30th Annual California Social Welfare Archives Awards Reception

The 30th Annual California Social Welfare Archives Awards Reception highlights those who have positively changed the social work profession. For more than 35 years, CSWA has documented the development of social welfare in California for educators, scholars and researchers by preserving and making available materials of historical significance and publishing oral history interviews with social work pioneers. The California Social Work Hall of Distinction honors exceptional contributors to social welfare and the social work profession and supports curricula in social work programs throughout the state. 

 

Starting at 4 p.m. with check-in and a light supper buffet, the 30th Annual California Social Welfare Archives Awards Reception will feature a program of special guests, including guest speaker Sandy Banks, who is the recipient of the George D. Nickel Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Welfare. 

 

Banks will speak on her role as a journalist in connecting people to issues and demonstrating that everyone has a stake in what social workers do. Banks is best known for her influential twice-weekly columns in the Los Angeles Times, which aimed to gently usher readers outside their comfort zones by personalizing social issues often considered too difficult to solve or too distant to care about. She wrote frequently about education, foster care, criminal justice, homelessness and mental health – serving as a voice for the ignored, unheard and unknown.

 

Susan B. Edelstein will be presented with the George D. Nickel Award for Outstanding Professional Services by a Social Worker. Edelstein devoted her career, including as director of UCLA’s TIES for Families, to improving the outcomes for children and families in the foster care and adoptions systems by implementing innovative programs to promote the healthy development and successful adoptive placement of foster children with special needs.

The USC School of Social Work Virtual Academic Center will be presented the Frances Lomas Feldman Excellence in Education Award. The success of the VAC in improving accessibility to a professional social work education has been recognized by the CSWA Board of Directors as embodying the principles Frances Feldman found so vital to the development of the future leaders of the profession. The VAC provides the premier, online MSW program to students in 49 states, Washington, DC, and 14 countries, many of whom are bound by location due to career or personal commitments, including service members and their family members living on military bases.

 

Tickets for this fundraiser are $50 per person and tax-deductible. A limited quantity of sponsored student tickets will be made available. Internal requisitions are also accepted.