Public Employee Press

Social Workers honor new graduates

Child abuse. Financial hardship. Drug addiction. Broken homes. Even torture and homicide.

Social workers are charged with addressing some of our society's most serious ills, face-to-face. But the intense stress of fulfilling their mission while maintaining the idealism that led so many of them to choose their career is often overlooked.

Each year, Social Service Employees Union Local 371 and its Committee of Concerned Social Workers pays tribute to the unionized employees who work to help the city's downtrodden and most vulnerable.

Budget cuts and downsizing

The 28th annual Social Work Month Awards Celebration on March 16 honored 33 Local 371 members who recently earned their master's degrees in social work. The evening offered an opportunity to reflect on the challenge of public service in an era when social service workers and their unions are under fire around the country.

"We are in the fight of our lives," said Local 371 Executive Vice President and CCSW Chair Yolanda Pumarejo, referring to both the nationwide assault on the collective bargaining rights and pensions of public employees and the local battles in New York.

In recent years, the local has confronted deep funding cuts and downsizing at the Administration for Children's Services. Currently, Local 371 is focused on the state's plan to take over and then privatize the city's Medicaid services, threatening the jobs of hundreds of members in the Community Alternative Systems Administration.

Over three decades, Local 371 President Anthony Wells noted, CCSW has awarded more than 100 members with scholarships worth a total of more than $100,000. Today, scholarship winners get $2,500. The committee founded the scholarship program in the 1980s to replace an educational differential lost in the 1970s fiscal crisis.

Cassandra Mack, who heads Strategies for Empowered Living Inc., was the evening's guest speaker. Her company runs a program to help people become successful and reach their potentials professionally and personally.

"You are on a mission of change. It's easy to get burnt out," said Mack, a Social Worker herself. "You are a lifeguard. Stay in your lane."