News Archive
Opinion
-
Marilyn Flynn has been reappointed dean of the USC School of Social Work for a new five-year term.
Flynn, the 2U Endowed Chair in Educational Innovation and Social Work, has served as dean of the school since 1997, becoming just the second woman to hold this position in the school’s nearly 100-year history.
-
A few weeks back I was at a drop-in center for homeless youth and I observed the following between a homeless youth and his dog.
“Nina, sit.” Dog sat.
“Nina, down.” She flattened to her belly.
“Nina, crawl.” She scooted forward a few feet on her belly.
“Nina, shake.” Nina popped up and shook Sam’s hand with her left paw.
“Nina, other paw shake.” Right hand shake.
“Good girl, Nina!!”
I turned to my student Amanda who owns three dogs and said, “My dog could never do that.”
“None of mine can,” was her emphatic reply.
-
Ellen Olshansky often tells a story that is a reflection of her personal passion for social work. “My aunt, who was a big force in my life, was a psychiatric social worker, and as children, my cousin and I would play ‘social work’ – in the way that kids sometimes play doctor or teacher,” she recalled. “We would create diagnoses for our patients and put them on file cards that we kept in a shoebox. We didn’t know any of the correct terminology, so we would write things like ‘this person is afraid to go outside, and we need to take her outside gradually.’”
-
I participated in two recent watershed cultural and transformational moments. Both instances occurred at university-centered conferences, not always the contexts of epiphany and emotional social change — but indeed, that is where they occurred. I’m now filled with hope that universities can collectively join forces with public schools to support military-connected and veteran students.
-
Graduate students from the USC School of Social Work and USC Price School of Public Policy confronted the fallacy of “race-neutral” policies April 2 at the third annual Students of Color and Allies Policy Forum (SCAPF).
-
Delphie Morales, a graduate student in the Community, Organization, and Business Innovation department at the USC School of Social Work, said she found her voice in Washington, D.C.
-
HIV/AIDS education, prevention and treatment efforts often focus on young adults and other populations considered the most sexually active and at risk.
Yet, statistics show that HIV/AIDS is not just a young person’s disease.
-
America is aging.
By 2050, the number of adults aged 65 years and older will nearly double; the number of elders of color will more than triple. The notion of advancing public health for older Americans may seem contradictory in our youth-oriented culture, yet people aged 65 years have an average of almost 20 years or more remaining in their lives, an increase of more than 50 percent during the past century.
-
Parents as Teachers National Center and the University of Southern California School of Social Work have successfully launched a pilot program marrying the Parents as Teachers evidence-based home visiting model with USC Telehealth.
-
Advocates, professionals, legislators, families, caregivers and all those who interact with the child welfare system grapple with the question of when and how resources should be invested at local, state, and national levels, to most effectively help children and families who may be touched by the foster care system.
If we are serious about helping children, we must ask ourselves with greater urgency: At what point should we begin to pay attention to families who are at risk?