Fall 2018 InDepth

InDepth SMITH COLLEGE SCHOOL FOR SO CIAL WORK

FALL 2018

I N THI S I SSUE CENTENNIAL HIGHLIGHTS REBUILDING LIVES SSW FAMILY LEGACIES

Kurt White, M.S.W. ’04, uses the group therapy approach in his work. See story page 26.

InDepth is published by the Smith College School for Social Work. Its goal is to connect our school community, celebrate recent accomplishments and capture the research and scholarship at the School for Social Work.

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Centennial Celebration attendees went home with great memories, and some cool Our Smith SSW swag.odissit

MANAGING EDITOR

Gretchen Siegchrist DESIGN

Lilly Pereira Maureen Scanlon Murre Creative CONTRIBUTORS

Dawn Faucher Dane Kuttler Laurie Loisel Tynan Power Faye S. Wolfe Megan Rubiner Zinn PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Shana Sureck

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR AND ALUMNI UPDATES CAN BE SENT TO:

InDepth Managing Editor Smith College School for Social Work Lilly Hall Northampton, MA 01063 413-585-7950 indepth@smith.edu ©2018

InDepth SMI TH COLLEGE SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL WORK

FALL 2018

F EATU RE S

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Oh, What a Time

Highlights of the SSW Centennial weekend

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Helping Rebuild Lives FO LLOW US O N:

Facebook facebook.com/ smithcollegessw Twitter twitter.com/ smithcollegessw Instagram instagram.com/ smithcollegessw YouTube bit.ly/SSWYouTube

Joanne Corbin broadens her work with war-torn communities in northern Uganda

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Group Champions

Class by class, SSW instructors spread the gospel of group therapy

DE P A RT M E NTS

02 From the Dean A note from Marianne Yoshioka

03 SSWorks School News + Updates Faculty Notes Student Focus

31 Alumni News Alumni Desk Alumni News

40 Post Script An End Note

O N T H E COV E R

Juanita Dalton Robinson, M.S.S. ’51, was one of more than 300 alumni to attend the Centennial Celebration.

Photo by Shana Sureck.

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M ARIAN NE R .M . Y OSH IOK A, M .S.W., PH .D .

Committing Anew We are distinct.

We are matchless.

We are changing the world.

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In a joyous celebration we graduated our 100th class this August and in September began our 101st academic year. Over these past few years as we prepared for our Centennial Celebration, I have had a wonderful opportunity not only to learn more about our School’s rich and important history but to connect with so many of you. We have thrived for 100 years with this special program because of our community, our curriculum and our impact. We are distinct. We are matchless. We are changing the world.

Everyone who has attended SSW understands what we mean when we talk about a powerful and exceptional community. Sometimes folks from other schools can seem disbelieving when I talk about the depth of relationships between students and alumni; if I mention a fun, quirky and sometimes a little weird (and I mean that in a good way) tradition called skits; the sweetness of baccalaureate; the often raucous thesis breakfast (where students now celebrate other academic and research achievements); and the powerful Senior Send Off for students of color. These traditions could only grow and be sustained in a community of colleagues and friends where you are known and seen.

In the creation of the short film that was produced about SSW (coming soon to an alumni event near you), I had the chance to look at course bulletins from our early days. What struck me was

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that the attention to student learning, the request for significant depth within course syllabi and our commitment to teaching has been part of this School from 1918 forward. It is still true today.

In 2018 we are making adjustments to the program to ensure that it is manageable for current students who increasingly hold jobs and have families. This is being done without sacrificing the rigor for which we are known.

One of the best parts of my job is hearing about the careers of our alumni, your interesting and significant work and commitments. It is truly a measure of the success of a school. It is a fascinating study to see what smart people with excellent clinical training and a commitment to anti-racism will do with their careers—lead significant clinical institutions, create important clinical practices, generate knowledge and interventions to be used by other clinicians, domestically and internationally. So many of you work with other Smithies.

I am so proud to be a part of this amazing School’s journey. As we start our next century, we commit anew to clinical social work education and research with an anti-racism lens. We commit anew to continuously strive toward greater racial and gender justice within our School, programs and in the world. We commit anew to care for and support our rare and important community. ◆

SSWorks News from Lilly Hall

IN THIS SECTION

SCHOOL NEWS FACULTY NOTES STUDENT FOCUS

Diana Alvarez’s performance was a highlight of the fundraiser for migrant families co-sponsored

by Smith SSW. PHOTO BY ELIZABETH KORELITZ/SOLAKA PHOTOGRAPHY

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BY FAY E S. WOLFE

Julie Akeret, documentary producer

Evolution of a Revolution The making of the School’s documentary short

“Inspiring.” “The film brought back so many memories!

It made me a little sentimental.” “Very difficult job to cover 100 years of history in a short film. It was well presented and fun.”

That last comment about Clinical Revolution came from Ann Hartman, SSW dean from 1986–94, who appears in the film and may be the only person who doesn’t need to watch it to learn about SSW. “I wrote a history of the School, it’s about this thick,” she said wryly when asked about the film, holding her thumb and fingers an inch apart. For everyone else, this lively, engaging and informationpacked 20-minute film has more than its share of revelations.

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Julie Akeret was its writer and director. With 35 years’ worth of experience creating documentaries on topics ranging from tomboys to arming teachers, she knew that primary sources and period photographs would be key narrative tools. “I spent many hours in Special Collections at the Young Library,” she said, “reading journal articles and letters and looking for photos to help tell the SSW story. Originally I thought the film would focus on the School’s origins.”

Dean Marianne Yoshioka, the film’s production adviser, elaborated on that point. “One of the interesting developments was our growing recognition of the pivotal roles played by two women: Mary Jarrett [SSW’s first director] and Bertha Capen Reynolds [associate director, 1925–1938]. The narrative that we had always heard had centered on President Neilson and Dr. Southard. They undoubtedly were important players in the creation of the School, but the program itself—its structure and premises—came from Jarrett and Reynolds. We began to see this film as a way to acknowledge the contributions of these two forward-thinking women.”

SSW Associate Professor Yoosun Park, with assistance from Amanda Sposato, M.S.W. ’16, researched the School’s history for the film. As she pored over archival materials, she said, “What emerged for me was that the basic storyline is known, but the nuances are quite different.”

She felt that the role of Mary Jarrett had been played down and her writings not given their due because of her gender.

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It gave me a sense of what’s behind us and made me think about what’s ahead. —FILM ATTENDEE “You could almost say Jarrett was one of the original ‘nasty women,’ very opinionated, very powerful, very unafraid to say what she thought,” said Park.

The nuances were taken into account, the film’s scope was expanded—and the storyline was extended right up to the present. Several generations and perspectives were given voice through interviews with former Dean Howard Parad; Professor Emerita Joyce Everett; Jean Camille Hall, Ph.D. ’04; Professor Joshua Miller; and alums Alan Siskind, Ph.D. ’72; Wendy Bassett, M.S.W. ’03; Tomás Alvarez, M.S.W. ’06; Frank Bayles, M.S.W. ’14; Zach Wigham, M.S.W. ’16; and Maggie Furey, M.S.W. ’18. The film’s clips of Alvarez, a pioneer of hip-hop therapy, working with “at-promise”

kids, as he calls them, show how relevant an SSW education is today.

“Schools are living organisms,” Akeret said. “If they are sensitive and alert, they will grow and change as the world grows and changes.”

“There are two take-home messages from this film for me,” Dean Yoshioka said. “First, that our School has been unique and extraordinary from the beginning.

Its block program, for example, allowed for incredible depth in the curriculum, depth that we retain to this day. The second takeaway is that our attention to racial justice was introduced in the School’s early years. It’s constant and evolving, and it hasn’t been easy. But it is a true commitment.” ◆

SPOKEN WORD

“ The purpose of your

work is not to save anyone, but to be part of the restoration of your own humanity by being in service toward the restoration of all of humanity.”

—SONYA RENEE TAYLOR, 2018 commencement speaker

The Study of Caring Welcoming Ben Capistrant While doing field research in Malawi in 2006, Benjamin Capistrant experienced a turning point that would set a trajectory for his areas of specialty.

Capistrant, who joined the SSW faculty in July as an assistant professor, was studying people caring for aging parents with undiagnosed dementia. At the same time, his own family was caring for elders with dementia.

“The universality of this idea that families care for each other hit me,” he said. What he refers to as his aha moment sparked an ongoing fascination with this research question: “How do families care for each other, and what does caregiving look like when families look different and have different resources?”

The search for answers has led him to study families in India, where family structures look different than in the United States, as well as gay male couples in which one partner has prostate cancer.

Capistrant is in the unusual position of holding an appointment at SSW while teaching half time in the statistics and data science department at Smith College, where his husband, Miles Ott, is an assistant professor.

Capistrant, 37, earned his master’s and doctorate in public health at Harvard University and his bachelor’s degree at Boston University. In the data science department at Smith, Capistrant last year taught intro and intermediate statistics and population health courses. The exact courses he will teach at SSW have yet to be determined, but he is already working with students earning Ph.D.s and serving on committees.

“He is a great collaborator and we anticipate a wonderful colleague and contributor for the SSW,” Dean Marianne Yoshioka said in her letter announcing his appointment.

“My background and interest as a methodologist lends itself to some natural collaboration,” he said.

“Those are pieces I’m already starting to develop and cultivate, research questions with other faculty here.”

While new to social work, Capistrant sees an enormous amount of intersection between the social justice aspect of social work and public health, particularly the social determinants of health.

“Social work as a discipline has done a really nice job of crafting an identity and having an organized set of principles,” he said. “I think that’s exciting to join the ranks and be a part of.”—Laurie Loisel

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Long before the summer’s Centennial Celebration, Lauren Anderson began combing through a century’s worth of archives in paper and digital form. The result of her long labor is the website 100 Years Empowering Change: A History of the Smith College School for Social Work, where Anderson has curated more than 350 photos, videos and documents. Those digitized records represent only around 20 percent of the materials Anderson considered, most of which are housed in the Social Work Archives of the Smith College Libraries Special Collections.

“The project description—create a website with historical information to accompany other centennial commemorations—gave me quite a bit of room to define the project as I saw it,” said Anderson. “This was both a joy and a challenge. My first step was to figure out the lay of the land. Who were the important people and what were the major debates? What had already been written on the history of the School for Social Work? What were the major categories I could organize information within?”

In addition to carefully reviewing the materials and selecting the most representative to digitize and add to the website, Anderson also curated

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Scrolling Through Our Past A digital record of the School’s history

BY TY N AN POWER

materials on key themes and presented them with observations and prompts.

For example, there are two explorations of changes in the curriculum and a collection that focuses on the School’s Anti-Racism Commitment.

“With my background as a professor teaching African-American history, I was immediately struck by SSW’s commitment to anti-racism,” said Anderson. “I wanted to see what the antecedents were to this commitment.

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How did it come about? How has the School changed since it was put in place?’’

Anderson found some answers in oral histories from Mary Hall, M.S.W. ’66, and a former SSW professor; and Joanne Frustaci, M.S.W. ’87.

“Hall succinctly and elegantly captures three different types of racism—blatant, color-blind and essentialist—while giving potent and powerful examples of each. Frustaci details student protest around recruitment of students of color in the mid-1980s and how the new dean, Ann Hartman, responded with empathy and collaboration.”

Anderson also found the perspectives of past deans to be revealing of the challenges they faced and the times in which they lived.

“Each generation writes their history to answer the questions they have,” said Anderson.

Recordings of an alumni gathering at the School’s 75th anniversary in 1993 proved to be a treasure trove, showing how graduates from the 1930s to the 1990s recalled their time at SSW and the highlights that remained with them years later.

“They shared challenging field-work internships, valuable and contentious

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interactions with faculty, and about almost getting arrested while teaching,” said Anderson. “Dean Ann Hartman even shared about what it was like as a child when her mother, also an alumna, went on her field internship.”

One of the most compelling stories that Anderson encountered was in the letters between Associate Director Bertha Capen Reynolds and Director Everett Kimball.

“Reading through almost 10 years worth of letters, you can see Reynolds struggle with her confidence and authority,” said Anderson.

“At first she writes about not being a very good teacher, but within a couple years she writes about how hard it is to deal with voluminous correspondence from students and alumna. Her confidence in herself, her abilities and her ideas begins to grow by the end of the letters, leading to a dramatic conflict with Kimball.”

“Not only do these letters let us inside one of the most important social worker thinkers and practitioners in the U.S., they also reveal the struggles that women have as leaders— struggles that come from the society outside of them and their internalized socialization.”

Visit the centennial website at sophia.smith.edu/ssw100-history. ◆

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES Expanding professional education Mary Curtin, M.S.W. ’00, recently joined the School for Social Work as the manager of professional education, bringing with her a wealth of social work experience. She has worked in residential treatment, outpatient treatment, inpatient psychiatric services, vocational rehabilitation and disability services. She’s also a surveyor for the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) and travels across the country assessing employment and community services organizations. However, even across such different roles and environments, a theme emerged: creating and providing trainings has been her favorite part of the work.

“I was drawn to the position to be able to create training and education programs that would help social workers deepen and diversify their skills,” said Curtin. “As a professional in the field for almost 20 years, I understand how quickly regulations and requirements can change and I understand the importance of staying current with emerging ideas and best practices.”

Curtin sees opportunities to provide training and education in social justice and anti-racism leadership, as well as up-to-date practical information that can be directly applied in a variety of social work settings.

“One of the great things about social work is the diversity of work,” said Curtin. “However, I also understand how it is easy to become tracked in one area of social work, so I believe the programs we design will also be able to help social workers become familiar with a different aspect of social work that they may later want to pursue.”

Outside of work, Curtin spends time with her family traveling, going to puzzle rooms and the theater. They are heavily involved with their synagogue and, as Curtin puts it, “have spent more time marching [for political reasons] in recent years than I ever thought possible.” She also sits on the boards of the Northampton Education Foundation and the Human Service Forum.—Dane Kuttler

Lauren Anderson spent six months going through the archives to organize 100 years of Smith SSW history into a Centennial website.

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PHOTO BY ELIZABETH KORELITZ/SOLAKA PHOTOGRAPHY

We Must Awaken Offering solidarity to migrant families

(right to left) Maria del Mar Farina, M.S.W. ’98, Ph.D. ’15, participated in a panel discussion on immigration policy with social worker Dalila Hyry-Dermith; Jorge Renaud, senior policy analyst at Prison Policy Initiative; and Andrea Schmid (not pictured), an organizer with the Pioneer Valley Workers Center.

Just down the hill from Smith at the Academy of Music on July 29, SSW co-sponsored Ofrendras: Solidarity With Migrant Families. Ofrendras is Spanish for offerings, and, fittingly, the event was a fundraiser for the Southern Poverty Law Center, raising more than $10,000 for programs assisting detained immigrant families.

In her welcoming remarks, event organizer Jaycelle Basford-Pequet, M.S.W. ’10, quoted peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh’s belief that “we have to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”

SSW student Natali RauseoRicupero moderated a panel discussion, which included Maria del Mar Farina,

M.S.W. ’98, Ph.D. ’15, an SSW adjunct professor and assistant director of field education. Del Mar Farina, who has done extensive research on American immigration policy, put recent, wrenching media images of children in detention centers within a historical context. Her remarks focused on the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which expanded the range of crimes considered deportable offenses, introduced fast-track deportation procedures, and has led to millions of deportations since.

She also emphasized the human toll of separating immigrant children from their parents, citing tragic stories of

immigrant children lost in the fostercare system after separation from their parents and evidence that, in general, separation has long-lasting emotional effects. Other presenters shared their own stories of coming to the country as immigrants or working with immigrant families.

The second half of Ofrendras featured a stirring performance of excerpts from Diana Alvarez’s Quiero Volver: A Xicanx Ritual Opera, which explores themes of motherlessness, political consciousness and building community. A line from Alvarez’s song “Orphan Heart/Orphan Will” struck just the right note for the occasion: “I will build this whole family.”

BRINGING TRUTHS TO LIGHT The history of psychoanalysis and racial study Dr. Beverly Stoute, M.D., and Michael Slevin, M.S.W. ’08, worked for two years on a series of eight articles about race and psychoanalysis for The American Psychoanalyst (TAP). The series stimulated such discussion that they used it as the base for a co-edited book on the subject, Race in the Therapeutic Encounter.

Stoute and Slevin share a conviction that a psychoanalytic understanding of and engagement with racism could help both patients and our society. “The history of psychoanalysis and race is stained with ignorance, misapprehension and, yes, racist theory and practice. However, from that dark past it is emerging,” they write.

On June 11 they shared their perspective with the SSW community in a talk detailing the importance and transformative potential of dealing with racism in a clinical

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psychoanalytic environment. “Psychoanalysis doesn’t just happen in the consulting room,” Slevin said. It has implications and uses “in one’s traditional social work endeavors, and in the sort of social-services Jane Addams world. One of our premises is that it’s relevant in both places.”

The presenters framed the discussion on the developmental evolution of race awareness from childhood to adulthood with their own clinical examples, as well as eliciting and exploring examples from the audience. Attendees were given the opportunity to explore how issues around race emerge in their consultation rooms, and how they can be addressed.

Slevin described the talk as “emotionally rich,” and found the students “attentive, riveting and respectful at every step of the way—which is a real gift for a presenter.”

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Faculty Notes Recent news and accomplishments

What happened earlier in your life doesn’t have to determine the rest of your time on Earth.

Supporting Father Involvement in Canadian Indigenous Communities

The Supporting Father Involvement (SFI) program, developed by Associate Dean Marsha Kline Pruett and her colleagues, has proven effective in many contexts since it began a decade ago. Most recently, it’s been successfully implemented with indigenous communities in Canada.

The SFI model aims to reduce child abuse and neglect and enhance family well-being through a curriculum that encourages father involvement and co-parenting. An important characteristic of the curriculum is that group leaders do not prescribe specific behaviors for parents. Instead, they offer a group environment in which partners can explore their own goals and ways of relating to each other based on their culture and values.

This adaptability has been key in its welcome among First Nations communities.

Pruett and colleagues have worked with groups in Alberta—University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills (formerly Blue Quills First Nations College) and Family Centre in Lethbridge—

training practitioners to run the program. They have found that the approaches of SFI align well with the communities’ cultural values.

“They come at it from a deeply rooted family tradition and so the kinds of values we ask them to consider and questions we ask feel very familiar to them,” Pruett said. “The values of the program are not to teach people how to parent, but to teach partners and family members how to talk to each other about the ways they want to parent, what they want to learn from elders and what kinds of support they need. Always, the program keeps inclusion of positive, engaged fathering as a main principle from which families are strengthened.”

Pruett was struck by the way the values of SFI match those outlined in Indigenous Social Work Practice, published by Blue Quills. “They had a wheel of indigenous values that almost perfectly overlap with some of the same concepts that we introduce,” she notes. Specifically, the four dimensions of holism—mind, body, spirit and emotion—fit well with important curriculum components such as being aware of depression and stress, and finding healthy ways to reinvigorate

mind, body and heart.

The communities’ priorities of caring, honesty, determination and sharing also fit well with the SFI approach.

As Pruett describes it, “Caring for your child and sharing it with other people in your community, being open with each other, determining your own directions as parents, and feeling like what happened earlier in your life doesn’t have to determine the rest of your time on Earth.”

The intervention has been particularly relevant for communities in which ties to parents and grandparents were severed when children were sent to residential schools. “Many of the fathers—because of the generation of residential schooling—don’t feel like they know what it means to be a parent,” Pruett said.

In these areas, men can also be relatively scarce, due to incarcera‑ tion, addiction or the need to work in distant urban areas. “One of the things we’re trying to do is make men a strong presence and help the men and women find each other again in parenting, because many of the men say they find their cultural roots again in the love of the next generation.”

—Megan Rubiner Zinn

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There was nothing out there that met our criteria. We wanted to show in-home therapy with a diverse group of clients and a diverse workforce.

Hannah Karpman Creates Online CANS Training Program

Assistant Professor Hannah Karpman has been working closely with the Shriver Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School to improve the quality and consistency of treatment for children and their families who receive mental health services through Medicaid.

When a 2006 class-action lawsuit mandated changes to Medicaidfunded mental health services for children and adolescents, Karpman got involved early, helping with initial training on the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) assessment tool used by the state’s care providers and coordinators. She also conducted research on the outcomes of such services. Now that the services have been running for almost a decade, Karpman has been working with the Massachusetts Children’s Behavioral Health Initiative (CBHI) to improve them.

In order to develop a curriculum suitable for clinicians, care coordinators, therapeutic training and support staff, and supervisors, as well as graduate students, Karpman

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brought together a team of educators and social workers that included SSW Assistant Professor Maria Torres; Sarah Rigney, M.S.W. ’09; doctoral student Nichole Wofford; and former Bertha Capen Reynolds Fellow Rhoda Smith. The resulting online course focuses on assessment and clinical understanding throughout in-home therapy, intensive care coordination, and outpatient services.

Assessment is a crucial part of behavioral health treatment that can become rushed, Karpman has found.

There is often a temptation “to shortcut through an assessment process and get right into the treatment, especially if the family is presenting us with a little bit of crisis and chaos,” she explains in one of the course components.

Improving knowledge and skills to perform a thorough assessment can lead to a stronger care plan that includes needed services from CBHI or other state agencies, providers or schools. It also can help a clinician engage youth and their families in a more collaborative approach, reducing the anxiety families feel and allowing youth to gain a sense of agency about their treatment.

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When Karpman began the project, she sought out videos to use in the learning modules.

“There was nothing out there that met our criteria,” Karpman said.

“We wanted to show in-home therapy with a diverse group of clients and a diverse workforce.”

To remedy this, Karpman’s team took on the task of producing short, unscripted videos featuring real families in scenarios similar to their own. By producing their own videos, the team also was able to ensure that they depicted realistic situations relevant to each course segment and allowed participants to use their own words to talk about their circumstances and concerns.

In addition to the custom-made videos and engaging course modules, the site offers a plethora of resources.

It also provides assessment tools for both practice and programs.

The course is currently in its second round of testing with agencies and clinicians. Karpman expects the online CANS training to launch for wider use in the spring of 2019.

Registered participants can access the site at canstraining.neindex.org.

—Tynan Power

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/ MORE / For complete bios of our outstanding faculty, visit ssw.smith.edu/faculty

Research Project Aims to Engage Undergraduates in Critical Conversations

SSW faculty members Peggy O’Neill and Annemarie Gockel, together with Smith College professor of psychology Nnamdi Pole, this year launched a research study bringing the Critical Conversations model to Smith undergraduates.

Supported by grants from multiple sources, the project will create student groups on campus whose mission is to embark on deep discussions about social justice, activism and oppression in all its forms.

“It’s an opportunity to construct healthy dialogue toward a more just community and environment and world,” said O’Neill.

Developed in 2015 by O’Neill and SSW colleague Hye-Kyung Kang, the model seeks to illuminate power dynamics within a social context to allow for deeper examination and reflection that ultimately ushers in change on multiple levels, including personal, systemic and institutional.

“It’s relational,” she said. “That’s exciting to me.”

Front row: Nathalie Fischer-Rodríguez, M.S.W.; 2nd row: Rose Sackey-Milligan, Ph.D., Nnamdi Pole, Ph.D.; 3rd row: Denise Goitia, M.S.W., Annemarie Gockel, Ph.D., Peggy O’Neill, Ph.D.

O’Neill said the model asks facilitators to articulate unspoken dynamics during a conversation about loaded topics such as racism or classism, for example, by identifying power imbalances when they come into play.

The goal is to help participants develop skills to both understand people with opposing views and build relationships with others whose perspectives differ significantly from their own.

In short, the project seeks to cut to the heart of the divisions now roiling the nation.

“We’re in a crisis in the country in terms of being able to talk about issues of power, yet these conversations are inevitably happening,” said Gockel.

Without a mechanism that articulates in a conscious way the power dynamics at play, Gockel and O’Neill believe such conversations will be ineffective, and possibly even harmful.

“The intention is to resolve, but what often happens is that the conversations reenact the issues themselves,” said Gockel. “Although we’re intending to have understanding, often they reinforce the divisions that existed.

The intention is to interrupt the enactments by naming them to bring them into the conversations.”

Gockel sees the model as one that invites participants to consider power dynamics in action in a way that brings greater understanding. In other words, she said, “How can we reach across the forces of oppression that divide us?”

Through their two-year research project, O’Neill and Gockel aim to find out the extent to which the Critical Conversations model can be that bridge.

“This model invites the instructor to say ‘something just happened that feels substantive that impacts our learning.’ It invites people to step into the conversation by naming it,” O’Neill said.

The model was introduced to the SSW campus through faculty training and engagement in a multi-year effort, begun in 2016, to prepare faculty to better guide conversations on these difficult topics within their classrooms and other group settings.

“The model is morphing in a way that we’re working to apply it in a created situation so we’ll jump-start a conversation about social justice issues,” said O’Neill.

O’Neill and Gockel believe initiating such conversations has the potential to create social change around issues in which embedded power dynamics can make conversations explosive.

“These are critical issues for our community here at Smith and critical issues in our nation,” said Gockel.

—Laurie Loisel

The intention is to resolve, but what often happens is that the conversations reenact the issues themselves. Although we’re intending to have understanding, often they reinforce the divisions that existed.

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BY DA NE K UTT L E R

Opening Doors Career devoted to creating access to higher education

Irene Rodriguez-Martin, associate dean for graduate enrollment and student affairs, has seen and shaped more than 30 years of the School for Social Work’s relationship to its students. She has seen thousands of once-applicants matriculate and finish their master’s degrees, and has devoted her career to opening the School’s doors to a broad range of students—especially those at historical and structural disadvantages, including low-income students, students of color and those who were the first in their families to pursue higher education.

After all this time, it can seem as though Rodriguez-Martin has always been an integral part of the School. However, she remembers clearly her first impressions of Smith College—a place where “people like us” didn’t belong.

Rodriguez-Martin grew up in nearby Westfield, the daughter of immigrants who believed that education was the best path to success. They were proud of their daughter for pursuing a college education—but when it came time to choose where to go, hesitations surfaced. “One of my teachers encouraged me to go to Smith,” said RodriguezMartin, “so I asked my father what he thought, and he told me, ‘People like us don’t belong at Smith.’”

While she didn’t end up attending Smith, Rodriguez-Martin never forgot the conversation. “I think that my father’s early comments saying that I didn’t belong, and my own feeling that education was the key, moved me to really work hard to make sure that [the School for Social Work] was a place for anyone.”

The position that ultimately brought her to Lilly Hall was in alumni affairs.

During her time in that department, Rodriguez-Martin developed an appreciation for the role that alumni could play in the recruitment of new students.

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“So much literature out there talks about the value of mentorship, and about half of the students of color at the School are first-generation college students,” she said. “So we used alumni at the School to reassure new students that they can fit in. We started a program called Reaching for Excellence, where we invited alumni to identify people working in the field who could be superstars if they got their master’s degrees, and then we paid to bring those people to Smith for a three-day ‘mini-exposure’ to inspire them and help them imagine what they could do with a master’s degree. … About 75 percent of the people we invite to this program apply to the School.”

She also points out that the School’s practice of giving financial package and internship location information to accepted applicants as soon as possible gives them the chance to make the necessary arrangements in order to enroll. “As a Hispanic woman for whom family is everything, I couldn’t fathom people taking that leap of faith,” said Rodriguez-Martin. “So we tell people, ‘If you apply by the early admission date, we will give you your admission decision, as well as the location of your field placement and your financial package,’ so people could

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make informed decisions. That was the beginning of more people of color applying to the School.”

Rodriguez-Martin is quick to point to mentors at the School who helped frame her path and empower her. “After alumni affairs, I was very strongly mentored by Dean Ann Hartman. She would tell me, ‘People believe that women get where they are by happenstance—don’t believe it! Everything you do is a deliberate step.’”

It was Hartman who called on Rodriguez-Martin to help craft an institutional response after an incident in which vandals scrawled obscenities and racial slurs across the stone steps of Lilly Hall. They decided to invite all alumni of color—“we need someone to guide us”—to a three-day conference to advise Dean Hartman. “That,” said Rodriguez-Martin, “became the beginning of the School for Social Work taking a critical look at our own activities. There’ve been lots of wonderful partners along the way who stepped up and moved forward toward implementing the School’s Anti-Racism Commitment.”

But Rodriguez-Martin’s work does not end—or even begin—at the School. Rather, it’s her work in the community—the place she has always belonged—that fuels her the most. “My parents were both big-time volunteers.

My father taught English, my mother worked for the church, and I’ve been involved in community my whole life.”

That drive to work in community led Rodriguez-Martin to positions on two boards, at the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts and at Baystate Health. She described Baystate’s CEO, Dr. Mark Keroack, as having “a social worker’s soul.”

He invited her to the board because he was doing research on how social factors and poverty affect health.

She is also a former board member of the Latino Scholarship Association, which grew from a group of families who pooled small amounts of money

/ Faculty Notes /

each year to give to promising students, into a fully endowed scholarship.

The fund, Rodriguez-Martin is quick to note, does not seek to reward students with the top grades. They, she says, will find a way to college and beyond more easily. Instead, it focuses on students with promising, if not perfect, performances who show

a demonstrated commitment to their communities. That commitment can come in the form of volunteering, or even holding an afterschool job to support their family.

Though her ideas and innovations have shaped several of the institutions of which she’s been a part, RodriguezMartin said that often her presence

at the table is itself a game changer.

Having been hired as not only the first Hispanic administrator, but a daughter of immigrants who was among the first generation in her family to attend college, Rodriguez-Martin said that the most important thing is that, “I could hold the door for all the people coming after me.” ◆

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/ SSWorks /

BY TY NA N P O W E R

Educating in the Field Bradley Landon helps agency understand TGNC clients

Normally, the first-year field internship is an opportunity to learn from more seasoned professionals, but for Bradley Landon, A ’19, it became an opportunity to educate. While working with adult inpatient clients at the Institute of Living (IOL) in Hartford, Connecticut, Landon impressed the staff with their knowledge of transgender and gender-nonconforming (GNC) identities and was invited to join their Gender Identity Policy Group and to contribute to a training program being developed.

“In their work with this committee, Brad participated in meetings and discussions, consulted on PowerPoint slideshow development that will be used for training purposes, and provided input regarding a number of policy issues related to the IOL’s commitment to better serving trans and GNC clients,” said Landon’s faculty field adviser, Adjunct Associate Professor Stephen Bradley.

Although Landon identifies as trans, they credit their knowledge—and confidence taking on the roles of educator and advocate—to their work as a case manager at the Jacksonville Area Sexual Minority Youth Network and the Northeast Florida AIDS Network.

“I worked with a lot of trans and GNC youth in Jacksonville,” said Landon. “Many of them had experienced psychiatric hospitalization and other forms of incarceration.”

At IOL, Landon chose not to disclose their own identity as trans

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to clients or colleagues.

“It was a unique experience of hearing what cisgender people say when they don’t realize a trans person is in the room,” Landon said.

In seven years of social service work, Landon has found that care providers often have the best intentions, but receive limited, informal training about transgender identities and experiences.

At the IOL, they had an opportunity to help remedy that.

Some opportunities arose during routine exchanges.

“When people in meetings discussed concerns about [gendered] bathroom use, I would cite statistics that show that trans people are not assaulting anyone in bathrooms,” said Landon.

“They actually are more likely to be victims of assault.”

Landon felt that correcting colleagues’ misconceptions in staff discussions could lead to better treatment and results.

“What we say in meetings is going to translate to patient care,” Landon said.

“If your therapist is microaggressing, you won’t be motivated. You’ll be dissociated, shut down.”

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Landon also used storytelling to help impart understanding and humanize trans clients.

“Cisgender colleagues would attempt a higher-level analysis of a client and I would share what that person’s day had been like and what impact that had,” said Landon.

When Landon reviewed materials compiled for trainings, they used an emphasis on storytelling to discourage reductive definitions.

“I worked on personalizing the descriptions,” said Landon. “For example, some people have a specific understanding of the trans experience.

I would attempt to move away from what may be assumed as the universal experience of trans people and push for a more nuanced and individual experience of clients’ identities, needs and goals.”

Landon felt the trainings were successful, thanks in large part to the advocacy of many cisgender staff members.

“Once they were given the time to learn, everyone responded to it well,” Landon said. “Their nervousness turned into curiosity. That was the result of a real team effort.” ◆

/ Student Focus /

BY ME G A N R UB IN E R Z IN N

My education at Smith has prepared me far beyond my expectations for continuing this very important work.

A Winning Perspective Seidenberg Prize goes to Stephanie Gangemi Doctoral student Stephanie Gangemi has won top honors in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute’s Seidenberg Prize competition for her paper “Are They Mental Health or Behavioral: Toward Object Relations Translation for Corrections Officers.”

Gangemi had been writing the paper for her comprehensive exam when she

saw the institute’s call for papers on psychoanalytic perspectives on problems of incarceration. The competition asked writers to address how psychoanalysis can help inform ways of thinking about issues between guards and inmates in the criminal justice system. Gangemi had been feeling stalled on her paper and the

call motivated her to finish.

Gangemi looks at the dynamics of victimization on both sides. “My basic thesis was that psychoanalysis can and should be used for us to help guards, and that there’s sort of a mutual process of traumatization and exposure to constant stressors and that process is interactive once they’re there.”

Gangemi attended the June meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association to receive the award of $15,000. She also won a stipend to present the paper at a conference in the coming year.

Having finished her coursework, Gangemi is at the beginning stages of her dissertation research. She recently left her position at the El Paso County Jail in Colorado, where she had worked for nine years, and has started a private practice, focusing primarily on individuals with complicated trauma issues or dealing with personality disorders. She is also teaching social work in Newman University’s M.S.W. program at its satellite campus in Colorado Springs.

“My education at Smith has prepared me far beyond my expectations for continuing this very important work in the criminal justice system,” Gangemi said. The prize has also made her feel even more empowered in her work: “I feel tremendously honored and inspired and excited to put the ideas into action.” ◆

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OH, WHAT A More than 300 alumni reconnected and celebrated our School over a weekend filled with parties, classes, movies, great food and lots of laughs.

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BY FAYE S. WOLFE

TIME! Highlights of the SSW Centennial weekend

PHOTOS BY SHANA SURECK

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AT

the SSW Centennial Celebration June 29– July 1, alumni, faculty, staff, current students and friends gathered to celebrate 100 years’ worth of outstanding education.

Around a robust schedule of film screenings, classes, receptions, a play, a lecture, a roundtable discussion, a dance party, a barbecue dinner and more, attendees found time for socializing, networking, reconnection, reminiscence and reflection.

The weekend got off to a rousing me was that every day you have thoustart with the premiere of Clinical sands of opportunities to build up or Revolution in Sage Hall. The film packs destroy someone.” a whole lot of history into 20 minutes, Waiting for Ellen DeVoe to give the but no film could tell the whole story, E. Diane Davis Lecture on Saturday which is at least 7,500 stories—that’s morning, Juanita Dalton Robinson, how many students SSW has trained M.S.S. ’51, echoed Gordon in characand graduated since 1918. terizing the benefits of an SSW At the President’s education. “It teaches you Champagne Reception how to look honestly at after the screening, yourself and to stop yourself See more Diane Gordon, M.S.W. ’71, from hurting others.” images online at ssw.smith.edu/100 sketched her narrative arc.

“The School was a very Her career began at Saint intimate environment,” she Joseph Hospital in Chicago. remembered. “The town was She went into private practice sleepy. It had one movie theater— in 1977 and has offered therapy to and it was closed for the summer. individuals, couples and families ever Some students got away on weekends, since. Along the way, Gordon raised a but even with my scholarship, money family. Daughter Ashley Adler, who’s was tight. I had to borrow money to considering a career in social work, buy a stamp—they were 3 cents—to sampled appetizers with her on the write to my mother.”

Conference Center terrace.

The only black student in her class, “Smith is a unique school and it Dalton Robinson went on to build a prepared me for my career in many noteworthy career and was instruways,” said Gordon. “I think the most mental in desegregating the Cleveland important thing the School taught public schools. Her SSW experience

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Professor Josh Miller laughs with Shannon Rohrer-Phillips, M.S.W. ’98, and others at the President’s Champagne Reception.

played a fundamental role in many aspects of her life: “It helps you to understand human behavior, how and why you function. I was a very different kind of mother because of it.” The kind of mother, it seems, who leads by example. With her were daughters Rachel Robinson, M.S.W. ’94, a professor at the University of Washington, and Miriam Robinson, M.S.W. ’87, a clinician in private practice.

How and why parents’ behavior affects children is a subject Ellen DeVoe has explored in depth. A professor and director of the Ph.D. program at the Boston University School of Social Work, DeVoe is known for her intervention research related to parents affected by trauma. In her lecture, “Beyond the Service Member: Working With Post-9/11 Military Families Throughout the Deployment Cycle,” she presented some of her findings.

Contemporary war is different from ones our forebears fought: there is no front line, the enemy is ubiquitous and yesterday’s friend is today’s foe. The tremendous toll it takes on military personnel can roil their families.

Among DeVoe’s vivid examples: the 3-year-old who stopped talking when his father went overseas and didn’t speak again until he returned a year later; a sniper’s young daughter who climbed into his duffel bag so she could go with him when he was deployed. In her work with Veterans and activeduty service members, DeVoe has had to strike a delicate balance between raising their awareness of the impact on their children while not adding to the guilt they already carry.

Addressed to an audience of people who have made it their life’s work to ease emotional pain, DeVoe’s talk confirmed the power of therapy to alleviate suffering and, in her words, “be a vehicle for growth.”

Associate Professor Yoosun Park’s class, one of eight offered on Saturday, provided essential historical perspective on another timely subject. In the fact-filled, riveting presentation “Problematized Bodies: The Role of Race and Gender in the History of Immigration to the U.S.,” Park examined immigration policies from 1790 to today. She analyzed landmark Supreme Court rulings notable for their contradictory, arbitrary determinations about what constituted “whiteness” in a candidate for citizenship. Irish, Italians, Czechs, Chinese and others who came seeking freedom and a better life in America were labeled inferior, suspected of “moral turpitude” and subject to exclusionary regulations not so different from ones being enforced today. Yet Park’s closing question, how do we fix this?, appeared to infuse her listeners with renewed determination to speak up and act up for a more just system.

Alumni packed the Campus Center for the Saturday afternoon screening of the documentary Wild and Precious

by Steve Cadwell, Ph.D. ’90. It’s an intensely personal portrayal of his life as a gay man: “Growing up a sissy boy in Vermont,” in his words; breaking down and being institutionalized as a young man, as a result of social pressures and extreme confusion about who he was; post–Stone Wall, out of the closet, onto the disco; then into the crucible of the AIDS crisis and out the other side. Cadwell is now a husband, a father and a therapist who counsels LGBTQ clients, among others.

Yvette Colón, M.S.W. ’90, was among the audience for the film. “Absolutely changed my life” was how she summed up her SSW education. At age 27, Colón was cured of ovarian cancer, but it was a social worker facilitating a young cancer survivors support group who helped her heal emotionally and inspired her to become an oncology social worker.

“My parents thought that social workers were for people who were

Top: Photobooth fun at the Alumni Reception. Middle Left: Floyd Allen, M.S.W. ’97, poses for a photo with Beth Richman, M.S.W. ’99, at the President's Champagne Reception. Middle Right: Tomás Alvarez, M.S.W. ’06, makes a comment during a back-to-class session, while Myrtho Gardiner, M.S.W. ’06, listens. Bottom: Susan Ryder, M.S.W. ’91, poses with her daughter Joey and Associate Dean for Graduate Enrollment Irene Rodriguez-Martin.

poor or crazy,” said Colón, now an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University, with a smile. “By the time I graduated, they were enormously proud of me.”

Like many others who attended SSW, Colón couldn’t have done it without financial aid. She is committed to helping raise scholarship funds, particularly for students of color and LGBTQ students. “The needs are so great,” she noted, “we need more people out there.”

As is fitting at a Centennial Celebration, participants looked back at what has come before. But they were also looking ahead, thinking about the state of the world and pressing social issues. The eloquent words of Floyd Allen, M.S.W. ’97, expressed the collective spirit of the celebration—and the school: “We need a different reality, we have a choice, we can choose to be different and make it happen. It might take 100 years, but we can put it in motion.” ◆

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Joanne Corbin broadens her work with war-torn communities in northern Uganda

BY MEGAN RUBINER ZINN PHOTOS BY ISAAC KASAMANI

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HELP

PING LIVES REBUILD

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O

ver the course of more than two decades, approximately 1.8 million people in northern Uganda were displaced in the midst of hostilities between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government.

Since 2005, Professor Joanne Corbin has regularly traveled to the region to learn how years of armed conflict and displacement have impacted these communities and how they have begun to rebuild their lives. In her most recent work, Corbin focused on the effects of the war and dislocation on women’s social, cultural and economic roles and responsibilities.

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Corbin has built relationships and networks in the region with the help of local organizations, including the Catholic Archdiocese and the Anaka Foundation, an NGO that helps communities improve their access to health care and education and become economically self-sustaining.

In 2013 and 2014, drawing on these networks, Corbin interviewed women in four villages in the Gulu and Nwoya Districts who had lived for long periods in internally displaced persons camps. In the interviews she explored the changes in the women’s sociocultural and economic roles and responsibilities since their displacement, and the ways community and cultural influences have affected these roles.

Throughout her research, Corbin was very conscious that the entire community would need to be involved in and aware of her work at each stage. “Thinking about how interventions are developed within the community and attending to particular community understandings about how families and how communities work together” has been key, she said. She was especially aware that the men of the community needed to be involved. Many programs in the area focus on the needs of women and children, and when men are left out they are more likely to act out violently or commandeer resources provided to others.

To this end, when Corbin began her research she led community meetings with both men and women to talk about the nature of the study and why she was interviewing women only at that point. She also offered feedback at the end of the study so the entire community would hear the results of her research.

In the interviews, Corbin learned that family and institutional structures had been thoroughly disrupted by the conflicts, and that women’s roles in their families and communities had changed significantly. Many had lost husbands to violence and disease, and were left with multiple dependents, including children of family members and others in the community. The women also spoke of the breakdown in relationships

Professor Joanne Corbin returned to northern Uganda in April. She ran trainings and celebrated with residents who have completed the curriculum she developed for dialogue groups.

between men and women, with men often participating less in caring for their families. “Women would talk about this over and over again,” Corbin said. “When there were too many children to take care of and too many responsibilities the men would shift to women who didn’t have any children.”

In most cases, the women were also land insecure. Land in these communities is passed through the male side of the family. If husbands were absent or killed, or if women weren’t married to their partners, they often lost access to land. “Without land you can’t build a home and you don’t have land to farm to raise income,” Corbin said. “You are impoverished, even more so than everybody else who is impoverished.”

Once she completed her research, Corbin worked with the communities to develop an intervention to address the social and economic changes and to re-establish community structures.

They created what they call “dialogue groups.” These groups, which began meeting in May 2016, consist of no more than 20 men and women, who meet monthly for a discussion led by a community-based facilitator. Corbin developed modules on 12 content areas to guide the discussions, including respect, communication, relationships and marriages, domestic violence and women’s access to land.

Almost immediately, the participants in the dialogue groups defied her expectations. They took full ownership of the process, adapting the groups to their needs, setting up ground rules and engaging in difficult conversations. They’ve connected to resources in their area to obtain information and guidance, and have developed income-generating projects.

The Anaka Foundation has also used the groups as a vehicle for its activities. Thanks to the processes and structures the groups have developed, the foundation can deliver its services and resources more effectively—such as connecting the most vulnerable children to educational resources, improving sanitation and providing entrepreneurial trainings.

According to Corbin, the communities are already seeing changes. Men and women are working together in ways they haven’t before, and

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they’ve experienced a decrease in gender-based violence, which Corbin attributes in part to women taking on leadership roles in the communities and gaining confidence in their voices. Land dispute cases have also decreased. “I think that’s because, in the groups, they’re able to talk about differences or conflicts,” Corbin said.

“And maybe there’s a different mechanism, a way of talking that allows them to resolve difficulties before they have to go through the legal route.”

Margaret Omona, Anaka’s executive director, also reports many changes.

She has seen an increase in women’s self-esteem and in male involvement within families, more unity in the community in farming and maintaining resources, health and educational outreach by members of the group to the wider community, gender equality in access to education and an increase in financial savings.

Corbin has also been quite happy to learn that more men want to be involved in the groups. Early on, men who participated would hear from others that they were foolish to get involved with something that wasn’t providing anything tangible. Now the men who participate often explain to the naysayers that they’re getting something more valuable—new ideas and strategies for earning a better living. “I no longer have to give the reasons why people need to participate.

The people themselves are generating these responses back to other community members,” Corbin said.

Corbin most recently visited the region in April and May of 2018, when most of the dialogue groups had completed all of the modules. The groups wanted to acknowledge the work they’d done, and set up a graduation ceremony where 130 participants received certificates of completion.

Initially, they expected the groups would be done after completing the 12 modules, but all of the groups have chosen to continue together.

During this visit, Corbin and colleagues led a cross-district training with 90 participants where they networked, discussed accomplishments and set goals for the coming year. They also initiated nine new groups and introduced new modules on significant

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“ I no longer have to give the reasons why people need to participate.

The people themselves are generating these responses back to other community members.” issues for the groups: suicide awareness and prevention, and incomegenerating strategies. A social work colleague specializing in social entrepreneurship, Jacqueline Armstrong, developed and presented the modules on income-generating strategies and contributed to the training.

While working in Uganda, Corbin enjoyed strong support back at the SSW. She received financial support from the Clinical Research Institute and research assistance from three doctoral students—LaTasha Smith, Dominica Lizzi and Stephen Friedman—who have participated in literature reviews, interview question development, interview transcriptions and data analysis.

For now, Corbin is focused on deepening and broadening the work she has begun. She has launched a study to complement her first one— interviewing men in the region to understand the effects of armed conflict and displacement on their social, cultural and economic roles. She will process that data this year and hopes the findings will better inform the dialogue groups. Corbin is also working to disseminate her finding in publications and at conferences, partnering with more agencies, and determining how to implement on a larger scale the interventions that are proving to be so effective. ◆

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After 13 years of research and training in Uganda, Professor Joanne Corbin is greeted as an old friend when she returns.

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Class by class, SSW instructors spread the gospel of group therapy

ILLUSTRATION: NEIL WEBB/GETTY IMAGES

GROUP CHAMPIONS

BY LAURIE LOISEL PHOTOS BY SHANA SURECK

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IF

you talk with social workers who run psychotherapy groups, it doesn’t take long to hit on why they do it.

They’ll remember a specific group, a single participant, a particular moment when they witnessed with great clarity the healing power of the modality.

Kirk Woodring, M.S.W. ’95, experienced it early in his career working with men with terminal AIDS diagnoses. A group member resisted bonding with others, often using humor to guard against other emotions. Three months in, the other men gently, kindly confronted him about his distancing ways.

Woodring watched in amazement as he cracked wide open.

“It was one of those cathartic, aha moments,” he said. “He teared up. It was the first time he showed authentic emotion. That moment was pivotal and I’m not sure it could have come in individual therapy.”

For Paul Gitterman, M.S.W. ’94, it was when he became co-facilitator for a long-running group for ex–prisoners of war who had survived World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

“People didn’t leave the group— they just aged out or died,” said Gitterman. “I was struck by the power of that connection. It was almost a sacred place.”

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Kurt White, M.S.W. ’04, thinks back to his internship in a hospital psychiatric ward after his first summer at Smith. He witnessed a seasoned group clinician help the unit work though difficult staff dynamics impacting their work.

“She did this masterfully and began to explore some of the larger systems dynamics and helped people move beyond this impasse,” White said.

Alison Berman, M.S.W. ’95, recalls watching teenagers in a public high school transform before her eyes.

They came to a therapy group dealing with substance misuse, anxiety or

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Kirk Woodring, M.S.W. ’95, is Chief Clinical Officer at the Brattleboro Retreat and teaches Advanced Group Theory and Practice at Smith SSW.

depression, and discovered something all had in common: Each felt they had no true friends they could trust.

“What they created in that group was so moving—they created such trust,” Berman said. “This was a place where they felt like they could actually talk and say things they couldn’t tell their friends outside. That couldn’t have happened if that group hadn’t been created.”

Meet the seasoned clinicians who are the core instructors of the Smith School for Social Work’s group therapy courses. They are passionate about the modality. They are committed to its practice. And they are fierce in their desire to prepare emerging social workers for a therapeutic intervention increasingly sought after in a wide variety of settings.

“Smith has always been known for its focus on individuals and families particularly,” said Woodring, coordinator for the SSW group practice offerings. “Over time, the School has recognized that there’s a real need for training in group practice.”

Woodring, Gitterman, White and Berman want to ensure that students are fully prepared to take on what can be an extremely intimidating—but also deeply healing—modality.

“First-year students in particular are going out in their placements and finding out, almost without exception, that they are being asked to do group work,” said Woodring.

For many years, SSW required students to take a single introductory, five-session group class. That was the requirement in 1995, when Woodring graduated. Shortly after that, in the late 1990s, the introductory group course was increased to a 10-session, full-semester requirement for firstyear students.

Students in their second and third year are offered two electives, Advanced Group Theory and Practice, taught by Woodring, and Group Theory and Practice With Adolescents and Youth, taught

by Berman.

“ There are those moments in group when it feels like you’re on the best, highest functioning athletic team you’ve ever been on, the best orchestra, everyone is in synch.”

Woodring noted that changes in the field motivated the changes in course offerings. “We were seeing more and more students having to do groups in their first placements, and there was a cry from the students that they needed more training in group work,” he said.

“They’re all coming back saying, ‘We’re doing groups,’” confirmed Berman. “Everyone is doing groups.”

Given the demands on students in the field, Woodring would like to double the sessions for the required introductory class from 10 to 20, and add to the electives offered.

“Smith has this history of doing really fine training in individual and family psychodynamic, psychotherapeutic models,” said Woodring. “Times have changed. There’s been an evolution in social work. Group work has developed a greater standing within the social work community.”

While groups have been a longstanding therapeutic intervention for people dealing with substance misuse disorders and on psychiatric units, they are becoming increasingly common in many other settings.

There are many reasons for this trend, prime among them that groups can more efficiently engage clients.

There’s also a sense that this intervention can be extremely effective for a wide variety of people, at times even more effective than individual therapy.

“They serve more people and cut down on wait times,” said Woodring.

“Groups allow a different kind of assessment over time than what you would get in individual therapy.”

Gitterman, who runs groups both at Williams College and in private practice, says the structure offers a type of healing other modalities cannot.

“You have an opportunity to work through dynamics with people who are equally invested in helping each other. It’s larger than the sum of its parts,” said Gitterman. “No matter what theory you use, the connection of the people to each other is really the powerful part of the healing.”

At its best, group therapy can help participants use the interactions with fellow group members to recognize and resolve patterns that hold them back, and then transfer that

experience to relationships outside the group.

“There are those moments in group when it feels like you’re on the best, highest functioning athletic team you’ve ever been on, the best orchestra, everyone is in synch,” said Woodring.

“It feels almost magical. You don’t get that anywhere else. You don’t get it in individual therapy in the same way.”

He believes group therapy can help people recognize patterns within themselves that they’ve never seen before.

“That really comes from both feedback and self-disclosure that comes in the groups,” he said.

White sees the taproot of group therapy as the way it helps participants understand themselves as part of a bigger whole. This can be a normalizing experience as well as a healing epiphany, he said, as people realize, “‘Oh, my God, the thing that I’m thinking and feeling isn’t just about me, it’s about a whole group system.’ ” White spends time in his courses both teaching about these theoretical concepts, and also helping students experience such revelations.

“It’s not just about learning about a therapeutic model; it’s learning to see the world in a completely different way,” said White. “The phase a group is in affects each individual’s thoughts and feelings maybe as much as their own past experiences.”

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Kurt White, M.S.W. ’04, meets with staff at the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital about a partnership related to pain management.

And because most people live their lives in the context of a variety groups—including families, schools and workplaces, to name a few—interpersonal dynamics are often sparked by larger group systems as much as by individual interactions.

“When people begin to get it, it’s a little like the scales falling from their eyes and they look at the world in a different way,” said White.

For all the benefits of group therapy, there are many challenges and pitfalls to navigate. Smith professors work hard to prepare their students for all of these.

“I think it’s one of the modalities that intimidates people the most,” said Gitterman, who teaches the required first-year introductory group course.

Intimidating for so many reasons.

Kurt White shared an old therapy saw: “It’s not that people talk about their problems in group, it’s that people are their problems in group,” he said with a mischievous smile, only half joking.

He quickly followed up: “Of course, from a strength-based perspective, you are also your strengths in group.”

Smith’s group instructors know that many social workers in training are understandably nervous about the prospect of running groups. “The fear is of being eaten alive by groups,”

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Woodring said, also only half jokingly.

“It is daunting and it is frightening.

Even seasoned clinicians are challenged by group dynamics.”

Berman, who said she learned how to run groups largely through trial and error, has sympathy for students new in the field. “It can get really chaotic— groups can get out of control, definitely,” she said.

Woodring, who runs his classes both as a group and as a course about groups, models for his students how a clinician should approach the role of group facilitator—a bit gingerly and with a lot of humility.

“I tell my students at the beginning of class that I can guarantee that I will make mistakes and that I will need to repair, and that’s part of what you need to learn as a group leader,” he said.

Berman said a key task for therapists running groups is to navigate the other relationships within a given setting.

“Groups don’t exist in a vacuum,” she said. For example, when running a group within a school a therapist might need to advocate for a room with enough privacy to build trust within its members. The therapist might also need to correct misunderstandings people may have about the process. Playing cards, for example, doesn’t mean the group is goofing off;

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it may be simply an activity the therapist is using to help participants feel safer opening up.

Gitterman and Berman say time pressures sometimes conspire against it, but it is essential to have individual meetings with prospective group members to prepare them for the experience and also to discern if the group is appropriate for the issue they are dealing with.

Another element key to success is having a clear vision of the group’s purpose. This can help keep the group from spiraling out of control or feeling directionless, they said.

Elizabeth Castrellon, M.S.W. ’10, is a senior social worker running multiple groups at a psychiatric hospital in Houston, Texas. She credits Smith with preparing her to effectively run groups. Most helpful, she said, was the way the advanced class she took with Woodring taught her theoretical underpinnings and the clinical issues raised in groups, while also experiencing being in a group.

Throughout the course, students took turns being part of the group while the others observed in a fishbowl format. “I felt really prepared to really think about groups in a different way,” she said. “It was a pretty big part of Smith and the way that classes are approached.”

Helen Chong, M.S.W. ’98, runs many groups in her private psychotherapy practice and is president of the Houston, Texas, chapter of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA). She said she’ll never forget being impressed in her first group theory class by how experiential it was.

“It’s embedded in the group class,” she said. “You learn via the environment. I fell in love with it.”

Chong attends the AGPA annual conference, where she sometimes leads groups to train emerging therapists. “When I see other Smithies, I just say, ‘Oh, they know group, because that’s how they were taught.’” ◆

Alumni News I N T H I S S EC T I O N

ALUMNI DESK ALUMNI NEWS

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/ Alumni Desk /

DAWN M. FAUCHER Alumni Relations & Development Director

Sharing our Story The Centennial Celebration continues online and around the country

I had the distinct pleasure of welcoming back to campus more than 300 alumni from all over the U.S. and Canada.

For 100 years the Smith College School for Social Work has attracted the best and brightest students from around the world. Since its inception, Smith SSW has trained and graduated more than 7,500 students—many of them pioneers of the profession like Bertha Capen Reynolds, Esther Cook, Florence Hollis, Hazel Augustine, Ann Hartman, Marta Sotomayor, Irmgard Wessel and Caitlin Ryan—to name just a few.

In June, we kicked off our 100-year anniversary with an on-campus celebration of our distinguished history and influential alumni. I had the distinct pleasure of welcoming back to campus more than 300 alumni from all over the U.S. and Canada. You can view some of the photographs from the Centennial Celebration in this issue of InDepth. You can find more photos and history of our School on our website: ssw.smith.edu/100.

I hope you will join us as we continue to celebrate our milestone anniversary throughout 2018 and into spring 2019.

Watch your email and check our website and Facebook page for information about regional events showcasing the film produced by PBS affiliate WGBY, Clinical Revolution: The Smith College School for Social Work at 100.

Alumni who attended the premiere in June were unanimously enthusiastic about the film, which documents the history of the School from its radical beginnings through many decades and leaders in clinical social work education. If you would like to schedule a viewing in your area, please contact us in the SSW Office of Alumni Relations. We would love to plan an event with you!

Academic Regalia To commemorate the Centennial year, Smith College School for Social Work for the first time commissioned the design of academic regalia for graduates of our doctoral program.

Academic dress is believed to have originated at medieval British universities when those institutions were associated with the church.

In keeping with the traditions of universities and colleges around the world, academic regalia are a special and unique symbol of an alma mater.

The colors representing the institution are typically available only to the college’s doctoral graduates. Gowns are usually designed according the degree held by the wearer.

Judith Josiah-Martin, Ph.D. ’18

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SSW doctoral robes are blue with gold piping, Smith College’s colors

Velvet bars indicate a doctoral degree

The hoods are a carry­over from the times when monks wore them as a head cover or as a shoulder cape used, at times, to collect alms.

2018 BACCALAUREATE & COMMENCEMENT 1. Nicole Tripp enjoys a laugh during baccalaureate. 2. Richard Malcom and Brian Mai applaud during commencement.

3. Graduates look forward to more comfortable desks. 4. Fred Newdom is honored with the Day-Garrett medal. 5. Robyn Shigemitsu and Rickey Thorn enjoy baccalaureate.

6. Rachel Greenberg performs for classmates during the baccalaureate ceremony. 7. Amber Zinni, Abbie Cyr and Taliet Gerretsen cheer on their classmates. 8. Members of the class of 2018 celebrate before the commencement ceremony. 9. Commencement puts a smile on Kamila Baker’s face. 10. Associate Dean Marsha Pruett leads the procession in style.

11. Sizana Ezana poses with a member of SSW’s class of 2045.

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Without Apologies “Every single one of us was born into this system with all of its violences and degradations. Every one of us has been both an agent of tyranny and an agent of mercy.

“We are called in this day at this time to a transformative compassion for ourselves and for those still stuck in the clay of oppressive systems. We must offer a grace, but only from a cup we have sipped from first. Forgive yourself for all you do not know, for all you were completely wrong about. Unlock the cabinet of your chest and look for the getting it wrong.

“Remember that there is no place on this train towards liberation, freedom and healing where you can step on at this point

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without crushing someone’s toe. Say sorry, mean it and get on the damn train. Folks already on the Woke Express, say ouch and scoot down. We need everyone on this ride in order to get to where we’re trying to go.

“Hold systems and institutions to account. Hold humans and their fallibilities with compassion. There is an area of your own privilege you have yet to awaken to. Remember that anger is a fuel and fuel without purpose burns everything. Be strategic with your rage.”

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2018 Smith SSW commencement speaker Sonya Renee Taylor, poet, author, educator and activist

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/ Alumni News /

J AYN E S I L B E R MAN

Day-Garrett Award Winners

BY ME G A N R U B IN E R Z IN N

Throughout her life, Jayne Silberman has taken unexpected roads. She pursued a social work career after taking a social policy class as a “gut” course and realizing it was her calling. She embraced family therapy when it was introduced into the Smith curriculum. She dove into teaching when the opportunity presented itself. In retirement, she reinvented herself as a photographer.

Although her social work career seemed like a surprise, Silberman was raised in a family where the field was highly esteemed. Her parents had created the Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund, the first foundation focused on social work education and service delivery, and those values undoubtedly rubbed off on her.

Silberman earned her M.S.W. in 1976 and calls her Smith education the foundation of everything she did afterward. While she was at the School, SSW added family therapy to the curriculum, which had a lasting impact on her work. She took the first course and felt strongly that one could do both individual and family therapy—opening the door for her to embrace a broad range of therapeutic approaches.

After earning a social work doctorate at NYU, Silberman began teaching, eventually becoming an associate professor at Hunter College. She also maintained a private practice until 2004.

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Silberman brought her professional passions to volunteer work, serving on the boards of organizations supporting people through chronic life-threatening illnesses, including Choice in Dying, The New Jewish Home and Jewish Home Lifecare. She was also vice chair of the Silberman Fund (which is currently on hold and now part of the New York Community Trust), where she created a social work faculty grant program, knowing firsthand the challenges faculty face securing funding.

She takes pride in the breadth of books the fund supported, noting that “every single one of those books was a milestone in the development and progression of social work.”

The Silberman Fund benefited SSW directly, supporting the work of our faculty, including Joan Berzoff, James Drisko and Yoosun Park. Silberman also contributed to the School with her time, serving on an advisory board for the Field Work Institute and on a capital campaign committee.

In retirement, Silberman launched an unanticipated photography career. Several years ago, she visited Maryland’s Assateague Island and was entranced by its horses and ponies.

Collaborating with the agencies supporting the herds, she published In the Herd: A Photographic Journey With the Chincoteague Ponies and Assateague Horses in September 2012.

Although aesthetically beautiful, the book has a hidden agenda. Silberman was “awed by the herds’ sense of family and connection so instantly visible to the observer,” and relationship for survival became her key theme. “From what I could see, these horses and ponies—and all animals in general—won’t survive without relationships,” she said. “I have friends who looked at the book, who are in mental health fields, who were like, ‘that’s just like psychotherapy.’”

Given her long dedication to social work, it’s not surprising that while Silberman looks at the world as an artist, she still sees it as a clinician as well. ◆

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FRE D N E W D OM

THE DAY-GARRETT AWARD, established in 1978, is presented annually to one or more individuals who have been outstanding contributors to professional social work and who have been significant members of the Smith College School for Social Work educational community.

The award is to be given to those who, in the judgment of the Committee, have personified in their lives and service to the community the high purpose of professional service for which the School is renowned.

A tireless advocate, teacher, mentor and leader, Fred Newdom has spent his career pursuing social justice, and the Smith College School for Social Work has long been among the beneficiaries of his passion.

As Dean Marianne Yoshioka wrote in 2016 upon Newdom’s retirement, “He’s a force, an advocate and an organizer, whose warmth and generosity have impacted so many.”

Professor Phebe Sessions recently added, “He is a tremendously positive person. … I just found him to be kind of a rock of stability.”

Newdom had his first experiences with social activism during the civil rights movement and earned an M.S.W. at Columbia University in 1967. He worked in a variety of social work settings—in a settlement house, teaching at the University at Buffalo, as executive director of the National Association of Social Workers— New York State Chapter and consulting for social justice organizations. In 1988, knowing his reputation as an organizer and leader, the chair of social policy invited Newdom to teach at Smith. He was skeptical about working at a program known more for its clinical rather than social policy education, but took the leap.

Newdom’s talents as an educator took him from teaching the intro to policy course, to serving as its coordinator, to assuming the helm as chair of social policy and becoming a year-round faculty member. For many years, he also coordinated the School’s community practice project.

Newdom reshaped the environment at Smith. He was a leader in creating the Anti-Racism Commitment and took great responsibility in introducing it to new students at orientation. Hiring adjuncts as social policy chair, he helped build a more diverse faculty. Newdom also inspired many students to pursue careers in social policy advocacy and helped make the School a welcoming place for community activists. “I arrived at Smith with a lot of anxiety about how I, someone

with more of a community organizing background and no academic training at all, would fit into the culture,” said Danielle Frank, M.S.W. ’15. “I was fortunate to meet Fred early on in my first summer. He really provided me with a sense of home.”

While teaching at Smith, Newdom continued to shape the wider field of social work. He was among the founders of the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society (now the Social Welfare Action Alliance) and served as its national chair for 10 years. He held leadership roles in NASW, including as chair of the Committee on Peace and Social Justice, and chaired NARAL Pro-Choice America for New York state. Newdom also continued consulting for advocacy organizations throughout his career and he built an expertise in disability rights, supporting the work of Independent Living Centers.

In his remarks at commencement, Newdom called on graduates to continue their activism after they leave Smith. “This is long-term work,” he said.

“Gather friends of the heart, friends of similar purpose and friends who will match and support your efforts, for you can’t do this alone. You’ve had the experience of working against racism in a setting that was generally supportive of that effort. That is not likely to be your experience in the outside world.” ◆

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A Family Affair

Passing down a passion for social work

BY TY NA N P O W E R

Meg Behr Laird, M.S.W. ’92, and Duncan Laird, M.S.W. ’93, met when Duncan’s stepmother, Ann Hartman, was dean of Smith SSW.

For many SSW alumni, their first glimpse of the School came at a campus tour for prospective students or, even later, at check-in for their first summer. For some, though, SSW has been a part of their lives—and their families’ lives—for almost as long as they can remember.

Dean Emerita Ann Hartman was 11 years old the first time she visited

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her mother, Lois Hartman, M.S.S. ’37, at Smith. “I slept on the floor of the dorm,” she recalled.

Lois had started working at Family Welfare Society in Rochester, New York, in order to support her children after she and their father separated.

Soon, though, she found she needed to return to school.

“They were just beginning to require

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graduate work,” said Hartman.

“There weren’t very many graduate programs at the time. There was nothing in Rochester.”

Lois entered SSW’s 15-month B program and was placed in a field internship in Chicago—creating a challenge for a single mother that SSW would avoid today. In Chicago, Lois lived at Hull House and interned at the Institute for Juvenile Research.

Meanwhile, Ann and her sister, Betty, stayed in Rochester with a young couple who cared for them.

Years later, Ann Hartman followed in her mother’s footsteps, returning to SSW as a B program student. With her Smith M.S.S. in hand, she moved to New York, obtained a D.S.W. from Columbia University—and fell in love with Joan Laird, a single mother with an adorable 16-month-old son, Duncan.

The trio settled down together, eventually moving to Michigan. Then, in 1986, Hartman returned to Smith with her family to serve as dean of the School for Social Work.

Laird taught at SSW as well, and her family therapy course led to the growth of their own family. After Duncan returned to the family home to recover from an illness and consider his own future plans, he met—and eventually married—one of his mother’s students, Meg Behr Laird, M.S.W. ’92, who was about to embark on a field internship at Duke University in North Carolina.

Meg also came from a family of social workers that included her mother, Louise Frieder Behr; brother William Behr, M.S.W. ’76; and sister, Sarah Behr Moaba, M.S.W. ’83. Although Duncan wrestled with possible career options, the path was clear to Meg. “Social work is just what we do,” she said.

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Left: Alex Daniel Bacon, M.S.W. ’98, embraces her mother, Margery Daniel, Ph.D. ’98. Right: Juanita Dalton Robinson (center) encouraged her stepdaughters Miriam (left) and Rachel (right) to study social work at Smith.

With encouragement from his mother, Hartman and Meg, Duncan obtained his M.S.W. from SSW in 1993 and is now the co-owner and clinical director of Learning Solutions for Learning Success in Florence, Massachusetts.

Juanita Dalton Robinson, M.S.S. ’51, also shared a passion for social work with her stepdaughters, Miriam and Rachel. “My stepmother was a great influence in my decision to attend Smith,” said Rachel Robinson, M.S.W. ’94. “She was the primary factor that drew me to Smith.”

“My understanding of a social worker was someone who removed children from their homes, distributed food to the poor and only worked in agencies for a substandard wage,” said Miriam Robinson, M.S.W. ’87. “When my stepmother explained all the positions she had as a social worker and the ways she was able to impact the community on a multilevel front, I was all in!”

Alan Doyle, M.S.W. ’79, didn’t expect his son Jackson to become a social worker. “I was completely surprised and pleased by my son’s desire to pursue a social work career,” said Doyle.

Once he knew of Jackson’s interest, he encouraged his son to consider Smith because of the emphasis the program gives to the field internship.

“Everyone I met [at an SSW event] echoed similar sentiments as my father: strong field placements, social justice

values, clinical focus, experiential learning,” said Jackson Doyle, M.S.W. ’17. “I’m sure it was very affirming for him that I opted to go to Smith, but I think he did his best not to influence my decision.”

Alex Daniel Bacon, M.S.W. ’98, initially avoided following in her mother’s footsteps—but wound up sharing the path with her. “I hesitated to pursue SSW because of my mom’s enrollment in the Ph.D. program at the time that I was applying to schools,” said Bacon.

“But in the end, I couldn’t deny that Smith was the best program out there for me and I knew that my mom and I could navigate the crossover of our shared time at Smith with mutual respect and space.”

“Alex and I lived on the Smith campus at the same time for two years, and it was inspiring to me, observing from afar, the academic and professional commitment demonstrated by Alex and her friends,” said Margery Daniel, Ph.D. ’98. “Their sense of purpose was motivating to me.”

“We kept our relationship on the down low and enjoyed interacting in easy, natural exchanges, whether it be through silent smiles exchanged in the halls of Seelye, or over a dinner down Main Street or, better yet, a 9 p.m. ice cream date at Herrell’s!” said Bacon.

“Both being members of the SSW community (then and since) has been a wonderful opportunity to bond in new

ways thanks to the energy and growth that our classroom and classmate experiences brought our way.”

When generations of the same family attend SSW, they have an inside view of the School’s evolution—and the impact it has had.

Alan Doyle noted that, over the years, Smith has demonstrated “a coordinated effort to raise awareness of respect for others, enhance well-being of all peoples, and conduct that work to the highest personal and ethical standards.”

“I have seen Smith evolve over time, particularly in its commitment to eliminating racist practices that had inhibited students of color when I was there,” said Rachel Robinson.

“I am an African-American clinician and, wherever I have practiced social work, I have been able to represent the profession in a unique way,” said Miriam Robinson. “Frequently, I am the only person of color in clinical settings. I am able to exhibit advocacy, case management and clinical skills in a way that I could have only learned at Smith. My experience—the training I received from the placements, the recognition of that training in the clinical community—has placed me on a path I would never have dreamed possible.

In 1985 I walked on to that campus in Northampton having absolutely no idea that I would be leaving with a power and knowledge that would carry me to so many, many places.” ◆

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/ Post Script /

On Dean Hartman’s Arrival “Ann Hartman began her tenure in our second summer as dean, and in true form, we celebrated her arrival with a protest. ... What more could a new dean ask for? We had a really royal protest about minority recruitment and retention ... The dean, to our chagrin, delighted in our protest, and she invited us to re-stage it the next day for the college photographer. We were puzzled. But we learned our lesson, our first systemic lesson: join with the resistance, it works very well.”

—Joanne Frustaci, M.S.W. ’87, shared this memory at the School’s 75th anniversary celebration

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A single focus on clinical social work education with an anti-racism lens Smith College School for Social Work Theory Driven, Research Informed Located in Northampton, Massachusetts, both our M.S.W. and Ph.D. programs follow our unique block structure, alternating concentrated periods of rigorous on-campus education with off-site training at leading clinical or research sites around the country.

You’ll have double the time in the field than other programs, with the support of an on-site supervisor and a faculty field adviser.

More experience. More supervision. More recognition.

APPLICATION DEADLINES

M.S.W. Early Decision: January 5 M.S.W. Regular Decision: February 21 Ph.D. Priority: February 1 Ph.D. Final: February 28

ssw.smith.edu sswadm@smith.edu

Tell someone you know about SSW and encourage them to apply.

M.S.W./Ph.D.

| Clinical Research Institute | Post-M.S.W. Professional Education | Certificates

Lilly Hall Northampton, MA 01063 smith.edu/ssw

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

Thank you to everyone who joined us in Northampton and around the country to celebrate our School’s extraordinary legacy!

Your support has helped ensure Our SSW will continue to be a pioneer in social work education. Visit give.evertrue.com/smithcollege/ssw