beginning, Jil and I, we reached out
to the Equal Opportunity,
EEO manager at the Bedford VA, Deborah,
who was very enthusiastic about having us
participate and be a part of this work.
She really invited us and provided
a welcoming atmosphere for us.
And it turned out that, in February when we did
the presentation, it was Black History Month.
So we were able to use our presentation
under the sponsorship of the EEO office
to do a presentation as part of
the Black History Month celebration.
So that was something very important,
to go into something that's pre-existing
within the agency, instead of trying to do
something that's completely new which would've
taken a lot more time and effort.
This was very important
that we collaborated with Deborah,
and the other important thing is that Jil and I,
we really collaborated very well together.
We met every other week for five weeks,
on our non-working hours.
We went to each other's house and we talked
in a relaxed environment, and that really helped
to get some of the ideas going,
and sit down and maybe have some coffee
or have some meal together.
That really helped for me, I think.
And obviously, Carolyn du Bois was our FFA,
and in connecting with her and getting
to tell her about our presentation,
about our ideas, and getting her support, too,
I think that was very important.
Whoever your FFA is, connect with that person, too,
to get the (mumbles), I think is very important.
So that's the first thing, collaboration.
The next thing is the topic itself.
We used a YouTube video clip that was
actually pretty old, back in the 1990s.
But, but, the topic of our presentation was
Does racism still exist today?
and we used that to say, even though the video is old,
we wanna still contrast that to today and ask people,
"What do you think? Does the kind of stuff
"that shows in the video still exist today?"
So it was a good contrast.
The topic was very much needed because
Deborah told me, in her 25 years working
at the VA, there was no specific topic
that was specifically addressing anti-racism.
It was cultural diversity, diversity, awareness,
but nothing anti-racism focused.
So that was very needed, she said.
Also, what is it that your agency needs,
that wasn't there already, but you can fit
into the existing structure of the agency.
The PowerPoint, itself, was very interactive.
It was a video but it was simple.
We had few slides up.
We didn't really talk too much based on the slides.
Jil and I prepared, I say something,
she says something, we watch the video,
I say something, and a lot of times
the audience was asking questions,
talking about their own experiences.
I think that was very important, too,
to get the audience, to connect with them.
But one of the things that we didn't know,
going into the presentations,
how the audience will respond.
That was a big uncertainty and nervousness.
But I think the fact that Jil and I,
we collaborated well together,
that we worked well with Deborah,
that we worked well Carolyn, and at the same time,
we were able to plan together pretty well,
we'd meet five times, I think that really made
a difference going in to prepare ourselves.
I think the video spoke for itself in some ways, too,
and the audience was able to pick up on that,
and to be emotionally
stimulated.
A lot of people brought in their own experiences
about what they felt,
and it was a very powerful event.
Jil's gonna talk a little bit more about her experience.
- Hi, I'm Jil.
I think a lot of what I'm going to say is gonna echo
what Todd said, but I think one of the major pieces
that assisted us in navigating the implementation
of this project was that we didn't enter this endeavor
solely focused on our own prescribed agenda.
We really attempted to be mindful of what would be
most beneficial and supportive of the organization.
So we took an approach that was sensitive
to not stepping on anyone's toes, so to speak,
and I think holding this sensitivity and awareness
was important, especially being placed in such
a large and, really honestly, bureaucratic agency.
Todd spoke to this also, but I think one of the pieces
that really helped in launching our project
was that we were able to partner with,
and work collaboratively with someone
who held similar values as we did,
and who also held the drive to address
issues related to racism.
So in partnering with the Equal Employment
Opportunity program director, we were afforded
the opportunity to align ourselves with someone
within the organization, and this, in turn,
assisted in accomplishing the logistics of the project,
such as raising awareness within the agency,
and as well as simple things as where we were gonna
hold the presentation and securing that.
So I'll talk a little bit about
the actual day of the presentation.
Speaking personally, I'm not someone
who's very good at speaking publicly,
so it's ironic right now.
(laughter)
(laughs) The project, honestly, was nerve-racking
and an out-of-body experience for me.
But I did value the purpose and intent of the project.
We couldn't predict how audience members would
react to the content of the presentation,
and we didn't know how we would be perceived,
so we really attempted to frame our presentation
with the understanding that we were,
in no way, claiming to be sources of authority
or experts on anti-racism work.
Fortunately, we had a turnout of about 40 to 45
individuals from varying departments of the agency.
It's also interesting to know the energy
that was in the room after showing the video.
Once we opened the floor for discussion,
it was that brief moment after the video ended,
when we stepped out onto a ledge
and asked for people's reactions, not knowing
what responses we would receive, if any.
I think we both breathed that sigh of relief
when people bravely began to share
their own experiences and reactions to the video.
As the discussion grew and developed,
people shared formable sides of themselves
by sharing their own experiences
of racial discrimination, and you could really feel
the passion that people held for
the acknowledgement of such experiences.
All in all, I believe this project's outcome
firstly served to provide a space for individuals
to acknowledge and receive validation
for their own experiences of racial discrimination,
and also to raise awareness of the importance of
discussing the reality that racism does, in fact, exist.
Secondly, I also believe that this project serves
as a stepping stone for future presentations
or workshops to be held within the agency,
because after we finished the presentation,
we did have several people coming up to us,
expressing the desire for more discussions
about race and racism.
Just to conclude my own reflection,
although this was nerve-racking for me, it was also
a very rewarding and inspiring experience.
- Hi, I'm Jamie.
I was placed--
Can you hear me? Wow!
This year, I was placed at the Center for Women
and Community, which is a college counseling center
located on the University of Massachusetts campus.
I have to tell you a little bit about the agency
'cause I think it was influential in terms of what
we were gonna do there for an anti-racism project.
The CWC offers short-term counseling
to mostly women, and the focus is really
around women's issues.
I say that in quotes.
It's, in my opinion, really a hidden gem.
It's an agency that has a real
social justice lens, I think.
It's actually housed in
the New Africa House on the UMass campus.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, in the 1960s,
the New Africa House was really taken over
by black students, and then it was designated
the home of African-American Studies on campus.
The CWC is on the second floor of
the New Africa House, and on the first floor of that
building is the Center for Women and Community.
The CWC, the Center for,
on the first floor is
the Women of Color Leadership Network,
and this is one of the CWC's collaborating agencies.
When we were thinking about what we're going to do
in terms of an anti-racism assignment, we were like,
"What do we do in an agency that really does it right?
"What do we do in an agency that has
"an expressed commitment to anti-racism work?"
And in all the things they do, in sitting with clients,
they're really thinking about the impact
that race and racism has on clients
in terms of symtomatology.
They draw on an empowerment model
and I think
the belief is that symptomatology is rooted
in oppression, and of course, racism.
So we're like, and I say we, because this was
a collaboration between myself and other interns,
"What are we gonna do with this agency?"
I mean there is literature available about,
anti-racism literature is available to every client
and they're doing things all the time
in collaboration with other campus constituencies
around this sort of work.
And what we found was that the answer
really lied in the question we were asking.
What do you do when you're doing
lots of things right clinically?
We realized that it wasn't our job
to figure out what to do,
but it was our job to invite our team
and the other members and staff of CWC
into that conversation.
We ended up hosting a film screening
and a discussion about what is the responsibility
of social workers beyond the clinical setting,
when you're doing lots of things right.
I wanna tell you a little bit
about the film that we showed.
It's called Unnatural Causes,
and it's a documentary film that explores
the social determinants of health and mental health,
really on a population level.
We showed a segment of the film that's titled
When the Bell Breaks, which looks specifically
at the impact of racism on the health of black women,
using infant mortality and low birth rate
as a measure of optimal health.
I think the key point of this segment
for guiding our discussion was that
social class is a significant factor in health,
and infant mortality and health.
But what's really important is to understand
that African-American women, even when they are
upper middle-class women, they give birth
at lower birth rates than lower white women.
It's also important to note that this indicator
is not present in black women, in African women,
so this is not a biological experience.
It requires that African women who migrate
to the United States are here for one generation
before their birth outcome starts to reflect
those of African-American women.
Another thing that the film told us was that
there was a time in our history where this gap,
in terms of birth outcomes and mental health
measures and health measures, was shrunk,
and that was right after the Civil Rights Movement.
So what was happening during that period
doesn't really reflect what we're doing
in the clinical space, and even what we're doing
in the CWC, what we were doing clinically.
The gap began to widen when government
pulled back in terms of cutbacks,
so what was happening was that
there were policy interventions that were shrinking
the gap between blacks and whites,
and with respect to women, infant mortality.
So the conversation that we attempted to have is
what do we do as clinicians, and what is our
responsibility as social workers in terms of
engaging policy, really, on a macro level?
I think that, I wanna say one point,
we hosted this film screening during the lunch hour,
and if you want to get people together
all at the same time in the same space,
you offer them food.
(laughter)
This has been my experience getting people together
for a host of reasons for years and years years.
We offered pizza, we brought everyone in,
we watched this film.
It's a really powerful film.
I suggest everyone watch it if you haven't.
What we heard from people, the clinicians
and social workers at the CWC after watching it,
was that we tend to lose sight of our responsibility,
our social work responsibility in the clinical space.
We're working with clients, and even when we have
a social justice lens, even when we're sitting
with people and we're acknowledging
the chronic stress that they experience
because of something like racism,
we forget that it is also our responsibility
to engage in public policy endeavors
and things that shrink the gap between
whites and blacks in the United States.
And people were really grateful to us.
They said, "I'm often thinking about things like this
"through an individual lens, and I recognize
"that it's important for me to really step back
"and look at issues like racism at a macro level,
"and what is required of us as social workers."
I think that what I took away from it was
that there's not just a clinical response
or a clinical intervention to anti-racism.
There really is a social work response.
Thanks.
- I'm gonna use the projector so you guys
might wanna scoot around
and come back for the discussion.
- Ok. - Thank you.
Ok, can you all hear me?
Thanks Dina for bringing everybody down closer.
Also, thank you everybody for being here
on a Saturday morning, thank you.
It's, just wanna acknowledge
how that can be a bit of a challenge.
My project was about race, racism
and schizophrenia in Vermont, so I worked
at the Counseling Service of Addison County.
That was where my placement was,
which is a community mental health agency,
but the first year of my placement,
I was in a hospital setting in Burlington, Vermont.
And there are two units in that hospital.
There's the mood disorder clinic
or the effective disorder clinic, I mean,
the mood disorder unit, the suicide unit, essentially.
People who had attempted suicide, depression.
And there was another unit called the psychosis unit.
In your monthly narratives, you might remember
where you track the caseload
and who's on your caseload, and I really was noticing
there's a lot more people of color upstairs
on the psychosis unit, that is a locked unit.
People are there involuntarily.
There are no interview rooms on that unit.
They opted, when they built it, to have more rooms
for patients but not rooms for family meetings.
So I was really aware that that was going on,
and that that was going on in looking at
how people with mental illness were being treated
in the state by looking at those two units.
That was my first year placement.
Originally, my proposal was to use this book called
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia
Became a Black Disease.
That's the cover of the book,
and it's written by a man who's a psychiatrist
and an American Studies professor.
The premise of the book is that schizophrenia
exists equally across all racial groups.
Historically, starting in the 1960s, African-Americans,
particularly African-American men,
are diagnosed four to seven times higher.
So biologically schizophrenia should
exist equally across all racial groups,
but in terms of what's diagnosed,
for people who saw Mary Olsen's presentation
yesterday, we talked about diagnosis and medications
as being pretty profoundly disparate in terms of race,
and that when you have that diagnosis,
you are locked up, you can't get out,
you are force-medicated, and the expectation
is for long-term disability and removal
from your community, so it's a lot of ramifications.
I was just gonna use the book and I didn't know
exactly what I was going to do with it.
Actually, another thing about the book,
in talking about the racialization of diagnosis and
prescription, one of the reasons I used a PowerPoint
presentation today was to show you this ad.
If you can see on the left,
Assaultive and belligerent!
Cooperation begins with Haldol.
This was an advertisement from the 1970s
in psychiatric journals, and that's,
again, what that book is talking about.
So I really recommend checking out that book.
And this is just really frightening, obviously,
and Haldol, I looked it up, and Haldol also was used
in the Soviet Union with political prisoners.
It's a pretty intense, suppressing drug.
What I wanted to do was find out,
look at the disparities in Vermont.
Part of my placement was in something called the
Community Rehabilitation and Treatment Program.
That's the name for the severe and persistent
mental illness program in the state.
There are nine agencies
that serve people in that program.
My agency was one of them.
And I had gotten a document from
the State Department of Mental Health.
They're called PIPs,
Performance Information Project.
Basically, it's analysis from the Department
of Mental Health about indicators.
Performance Indicator Project.
They were things about how many people
in the CRT program were working,
different things about people in the program.
I contacted them and I said,
"Have you ever looked at race and diagnosis?
"Have you looked at who's diagnosed with what,
"and what race they are?"
We had to go back and forth a lot of times 'cause
she didn't really understand what I was looking for.
Again, these Performance Indicator Project things
came out, and it said, "Get in touch with somebody
"if you had more questions," and I did.
One of the things is to let you know that the
Department of Public Health has people who do this.
They collect data, all the stuff, they get that data
from hospitals, they get that data that you're using.
You can contact them and ask them questions
about the data, and you can ask them to run
a specific analysis of data.
That's something that we can do in any state,
not just a small state like Vermont.
I knew that because I had actually worked
for the Department of Health years ago,
and I knew that was something that was available.
You could really find some amazing stuff.
They had never looked at that.
What did we find out in looking
at the diagnosis, mood disorders?
In the CRT program the mood disorders,
people with bipolar disorder, major depressive
disorder, and people with psychosis or schizophrenia.
Those were a lot of the people in the CRT program.
Here's what we found out.
If you can see this graph,
this is why I wanted to show it (mumbles).
For all of the entire program CRT,
we've got the gray boxes.
41% of the entire program have mood disorders,
are diagnosed with mood disorders,
and 50% diagnosed with schizophrenia.
So that's the whole program.
Among white people in the program,
it matched it, completely.
41% mood disorders and 50% schizophrenia.
Look at African-Americans.
67% to 29%.
Not four to seven amount, that's a difference of
40%, 60%, it's pretty significant here.
So this is what I did with my talk
in our clinician's meeting.
We had weekly clinician's meetings.
I had planned it to have a talk.
It was about 20 minutes.
I presented all of this information, we talked about it,
I asked a couple of different questions.
I had a handout that had those images,
the image of the ad, and then,
"What do you think it is like here?"
and people were really struck by it.
They said things like,"It's eyeopening and scary,
"and even here, that it exists."
Another thing, an outcome of that,
in addition to the discussion was that
that Performance Indicator Project report is now
on their website, and it does say it was requested
by a Smith College School for Social Work intern.
I really want people to know that this is stuff that
you can do and people were really appreciative of it.
The discussion was pretty intense
because they would not have said,
"Here in our white state of Vermont,
"that we have these discrepancies, too," and we do.
Just enclosing, I have this quote.
I'm actually working on bringing
a presenter from the Ecorys project,
which is a radical mental health organization.
It's coming here to Smith on July 29th
from seven to nine pm.
Sasha DeBrule, and he has this line on his signature
and his email, we've been doing that.
It's "Justice is what love looks like in public."
What Jamie was saying in terms of
where's the clinical work, compassionate work,
political work, and micro-level and macro-level meet.
And it's here.
When we think about justice and love,
and the work that we do, these are places
in pointing out some of these issues
and talking about these issues is where they meet.
Thanks, I look forward to talking to you about it.
These slides are up online, apparently.
I can't wait to talk about all of our projects.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Thank you very much, truly, for being here
this morning and for sharing all of your projects,
and for giving us a really good sense
of the various ways in which we can address
anti-racism work, at the micro,
the meso, and the macro level.
Again, this is really for you, so please,
any questions that you have where our panel is,
if you can feel free.
- Not all at once.
(laughter)
- Daniel, I'm interested in the response
that you got in your presentation.
From what I heard it sounds like you did this
on your own and brought the information forth,
and (mumbles) what I found.
I'm wondering if you had any
negative responses or people who were like,
"Why are you digging into this?"
- I didn't get about why was I digging into it,
but there was somebody who was,
and I also wanna say, with this project, keep it small.
It was 20 minutes' presentation but I had been
contacting the person to collect the information.
I didn't know how and was like,
"How do I even begin to present this?"
Somebody was,
the people did say that it was eyeopening
and important to see, my supervisor was really into it,
the director of CRT was really into it.
One of the clinicians had this pushback analysis
that was kind of disturbing to me,
which I didn't quite know what to do with.
We didn't have enough time.
He said something to the effect of,
and this is a clinician who's worked in that program
for a long time, "Well, you also can think about
"what are the causes of schizophrenia,
"like broken families and the fact that
"in African-American families, there's no father.
"The fathers are absent" or something like
this comment that I just didn't know what to do.
That would have been, I needed more time,
and again, that was where I felt I'm the intern.
My jaw dropped to the floor.
I didn't quite know what to do.
I knew that I struggled with this particular clinician
and it wasn't a surprise to me that he would say
something in the meeting that I was flabbergasted by,
but that was, I waited until later and talked
to my supervisor about what to do and had to
manage that 'cause we didn't quite have enough time.
We did talk about it and some other people
stepped in to talk about it,
but I was really struck by that.
Also, something else had happened
in another clinical meeting,
where he made a joke that I had to challenge him.
So there were a couple of things
that were interpersonal that came up.
But otherwise, people just appreciated it
and talked about, we were able to talk about
what they experienced at other agencies.
- It's actually going back to (mumbles)
about the interpersonal potential conflict.
I want to know (mumbles) color whether
any of that (mumbles) and if it did, either as
an obvious statement or more of (mumbles)
and how you dealt with it (mumbles).
- The CWC is an amazing agency
and they're really, really focused on these issues.
But lo and behold, there was certainly a white woman
in the room who was made to feel very uncomfortable
by these kinds of conversations.
Because often people are triggered and they're like,
"Oh, you're pointing out what I'm not doing."
And I actually think, and this is just a thought,
but because of it, she stopped
speaking to me for a period of time.
I then talked to my supervisor about it and I said,
"I really feel like this triggered her
"and now it's become an interpersonal conflict."
And she said to me, "You should ask her."
So I did.
I said to her, "I feel like this was a really hard
"conversation that we all had together,
"and something's changed for us interpersonally."
I wasn't surprised by her response.
It was, "Oh, absolutely not."
But it was reparative, and it was a moment for
the two of us to say, "If this is the case, it's not cool.
"And if it isn't, we should be friends anyway
"or whatever."
(laughter)
I think these are really hard conversations to have,
and sometimes it requires repair attempts.
It's unfortunate that I was the one who was
responsible for doing that, but I think I got the support
of my supervisor, and it went ok.
- My turn. - Your turn?
- So far, with our assignment,
I think because we reached out
to very important people like Deborah,
and Jil and I, we collaborated well,
I didn't feel there were too many
interpersonal conflicts.
I don't think there was any interpersonal conflict
in this particular assignment.
This topic, the presentation, itself,
the video invoked a lot of reactions
and a lot of different people,
a lot of diverse group of people
that came to our meetings.
The sheer sense of this universal aspect
that we all can identify with,
made it very collaborative.
I didn't really feel like there was a lot of resistance.
Deborah, like I said earlier,
provided this support,
and she's always willing to meet with us
when we wanted to talk about it.
That was very important for us.
So I didn't feel like I met any resistance in moving
this presentation forward at the Bedford VA.
- I'm amazed by how
thorough and thoughtful all of your projects are,
and I'm just wondering
how did you accomplish this during thesis
and what advice can you give us?
'Cause your projects seem so fleshed out.
- I think Samuel said it earlier.
He said, "Keep it simple".
We're also in a panel right now.
So it sounds like, we're putting our best foot forward.
(laughter) Right?
And it is an assignment.
I think the language changed last year
and I had to work really hard to hear that.
It's an assignment.
It's good enough, right?
This is a hard topic to do good enough with,
so there's a lot of emotional work
that also happens, which is hard.
But that's my two cents.
Other people might have different perspectives.
- Also, collaborate, like everybody else has said.
- We are talking about it after the fact, right?
So the thing's been written,
and we're able to put it into a nice neat package.
But I didn't know.
The proposal I had originally written
was just till I could use that book.
I didn't know what was gonna be beyond that,
and that might've been enough.
Partially, because you have to write that proposal
earlier in the year, I don't remember when.
When is it? - December.
So you write that proposal but I didn't give
this presentation until the end of March.
And a lot of classmates didn't do it until March,
the presentation part.
So it is just one thing that's on the back burner,
maybe collect some information, think about it,
but you do write that proposal that's a little bit
the skeleton of the plan of what you're going to do,
and then it fleshes itself out.
- Obviously.
- One thing for me, too, like I said earlier,
Jil and I, we took the time off to meet,
have that relaxing time together
and work in a comfortable environment.
For me, I think that's very important
to de-stress away from the work environment.
If you have the opportunity to work with somebody,
do it outside and use that time to do the work.
- I'm wondering, for collaborating for the actual pieces
of the assignment, is everything shared
or is it assigned, is everything completed
as a group or (mumbles).
- I think all except for the final paper, which is
really your personal reflection on the assignment.
But everything else--
- The goal and everything is handed in together.
- That's right.
It can be.
- You could (mumbles) with students across
different agencies, too. (mumbles).
Most of the people do it.
You don't have to do it collaboratively (mumbles)
but you can hear how helpful that can be.
- Is it possible to collaborate with people
who are not in the same stage as you?
Because I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in my stage,
and this sounds overwhelming to do this by myself.
So I don't know if you know anybody
in class who's done it cross-stage
or you guys went separate (mumbles).
- I would think it would be possible, right?
- The issue is you need to do something in your
agency or the community in which you're serving.
(mumbles) this is the anti-racism (mumbles).
You may have ideas about things
that would be of service to the community
that you could do.
Probably most of (mumbles) the project.
(mumbles) like match up with students
in another setting (mumbles)
- Carolyn, if (mumbles) I think that (mumbles)
that it's mostly, for example, I have
a particular diagnosis when we (mumbles)
particular community, it could be interesting, actually.
- Yeah.
- Two people are located in even different
geographical areas, so it really depends.
Are you looking at something that is much more
a macro-level, and compare and contrast,
or are you looking at something that is really
very specific to that community.
You have been trying to ask a question,
I think, about seven times.
(laughter)
- Thank you guys for coming, it's really (mumbles).
I understand you mentioned that you made your
presentation (mumbles) clinicians on a weekly basis.
For those of you that had to recruit and entice
people with pizza, I'm curious about how
you went about recruiting clinical staff members
to attend your discussion.
- We had popcorn
(laughter)
and coffee and doughnuts and I think candy.
(laughter)
- Tea. - And tea.
We both sent out emails
to the whole clinical staff and other stuff--
- And we sent out very attractive-looking emails.
(laughter)
- And we also all worked in separate teams
and I think we were enticing people
in our own team meetings,
to extort them to come,
so we did a lot of food work to actually get people,
and get your supervisors to come, at least.
- And that was where we had two different sessions.
We had them on different days of the week
at different times so that we could try
to get some people, 'cause everyone is really busy--
- Lunchtime and afternoon tea.
- That's a good point about the very attractive
email blurbs, we did the same thing,
and I think that a headline of ours was,
"For those committed to anti-racism work." (laughs)
(laughter)
"Please RSVP." (laughs) (laughter)
- For anyone in the panel, I'm wondering
if you employed
identified allies within the agency
that maybe would promote your project
or assignment, and talking to the people
that they already know, people (mumbles) say,
"Hey, I think it was pretty cool.
"Can we drum up some interest in this?"
I don't know, I'm trying to look at angles (mumbles).
- So Deborah was our point person that we talked to.
She invited,
because she is already well-known in the hospital,
she was able to get the flyers out,
put our pictures on the computer screen,
on our screen savers,
have Subs, wraps, chips, sodas, drinks,
all under the EEO office.
So we didn't have to pay anything.
It was lunchtime, people wanted to eat.
So that was everything under one roof.
- But it also was their programming
for African-American History Month.
- That's right.
- So if you can figure out what happens
at your agency, how do they do training,
how do they do discussions,
what are events that they wanna celebrate and honor,
and plug into it, don't make that up yourself.
Find a way to plug into what already exists.
- I just wanna emphasize this point.
This is why it's important to understand
where your organization is.
We didn't have funding.
People don't necessarily take lunch at our agency.
There were a lot of things to have to consider,
in terms of where they were in their openness
and willing to support these kinds of issues.
Understanding that is really important, I think.
- We have time for one final question and then
(mumbles).
- If someone else hasn't gone first.
(laughter)
- How will you assess that?
Come on! (laughter)
- They're such nice social workers.
- I was wondering if any of you know of any students
who talked about, or two questions.
If you know of any students who talked about
power and privilege exclusively,
and the other part I was thinking of was
not remaining in the vine area, like black and white,
and so talking about intersectionality.
If you can make any ideas that you forgot or know of.
- I would, because Maria and I read them all (laughs).
We read them all.
Students have lots of different kind of things.
Students have looked at issues of intersectionality.
We had students in college health settings looking at
who's accessing college mental health services,
across issues of intersectionality,
what is it like for gay people of color to come
to this particular college counseling service,
who's getting served, who's not.
I think the interface around
religion, race, gender orientation,
sexual orientation, class.
So many students have really looked
at a range of variables and factors that are impacting
clients and impacting access to care.
Does that fit with some of what you're thinking about?
Yeah, absolutely.
We've had some students looking
at Jewish identity and race issues.
How do you put those things together
and pull the things apart?
So, absolutely, think beyond the binary.
People don't come in boxes, as they say.
- I can also offer that our conversations
often went to intersectionality.
I don't know if that was true
for other people's projects,
but I think you can just expect it
to happen in the conversation.
- I think that my project or assignment focused
really specifically on women, and a particular issue
related to giving birth, and infants.
So while I think it can be broadly expanded to think
about all people of color, that really was a niche.
- We're very close to needing to wrap up.
I think that I would just pick up on that
one piece around assessment.
If there's anything that tends to be missing
out of these assignments, it's assessment.
Sometimes students come out of the second summer
with a lot of ideas about what they wanna do
when they go to the agency,
and want to apply that idea to the agency,
but make sure you take a little bit of time
in the fall to get yourselves located.
Find out who the allies and resources are.
Read the abstracts of what your colleagues have
done before, so your'e not reinventing the wheel.
Sometimes a great project is to do a follow-up
to what the folks, the year before, did
and that deepens the conversation with people.
But do some assessment about what will be useful
to your agency and in service of the clients
that you're working with.
- The last thing that I would wanna say is that
we're using Moodle as a platform to continue
to upload information that may be helpful to you,
and likewise, if you find something
that you think will be good to post there,
I really welcome your thoughts, your ideas,
and whatever you can offer so that we can continue
to engage in this very important work.
Thank you so much for being here.
(applause)
- Also, feel free to ask us other questions.
We'll be around or you'll know us,
see us on campus at the lunch today.
Just feel free to ask us
if you have some other questions.
- I wanna thank the panel.
I thank all of you guys for being here
on a Saturday morning.
I'm incredibly touched by the work
that you do with clients.
I read a lot of your clinical material.
Very touched by the work that you do.
On behalf of clients who are in great need,
I'm very proud of the work you do.
You guys have done a great job.
Thank you.
(applause)