Becoming a Social Worker

Alex Abramovich, Tasha Blaine

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982140403
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

A revealing guide to a career as a social worker based on the real-life experiences of three distinguished social workers—required reading for anyone considering a path to this profession. Becoming a Social Worker takes you behind the scenes to find out what it's really like, and what it really takes, to become a social worker. Acclaimed authors Alex Abramovich and Tasha Blaine shadow three distinguished social work professionals to reveal how this compassionate field changes lives. Discover what it's like to tirelessly advocate for victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, investigate accidental drug overdose deaths in New York City, and assist clients in a full-time private practice. Gain insight from these social workers paths as they offer wisdom and insight from their years of service. Social workers have a common mission to serve people in need—here is how this life-changing job is actually practiced at the highest levels.

1 LAURA FERNANDEZ

Laura Fernandez works in a carefully restored Beaux-Arts building with televisions in the elevators and a swanky rooftop lounge. The grand lobby has high vaulted ceilings, marble floors, and gold-leaf rosettes on the walls. The company directory lists blue-chip law firms and boutique marketing companies. But there is no entry for Laura’s employer, Sanctuary for Families.

Sanctuary serves one of New York City’s most vulnerable populations: victims of domestic violence. Its official address is a post office box; only the agency’s staff and clients know the physical location. We don’t know ourselves until the morning we’re due to meet Laura, who is Sanctuary’s clinical director. After taking an elevator up to a nondescript office, we are instructed by a receptionist sitting behind a glass partition to take a seat in the otherwise empty waiting room.

Five minutes later Laura appears. She is a compact middle-aged woman with shoulder-length hair, big brown eyes, a warm smile. Back in the eighties, she tells us, Sanctuary for Families was run out of a church parish house in midtown Manhattan. The agency had only five employees. Since then Sanctuary has grown to become New York State’s largest nonprofit provider of services for victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking as well as for child victims and witnesses. Sanctuary runs women’s shelters in each of the city’s five boroughs. (One of those shelters, the Sarah Burke House, is the largest transitional center for domestic violence survivors in New York State.) The agency operates out of five family justice centers as well, and runs a multiservice walk-in center for sex workers and survivors of sexual violence (including victims of genital mutilation). It provides what is known as wraparound care—crisis intervention, emergency and transitional shelter, career services, legal assistance and representation, counseling, and long-term follow-up services—for ten thousand adults and children each year. Put more simply, the agency helps victims get away from their abusers and assists them as they rebuild their lives as survivors. The challenges that Laura and her colleagues face day in and day out are staggering. Eighty-two percent of Sanctuary’s clients live in poverty. Three-quarters of them are immigrants. Many of them speak no English at all.

As we walk through a maze of cubicles, Laura talks about the agency’s shift to an open floor plan. “The staff definitely didn’t like that transition,” she says with a shrug and a smile. What the shrug seems to be saying is Change is hard all around, but I’m willing to accept the blowback if it means the changes are good.

“It’s hard to work that way, I understand,” Laura continues. “Before, everyone had their own little office. But now that they’re all in the open, the people working here interact more. They come to each other with their concerns. They talk problems through together.”

Laura herself is chatty, direct. She took the Myers-Briggs personality test once, but it only told her what she already knew: she’s an off-the-charts extrovert. Talking things out is how she herself tends to solve problems, and the problems and challenges Laura has faced in her three decades on the job have been significant.

Over thirty years ago, in Boston, Laura took her first social work job as a child welfare caseworker. Twenty-eight years ago she started at Columbia University’s School of Social Work; Sanctuary for Families was her second-year internship. Upon graduation, Sanctuary hired her as a full-time women’s counselor. After three years of doing that work she left Sanctuary and took a position at Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families, an agency contracted by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services to provide child welfare services, including foster care. She spent the next sixteen years at Edwin Gould, working up to assistant executive director of programs before Sanctuary lured her back in 2015 to be their clinical director.

In a way, returning to Sanctuary felt like a homecoming. The clinical director Laura replaced had been with the agency for more than two decades; Laura had worked under her as an intern and a counselor. Now Laura was responsible for a team of ninety; for all of Sanctuary’s clinical services, including counseling, case management, and crisis intervention; and for the department’s $5.8 million budget. She also oversees the quality of treatment for thousands of clients, all of whom are victims of chronic trauma, which Laura had seen plenty of as a caseworker.

“In my early child welfare years,” she says, “back when I was seeing horrors firsthand, my friends graduated from college and told happy stories and I would tell stories about death, molestation, violence. They would be, like, ‘You’re so dark.’ And it was. It completely consumed me, those first few years of doing the work. Then I thought: I cannot be doing this. When I’m not at work, I can’t be driving down the street, thinking a client is going to die and I didn’t do anything, thinking that I didn’t save them. I found ways to compartmentalize years ago—ways to put that piece away. I realized I can’t save them. It’s their journey. They have to save themselves. Over time I have also seen clients who have gone through really bad stuff come out the other side and be okay. I’ve learned that can happen. Even people who go through the darkest things can come out the other side.”

Laura still recalls those dark, riveting stories from her days in the trenches as a child welfare worker. They may be compartmentalized but, given the opportunity, old clients come rushing back: the four-year-old boy whose stepfather had beaten him so severely that his retina had become detached, leaving him legally blind; the eleven-year-old girl who had lived with the same foster family for ten years and then been kicked to the curb suddenly with no explanation.

Working in child welfare gave Laura her first sense of the ways in which institutions designed to help people—schools, social service agencies, and the courts—can actually hurt and dehumanize them. And while her days of working directly with clients are behind her, Laura now works tirelessly to transform the systems that serve them. Her daily duties—answering emails, taking calls, attending strategy meetings, drafting and reviewing documents—may seem mundane but they have the potential to shape the experience of every one of the thousands of clients Sanctuary works with each year.

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SOCIAL WORK IS DIVIDED into three tiers of practice: micro, mezzo, and macro.

Micro social work practice is what most people picture social work to be: counseling single mothers, aiding children, visiting the elderly. The job is direct and one-on-one. At the micro level a social worker might work in a shelter with homeless clients. But a clinical social worker in private practice who treats upper-middle-class clients falls into the same category. It doesn’t matter who the client is, only that the social worker is interacting with an individual.

Mezzo social work practice broadens the scope, looking to effect change for small groups or communities. A mezzo social worker might facilitate therapeutic groups, run trainings, or develop health-care initiatives in tandem with a local clinic.

Macro social workers deal with constructs and large populations. They develop programs that target specific groups, advocate on the legislative level, and push for concrete policy shifts.

What the three tiers have in common is the end goal: all social workers strive to improve functioning for their clients while ensuring that their basic needs—housing, education, health care, and personal safety—are being met. Some social workers jump between levels as a matter of course in the span of one day. Others start at the micro level and work their way up. Laura, for instance, was already thinking in macro terms when she was still a caseworker and counselor, thanks in part to her interest in politics, poverty, and systems, but also in response to personal encounters with individual clients—women like Sharwline Nicholson, who made a lasting impression.

“I was working as a women’s counselor at Sanctuary when Sharwline came in,” Laura recalls. “She’d been referred to Sanctuary by an outside law firm.”

Nicholson was thirty-two years old when she and Laura first met. She worked full-time as a cashier at Home Depot while pursuing a full-time degree in behavioral science, and she had a boyfriend, Claude Barnett, who drove up from South Carolina once a month to visit her and Destinee, the baby girl they’d had together. During one of those visits, Nicholson broke up with Barnett, telling him that the long-distance relationship no longer worked. Barnett had never assaulted Nicholson, but now he flew into a rage, cracking Nicholson’s skull, fracturing her ribs, and breaking one of her arms before fleeing. Bruised and bloodied, she called 911 and asked a neighbor to come take care of Destinee, who was in her crib at the time, and Nicholson’s son, Kendell, who was at school. The neighbor, who had babysat for the children before, agreed to watch Destinee and pick Kendell up at his school bus stop.

That night in the hospital, Nicholson gave police officers the names of relatives who could come get her children and take care of them. But the next day she was informed that the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) had taken custody of Destinee and Kendell. The children were in “imminent risk if they remained in the care of Ms. Nicholson because she was not at the time able to protect herself nor her children because Mr. Barnett had viciously beaten her,” ACS had determined.

Nicholson hired a lawyer. She appeared several times in family court. Eight days after she had last seen her children—who had since been placed in foster care—she was finally allowed a visit with them. At the ACS foster care agency in Queens, Nicholson followed the sound of Destinee’s crying and located her in a room by herself. The baby had a rash on her face, her nose was running, and she appeared to have scratched herself.

Kendell had a swollen eye: his foster mother had slapped him, he told Nicholson.

Nicholson demanded a phone with which to call the police. ACS denied the request but did agree to a new foster mother. When that woman arrived, Kendell asked, “You are not going to hit me, are you?”

Four days later Kendell turned six. Nicholson was not allowed to see or speak with him on his birthday.

“It took Sharwline twenty-one days to get her children back,” Laura recalls. “But the court was demanding that she move out of her home and into a shelter. Sharwline didn’t want to.”

Nicholson’s boyfriend had left the state once again. She felt that she wasn’t in danger and she didn’t want to bring her children to a shelter. “Back then,” Laura explains, “survivors of domestic violence had to do certain things, whether it was logical or not logical for their individual situations. But Nicholson’s whole situation was extremely messed up.”

One of Sharwline’s children received disability payments, and those funds had gone straight to the foster care agency; that had happened immediately, but getting the funds back was taking an eternity. She’d lost her job. She’d been in school, and she had to drop out.

Laura says, “Sharwline kept asking, ‘How could this have happened to me? I was a victim. I did nothing wrong. I called the police. I sent my kids to the neighbor’s. I called my family.’ What she cared about, most of all, was making her experience mean something. ‘I want to change the system,’ she’d say. Even though her whole life had been blown apart, her biggest focus was on preventing the same thing from happening to other people. She focused on systemic changes immediately. For starters, she wanted child welfare workers to get better training. And eventually it led to a whole class action suit. It took a long time to work its way through the courts, but I became an expert witness in that case.

“I had seen victims of domestic violence who had put their children at risk,” Laura says. “I had seen cases where there were reasons for child welfare to get involved. But what I was really seeing back then was that people who’d done everything by the book ended up losing their kids anyway. I saw case planners tell women to ‘give the guy another chance’—that was something they’d actually put in their notes. Or child welfare services would get involved and the woman would end up with a service plan a mile long while the father got sent to anger management. I would think, ‘He’s the one that needs all those services! He needs parenting. He needs therapy. But you’re putting it all on the mother!’ Everything, then, was about blaming mothers, and those were all things that I got to talk about on the stand. From my vantage point, as someone who had been a child welfare worker and worked in domestic violence, I described ways that the child welfare system wasn’t helping the people that it was supposed to protect. I told the court, even within the limits of the child welfare system we could have been doing much better.”

Almost five years after the incident, in 2004, the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, ruled that a woman’s inability to protect her children from witnessing abuse did not constitute neglect and could not be the basis for that child’s removal. In a long, scathing decision, Judge Jack B. Weinstein found that ACS had violated Nicholson’s rights under the Fourth, Ninth, Thirteen, Fourteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the Bill of Rights and compared Nicholson’s treatment by ACS to the way Black women had been treated under slavery.

“The evidence reveals widespread and unnecessary cruelty by agencies of the City of New York towards mothers abused by their consorts…,” Weinstein decided. “The pitiless double abuse of these mothers is not malicious, but is due to benign indifference, bureaucratic inefficiency, and outmoded institutional biases.”

Survivors of domestic violence would no longer be treated as criminals, and ACS was charged with helping them to find shelter and file orders of protection against their abusers. The New York State Court of Appeals went further and ruled that, prior to removing any child from their home, ACS and the family courts had to weigh the psychological harm caused by such a removal against the potential harm of letting the child remain in place.

These were landmark cases—rulings that transformed the way ACS operates in New York State as a whole—and Laura’s testimony helped ensure the verdicts.

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SOCIAL WORKERS ARE DRAWN to the field for all kinds of reasons. Some have their own histories of trauma and bring a heightened sense of empathy and understanding to their work with clients. Others are motivated by a strong sense of justice and human rights and an abiding concern for underrepresented and vulnerable populations. Some social workers are pulled to the variety of work settings and people they might encounter, along with the job security that an ever-expanding profession like social work provides. Still others were directly impacted by a social worker in their own lives and recognize the inherent meaning and necessity of the profession. But at first Laura Fernandez had no intention of becoming a social worker at all.

Laura had moved to Boston after graduating from Tufts and taking a job in Governor Michael Dukakis’s office. But Dukakis was a lame duck with six months left on the job, and when those six months were up, Laura’s job ended too. In the meanwhile, a close friend of Laura’s had gone to work for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. Laura told herself, There’s no way I could do that. The friend had a degree in sociology; Laura had double-majored in history and French. But the prospect of having to go on unemployment led Laura to reconsider and apply for a position as a caseworker.

“What would you do if you went into a home and there was a gun on the table?” the interviewer asked her.

Laura’s first thought was I would get the hell out of there! Then she decided, No, that can’t be the right answer.

“I would assess everyone’s safety,” she said instead.

“No,” the interviewer told her. “You would get out of there!”

Then, just like that, the woman gave Laura a job.

In a field like child welfare, where the burnout rate is high, there is incredible demand for caseworkers. This was especially true in 1990, when the crack epidemic and the AIDS crisis were raging and foster care systems all over the country were flooded and falling apart. Some children stayed in care for eighteen years, in placements that were never deemed permanent. Others got completely lost in the system, shuttling from bad situations to worse. On her first day Laura pictured herself as Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman. The bionic woman had long, blown-out hair. She wore sharp outfits. But she was a therapist, too. By the end of her f...