School Updates
Dear alumni and friends,
It is wonderful to be connecting with you again—as we go through all four seasons within the span of one week here in Pittsburgh. I hope that things are going well for you, wherever you may be reading this.
As you’ll see in the following pages, the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work has been busy on many fronts. I am thrilled with the ways that our staff has expanded and changed. We have new expertise and capacity in recruitment and admissions, alumni relations and development, social media and communications, and in our innovative and expanding programs of research and interventions with community organizations and institutions around Pittsburgh. We’ve also had some changes in leadership within the school. Jaime Booth is our new associate dean for research, and Kyaien “Kya” Conner (about whom you’ll read a great deal in the following pages) has stepped up as our new associate dean for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. It’s been exciting to add their energy, vision, ideas, and considerable administrative and leadership skills to our executive team. We have no shortage of great ideas. Now it’s just the challenge of figuring out how to implement everything that we want to do!
One of the most exciting updates for this year has been the launch of the next phase of the Center on Race and Social Problems (CRSP). We chose this as our cover story for this issue to give everyone a sense of all that is happening, the potential that is now here, and the directions that we’re exploring. Kya joined us last summer as the Donald M. Henderson Endowed Chair and director of CRSP. The center has been a critical part of the school for more than two decades now, and with Conner’s arrival and support from others (particularly Ron Idoko, CRSP associate director), we have amazing opportunity to realize CRSP’s true potential as a leader in research, paradigm-shifting knowledge, policy, and preparing the next generation of professionals. It’s definitely a “moon shot,” but when I hear this team talk about their vision and see all that they’re doing, it’s infectious. I truly believe that we can end racism!
As you’ll see in the rest of this issue, CRSP is just one of the places where we’re making strides to change the world. We’re expanding our focus and footprint around innovative research in mental health, poverty, legal/justice systems, education, child welfare, health care, and many more areas. We’re also broadening reach, depth, and focus in many areas of tremendous impact. In this issue, we spotlight some of these: the continued reach and impact of our Child Welfare Education and Research Programs, growth of our continuing and professional education offerings, internships and placements with our many community partners, and policy inroads based on faculty expertise and research.
We also highlight a few endeavors that are possible only because of the continued support and generosity of our alumni. These include the perspective-changing opportunities that Pitt undergrads (who are not social work majors) get through the Browne Leadership Fellows Program. We just recruited our 11th cohort for this intensive summer program, in which students from across campus work in community-based programs in Pittsburgh. In these settings, students learn and come to understand things that they can’t forget and carry these with them into their careers in medicine, law, education, engineering, and so many more. And we are preparing for our third annual Florence Gibbs Momeyer Endowed Lecture. In our first two years, we hosted nationally recognized experts with lived experience in disability advocacy and societal change. In 2023, Temple Grandin came to campus for this lecture and enthralled the audience with perspective-changing information on different ways of knowing and possibilities for people with autism and other neuro-atypical ways of thinking.
And, as I experience every year, our students are amazing! We had the largest-ever number of applicants to our PhD program this year, and I’m constantly amazed at how productive, generative, creative, and passionate our students are about the work they’re doing, both on their own and with faculty. I am really enjoying interacting with and being inspired by our MSW and BASW students. They bring their intense drive to make a difference and hold us accountable to make sure that we’re feeling the urgency and potential that they are.
So for those of you who are alumni, our current cohorts make me very optimistic about your upcoming colleagues and the field’s next generation.
I hope that 2024 is good for all of you! It is likely to be a challenging year in many ways. Please know that we are all in this together, bringing our unique and critical experiences and perspectives, and we’ll find our way through to a future that we want to embrace.
Thanks for being part of the Pitt Social Work community!
Take care,
Elizabeth M.Z. “Betsy” Farmer
Dean, School of Social Work
University of Pittsburgh