Family involvement, faith in education stressed at forum on preventing gang violence
Port City Daily
“When students don’t feel like they belong, they tend to resort to other, easier behaviors,” said Lisa Burriss, lead social worker and counselor for New Hanover County Schools Student Support Services, listing desire for attention and revenge as motivators. “If children don’t feel safe, then really nothing else matters. When we don’t take care of those things for our young people, they don’t feel like they belong,” Burriss said.

Specific actions on special social problems
TheAlternativePress.com
The involvement of social workers in the policy formulation process offers us an impetus to place matters on the agenda, but, where do we begin?  Despite support for policy practice, there has been limited empirical study of social workers’ involvement in policy practice, which leaves us with very little systematic knowledge of social workers’ roles in the policy formulation process.  Political activities of social workers means addressing perceived barriers to political participation.

ULM professor holds diversity training for federal program
The News Star
Pamela H. Saulsberry, professor of social work at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, developed a diversity workshop panel for the Delta Regional Authority’s Leadership Institute in New Orleans.

Boston bombing injured runners, families
The Daily Herald
“There’s a lot of change in the dynamics of family,” said Sally Johnson, an outpatient social worker at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, which worked with many of the marathon victims and their families. “One of the struggles is that there’s secondary loss for the family. Their lives are certainly greatly affected as well.”

The wonders a pet companion can do
The Free Lance-Star
SWAP [Seniors With Animals Project] started about a year ago and includes several programs. One brings animals to nursing homes to cheer residents; another helps seniors with training and placement of animals they can’t care for anymore. A third service is “Animeals,” where pet food is delivered along with Meals on Wheels. Jennifer Devine, SWAP chairwoman and a geriatric social worker, said many seniors find that having a pet is soothing and reassuring, even with the extra work.

A look inside the quietly growing St. Louis startup scene
Tech.co
Over the last four years [Clifford Holekamp] has co-founded collaboration between his Entrepreneurship Platform and the Brown School of social work, established a study abroad course in Budapest, and cross-listed an exchange program with the IDC in Herzliya, Israel.

Troubled children, dysfunctional system
Sentinel & Enterprise
I have never worked with children or for the state, but my post-master’s degree social-work career began in an inner-city transitional housing program for men and women. The addiction problems, the mental-health issues, gang violence, broken families, and the poverty, my God, the poverty: These were things I had never seen before on such an enormous scale.