SSA Magazine - Fall 2008

Fall 2008

Read the full magazine (PDF).

• Direct Impact: The School of Social Service Administration has been a leader in social work for a century, with special relationship to the communities and people of Chicago.

• Child Welfare: SSA has had an outsized impact on child welfare issues in Chicago and throughout Illinois since the School was started

• Employment and Poverty: SSA's founding mothers knew that to improve the lives of the most vulnerable in society, they would have to address issues of employment and welfare.

• Mental Health: Generations of clinicians have graduated from SSA to work in agencies around the Chicago area armed with state-of-the-art theories on what works best to help individuals in need

• Community Organizing: For the first half of this decade, SSA and the University of Chicago provided technical assistance and professional development to give a boost to many local social service groups in the nearby Woodlawn neighborhood through the Community Outreach Partnership Center

• Criminal Justice: Perhaps no recent faculty member at SSA is better known for having an impact on his or her field than George Herbert Jones Professor Emeritus Irving Spergel, and his work with youth gangs in America.
• Education: Preparing social workers who are interested in working in public schools has been part of SSA's mission since it began
• Classes Today: During its long history, SSA has consistently pushed to advance academic teaching in its curriculum

• Conversations - Getting Healthy: Read the conversations piece between SSA Professor Harold Pollack and Dr. Tariq Butt, deputy medical officer of Access Community Health Network, as they discuss health care policy and its effect on low-income communities.
• Disclosure Rates: When and why do African-American men who have sex with men talk about HIV?
• Keeping a Relationship Emotionally Safe: The emotional safety model, created by SSA lecturer Don Catherall, is at the core of his course at the School and outlined in his latest book, Emotional Safety.
• Making Connections, Building Family: A new study looks at the sense of ambiguous loss and relationships among youth aging out of foster care.
• Inside Social Service Review: The following are summaries of three articles that appeared in the June 2008 issue of Social Service Review.
• The Power of Paperwork: This article examines how sanctions that take away all or part of an individual's welfare payment—widely thought to be effective in pushing recipients into self-sufficiency— may be too blunt of an instrument

• Husband and Strife: This article discusses how a shortage of good partners undermines policies that promote marriage for young mothers.

• Help from Many Friends: This article examines how social interactions impact mental health.
• Camp Counselor: SSA Alumna Abigail Erikson combats violence against women and girls in two Burmese refugee camps
• Behind the Numbers - More than the Minimum: Social workers benefit by approaching continuing education as professional development.