News Archive
Alumni
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Alma Fowlkes, MSW ’65, may have retired from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services in 1993, but she has never stopped doing social work over the last 20 years. A committed volunteer for the California Social Welfare Archives (CSWA) at the USC School of Social Work, Fowlkes was recently honored by the USC Alumni Association with the USC Widney Alumni House Award, which recognizes outstanding sustained volunteer service and contributions to the Trojan Family.
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The California Social Work Hall of Distinction honored six social work leaders on Saturday for their distinguished career achievements and exceptional contributions to social welfare in California, including USC School of Social Work alumni Ismael Dieppa, DSW ’73, and Mariko Yamada, MSW ‘74. The 2013 class also included Congresswoman Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Social Work Caucus, who recently earned President Barack Obama’s nomination for United States representative to the United Nations.
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In a new kind of partnership uniting higher education, nonprofit organizations and philanthropy, the Hutto-Patterson Charitable Foundation has established an endowment to fund the creation of a field placement at the USC School of Social Work with United Friends of the Children (UFC), an organization dedicated to bettering the lives of foster youth.
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Faustina Solís, MSW ’54, an educator and pioneer in public health and the second provost of the University of California, San Diego’s Thurgood Marshall College, died on Aug. 4 in San Diego at age 90.
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If you're going to talk about a subject most people don't want to talk about, why not do so over tea and cake and cookies?
Why not gather in a sunny living room looking out on a lush tangle of green, where you can watch the breeze ruffle the leaves on the trees as you eat forkfuls of blueberry tart?
Death comes to each of us, to everyone we love. Couldn't talking about it in a safe, comfy setting make the prospect less frightening?
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When Tammy Kaitz’s son, Dylan Crane, was diagnosed with cancer eight years ago, the two started going to meetings of the support group Teen Impact at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Tammy had the opportunity to talk with other parents who were experiencing similar circumstances, and Crane, then 13, met a girl who had just completed treatment for the same illness.
“I used to say Teen Impact was my emotional life vest because it was really hard to stay afloat,” Kaitz said.
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For La Shonda Coleman, new director of the Center for Women and Men (CWM), coming to USC was fate.
Coleman had just completed her bachelor’s degree in sociology at California State University, Northridge, and was researching master’s programs in social work. Thinking that USC was beyond her reach, she decided to explore options at California State University, Los Angeles (CSLA). However, en route to CSLA, she realized she had unconsciously driven to USC.
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When Kristen Kavanaugh, MSW ’12, started the Military Acceptance Project, a website used to promote the equal treatment of all military service members, veterans and their families, she never really gave the idea of working in politics a second thought.
But as the USC School of Social Work class project grew bigger and gained national attention – MAP was recognized as a Champion of Change by the White House last year – Kavanaugh realized that she could use her advocacy skills to achieve something on a larger scale.
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As Steven sits in an office with colorful furniture and regularly used incense, his therapist Moira tells him, “We all make choices. It doesn’t mean that one choice is right and the other is wrong. But it does mean that we have to live with the choices we’ve made and the impact those choices have on others.”
This cause and effect is a theme that runs throughout “Therapy,” a play written and directed by USC School of Social Work alumnus Jeff Bernhardt that shows how the line between professional and personal issues can become blurry.
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Lillian Hawthorne, 88, died on Feb. 20, 2013, in Brooklyn, New York. Professor emerita and assistant dean for student affairs at the USC School of Social Work, Hawthorne, MSW '71, is credited with transforming the school’s field education program, the first to conceptualize field experience as pedagogy.