Social Work: Credo Reference

organized effort to help individuals and families to adjust themselves to the community, as well as to adapt the community to the needs of such persons and families.
Modern Social Work

Modern social work employs three methods of assistance: case work, group work, and community organization. Case work is the method by which individual persons and families are assisted. The person in need of case work may be physically, mentally, or socially handicapped. Among those regarded as socially handicapped are: the unemployed, the homeless, members of broken families, alcoholics, drug addicts, and neglected or problem children. To determine the cause of maladjustment, the social worker must understand individual psychology as well as the sociology of the community. Physicians, psychiatrists, and other specialists may be required to help diagnose the difficulty.

Social group work is exemplified by the social settlement, the supervised playground and gymnasium, and the classroom, where handicrafts may be learned. The community may be called upon to provide the buildings and grounds for such activities; often the services of volunteers and of public groups are utilized; in recent years people living in poverty areas have been employed to work in and direct poverty projects in their own communities…

Poverty is deprivation of material essentials such as food, shelter, drinking water, and clothing. It is also associated with the lack of education, freedom, and dignity. The uneven distribution of poverty at various scales, from the global to the household, via the national, regional, and local, suggests the importance of geographic factors in explaining its prevalence and understanding its nature.

neighborhood welfare institution generally in an urban slum area, where trained workers endeavor to improve social conditions, particularly by providing community services and promoting neighborly cooperation. The idea was developed in mid-19th-century England when such social thinkers as Thomas Hill Green, John Ruskin, and Arnold Toynbee (1852–83) urged university students to settle in poor neighborhoods, where they could study and work to better local conditions. The pioneer establishment was Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884 in London under the leadership of Samuel Augustus Barnett. Before long, similar houses were founded in many cities of Great Britain, the United States, and continental Europe. Some of the more famous settlement houses in the United States have been Hull House and Chicago Commons, Chicago; South End House, Boston; and the University Settlement, Henry Street Settlement, and Greenwich House, New York City. Settlements serve as community, education, and recreation centers, particularly in densely populated immigrant neighborhoods. Sometimes known as social settlements, they are also called neighborhood houses, neighborhood centers, or community centers. The settlement house differs from other social welfare agencies; the latter provide specific services, while the former is aimed at improving neighborhood life as a whole. Its role has gradually altered as some of its varied functions have been assumed by state and municipal authorities and by other organizations. Kindergartens, formerly an important adjunct of the settlement house, are now operated by the public schools; municipal health departments have taken over its clinical services; and labor unions now sponsor educational and recreational activities for workers. The early leaders of settlement houses in the United States met from time to time and in 1911 founded the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers; Jane Addams served as the first president.

Organized educational, cultural, medical, and financial assistance to those in need. Measures of assistance include care of destitute adults; treatment of the mentally ill; rehabilitation of criminals; care and relief of the sick, the handicapped, the young, and needy families; and educational activity for children. Access to such programs is considered a basic or inalienable right of those in need. Nations that provide social welfare programs are known as welfare states.

The concept of a welfare state is difficult to define. In the simplest terms, it refers to a state that has assumed some responsibility for individual welfare through the provision of both income transfers and social services. Government provision of social programs includes pensions, unemployment insurance, invalidity and sick pay, social assistance, family assistance, parental leave, health care, care for the elderly and people with disabilities, employment services, specialized services (e.g., alcohol and drug treatment and foster care), and housing. The earliest welfare state developed in Germany in the late nineteenth century, when the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck extended health and social insurance benefits to workers. Today, most advanced industrial countries would be classified as welfare states, with social expenditure in 2001 accounting for an average of over twenty percent of Gross Domestic Product in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, according to OECD figures.

services provided for the care of disadvantaged children. Foundling institutions for orphans and abandoned children were the earliest attempts at child care, usually under religious auspices. At first the goal was to provide minimum physical subsistence, but services have been expanded to include social and psychological help. In the late 18th cent., a movement developed around the idea that children should not simply be regarded as small adults, and such educators as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel were discussing children's special needs at the same time that the Industrial Revolution intensified the nonagricultural exploitation of child labor. In the 19th cent. many religious and private institutions were organized to take care of children who were orphaned, destitute, or handicapped. In child-welfare legislation, the British Children's Charter Act of 1908 and the Ohio Children's Code Commission of 1911 marked a new era. The idea that it was the responsibility of the community to provide children with the advantages that their parents could not supply is a 20th-century development. In this category are free school lunches; medical, dental, and psychiatric services and child guidance clinics in schools; playgrounds; children's courts; special schools for handicapped children; and care in foster families for children of broken homes. Infant and child clinics are often provided by municipalities. Many social welfare agencies finance summer camps for both healthy and handicapped children. In the United States child welfare services are administered through the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. A series of new child welfare programs were passed by Congress in the 1960s. These included the Child Nutrition Act, the Head Start Program, and the Foster Grandparent Program. The International Union for Child Welfare (1920) organized relief for child victims of major international and national disasters. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF, 1946) targets malnutrition and helps reestablish children's services destroyed in war.

Jane Addams, social reformer, settlement house leader, and peace advocate, was born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, a little town near the Wisconsin border. A member of the first generation of college women in the United States, she graduated from Rockford [Illinois] Female Seminary (later Rockford College) in 1881. She floundered for the next eight years while she tried to find something useful to do with her life. She resisted attempts to make her a teacher or a missionary, and, like more than fifty percent of the first generation of college women, she never married. Finally in 1889, together with Ellen Gates Starr, a college classmate, she founded Hull-House on the west side of Chicago.

Edith Abbott (1876-1957) was born in Grand Island, Nebraska. She was one of the first women in America to earn a doctoral degree. In 1924, she became the dean of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, a position she held for 18 years. As such, she had a profound influence on the emerging field of social work.

Abbott came from a family that had an intense interest in social activism. Her mother participated in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. Abbott's sister, Grace, served as the chief of the Children's Bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor from 1921 to 1934. Abbott graduated from a girls' boarding school in Omaha in 1893.

Although Abbott wanted to attend college, her parents could not afford it at the time. Consequently, Abbott returned to Grand Island and taught high school for 2 years. She eventually attended the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1901. She went on to attend the University of Chicago, earning a Ph.D. in economics in 1905. The following year she continued her studies in England, attending both the University College of London and the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was at the London School that she was exposed to new methods of combating poverty…

Lillian D. Wald, a public health nurse and social reformer, was born in Cincinnati on March 10, 1867, to German-Jewish immigrants Max D. and Minnie Schwarz Wald. The family moved to Rochester, New York, and Wald attended private schools. She gradually became bored with a lifestyle that promised nothing more than social events. Like many young women of her era, she wanted to use her skills and talents for something socially useful. Nursing offered everything that she sought. In 1891, Wald graduated from the New York Hospital Training School for Nurses. She then spent a year working in an orphan asylum.

After briefly studying at the Woman’s Medical College in New York, Wald abandoned her interest in becoming a physician and moved to the College Settlement on the Lower East Side. She taught home nursing to immigrants. When one of the students became ill, she went to her home to offer aid and discovered that tenement living involved suffering, poverty, and filth. Shocked and ashamed that such conditions existed, Wald joined her friend Mary Brewster in forming a settlement house in 1893. With financial support from a wealthy banker, Wald and Brewster founded the Henry Street settlement in 1895.