Journey of a Generalist Macro Social Worker
Macro social workers are committed to improve society and its defects. I will tell you the story of my own journey into macro social work. After I tell you my story, I would like you to consider your own motivation in the field of macro social work practice by exploring some questions and then filling out a checklist.
Along with her three sisters, my mother, a part Cherokee Native American, was raised in Otterbein Home, an orphanage operated by the Evangelical and Reformed Church in Southern Ohio on property that was originally a Shaker Colony. My father immigrated to this country from Germany in 1929, just before the Great Depression, the same year my mother graduated from the Otterbein Home high school. My mother completed her first year of nursing school but did not have enough money to finish.
For nearly ten years, like many Americans, my mother and father existed on jobs wherever they could be found. My mother became a nanny and my father wandered through America as a laborer and cook for a Wild West Show, eventually settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he had an aunt and a cousin and a large German population existed. He became a cabinet maker for the Baldwin piano company. He and my mother married in 1939. A year later I was born and shortly afterward America declared War on Japan and Germany. The next five years were difficult for my father and other German Americans. His brothers became soldiers or officers for the Nazis, fighting against my father’s adopted country. His German accent, attendance at German gatherings, associations with other German Americans, and activities as a union organizer marked him as a person warranting investigation by the FBI. He never really felt fully integrated into American society.
One day during elementary school, I saw a boy new to the school who appeared very strange looking. In an unthinking and unfeeling way I began to make fun of him. I still remember the look of hurt and confusion on his face. That look made me deeply ashamed of what I had done. He did not attend any of my classes, but sometimes when I saw him on the playground I would talk to him. Over the years, Jackie became one of my closest friends. When I went away to ConcordiaCollege in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and ConcordiaSeniorCollege in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to pursue a ministerial career in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, Jackie and I continued to write to one another, and we visited when I came home on vacation. We were both very proud when he graduated from high school, a great achievement for a young man with an intellectual disability.
I became fascinated with group work, partly out of my membership in the Boy Scouts of America and partly as a result of working part-time as a group worker at the Silverspring Neighborhood Center, a program of the Episcopal Church in Milwaukee; as a summer camp counselor at Camp Sidney Cohen, Delafield, Wisconsin, operated by the Jewish Community Center in Milwaukee; as a Training Director for Dan Beard Scout Camp, Cincinnati, Ohio; as a Gray-Y leader for Fort Wayne, YMCA; and as a recreation leader for the Fort Wayne State School for Mentally Retarded.
One of the experiences that helped shape my excitement about being a social group worker was getting to know several social group workers and watching them in action. I decided that this was a career to which I was called. Applying for scholarships and to graduate school, I was accepted at the University of Hawaii, which met my interests in ethnic diversity and social group work.
After graduating with an MSW degree in 1964, I returned home for a visit. Jackie, my friend, was working full-time. If I had not met and been affected by Jackie, it is very possible that I also would not have begun my own first full-time job as a social worker at an institution for persons with intellectual disabilities in Watertown, Wisconsin. Wanting to round out my skills in individual counseling, I attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Counseling and Behavioral studies for a year, after which I returned to Hawaii, where I worked as a clinician performing individual, family, and group psychotherapy at Catholic Social Services, Honolulu. After several years of clinical practice, I married and accepted a supervisory position in social group work at Potrero Hill Neighborhood House in San Francisco. Problems in administration, budgeting, race relations, poverty, housing, drug abuse, and alcoholism impinged on me in ways that clinical practice did not. In addition, the late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of social ferment over the movement to end the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. Many social workers, including myself, became engaged in social action, including protest marches and active resistance to the war, as well as advocacy in civil rights demonstrations.
I became involved in several community action programs of the “War on Poverty” and worked with neighborhood associations, neighborhood arts and theater groups, and other community groups. After a number of years as supervisor and director at the Neighborhood House, I decided to begin a small agency for people with developmental disabilities, writing a grant and obtaining funding. As a social administrator for the PotreroHillSocialDevelopmentCenter, I became actively involved in social planning, serving on several planning boards in health and developmental disabilities and becoming engaged in performing needs assessments for the community of persons with developmental disabilities. Assisting this community expand its services and support systems, I formed a coalition group of four small social development centers, writing and obtaining a federal grant, developing the board, and helping the new organization get on its feet.
I accepted a position at San Andreas Regional Center for Developmentally Disabled in Santa Clara, California, beginning as a senior counselor, and as the agency grew larger, becoming its first community resource developer, a position that included social planning, research, consultation, and program development, helping improve existing programs and working with community groups to develop new ones.
During this time I became more and more fascinated with wider social problems and began reading widely in the field of political philosophy and social issues. I continued to be concerned with the various discontinuities I saw in our society and became interested in values and value thinking. After taking several courses in administration, the strands of my various interests came together, and I began to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Southern California, School of Public Administration, eventually receiving a master’s and doctorate in public administration. At the same time, I became involved in practicing organization development with local churches and taught public administration for the University of San Francisco.
I became a full-time faculty member as director of the social work program and taught administration for FresnoPacificUniversity in Fresno, California. I joined other faculty members in establishing a small family care home in a residential neighborhood, over strenuous protests of some community members. Several of my social work students, faculty, and I began to work on a plan to include college-age adults with developmental disabilities on our college campus.
Today college-age persons with developmental disabilities attend classes on campus, engage in work training projects, attend college events, and at graduation walk across the stage in full graduation garb just as any other college student and receive a certificate of completion. Jackie would have been proud. It is one installment on my debt in repayment for that day on the playground in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Ten years later, I accepted a teaching position at the Kyushu University of Health and Welfare in Nobeoka, Japan. For over five years I have learned more about our global society as I experienced this culture. Recently, my university has generously allowed me to live and perform research at the University of the Philippines, Diliman while continuing to teach in Japan. Here in the Philippines I am learning about the conditions of people in a third world nation first hand and the role that international generalist macro social work can play in helping.
Like many social workers, I began my professional practice as a clinician. However, I was drawn increasingly to macro social work practice, eventually obtaining experience in many arenas of macro practice, and now it has expanded to include international social work. One of the strengths of macro social work is its capacity to accommodate a variety of interests, abilities, and mixes of skills. As I changed and the world about me changed, I was able to find in macro practice a way of using my social work skills to help numbers of people, groups, and communities grow and develop, but it meant I had to learn and grow in different directions as well. Now that you have read my story, let’s explore what kinds of patterns you see operating that shaped my interest in social work and in macro social work.
Macro social work is a field in which one can make a real difference. Looking back, I can see programs I began that are still in existence, agency policies and plans on which I had an impact, organizations I helped change for the better, communities that are more healthy, and social organizations that I helped lead. You too may begin your interests in social work at the micro level. However, if you have a larger social concern, the field of macro social work is waiting for you. It is an arena of social work practice that needs committed and dedicated practitioners.