The letters that make Obama long for his community-organizing days
The Washington Post
“Sometimes, what you want to do is just pick up the phone and say, ‘Tell me more about what’s going on, and let me see if I can be your social worker, be your advocate, be your mortgage adviser, be your employment counselor.’ So what I have to constantly reconcile in my mind is that I have a very specific role to play in this office, and I’ve got to make a bunch of big decisions that you hope in the aggregate will end up having a positive effect over this many lives. But you can’t always be certain.”

Web therapy reaches out to patients near and far
Journal and Courier
Buck Black, a licensed clinical social worker with the Heartland Clinic, has a session with a patient via Skype in his office, in Lafayette. / By Brent Drinkut/Journal & Courier • Are you looking for ways to improve anger, stress or relationships?

Neb. coalition files petition to force state action on treatment …
The Republic
Terry Werner, who heads the Nebraska chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, says the rule already exists in the code of ethics that governs each profession in the group.

Occupy camps don’t create social ills, they showcase them
San Francisco Bay Guardian
But rather than seeing the squalor that has been highlighted by city officials and the media, I saw it as a place of real possibilities, particularly from my perspective as a social worker

Incentives And Cultural Bias Fuel Foster System
NPR
It was a social worker from the Department of Social Services. She said her daughter Erin Yellow Robe was going to be arrested for drugs. Howe couldn’t believe it. She had never seen any sign of drugs or any other problems. And then the social worker changed Howe’s life. She said she was coming to take Howe’s grandchildren away.

Tribes Question Foster Group’s Power And Influence
NPR
“They make a living off of our children,” says Juanita Sherick, the tribal social worker on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation. She says the state pushes aggressively in her cases to place kids in Children’s Home who, she says, should be placed with their grandmothers, aunts and uncles — family members who are often desperate to take them in.

Native Survivors Of Foster Care Return Home
NPR
Years later, he was told by a state worker that his mother drank too much. But he doesn’t recall any bad memories. He knows she loved him. When he closed his eyes, he could see it in her face. He says he doesn’t understand why he wasn’t sent to live with one of his relatives. He had hundreds of them. Instead he was sent to a white foster home.

Report details inequities for kids of gay parents
The Associated Press
The other groups are the liberal Center for American Progress and the Movement Advancement Project, a gay-rights think tank. Among other participants in the project were the National Association of Social Workers and the Child Welfare League of America.

Report: 2 Million Children Living In LGBT Households Face Legal …
ThinkProgress
Today, a coalition of LGBT organizations in partnership with social welfare and child advocacy groups released the most comprehensive report to date analyzing how public policies impact children with LGBT parents.

Why Kids with Same-Sex Parents Need Legal Protections
Slate Magazine
A coalition of child-welfare groups released a report on Tuesday showing that children of gay and lesbian parents in the U.S. face serious disadvantages not experienced by their opposite-sex-parented peers.

Report: 2 millions kids ‘collateral damage’ of laws against LGBT people
LGBTQNation
A groundbreaking new report released Tuesday reveals that nearly two million children have become collateral damage of decades of ideology, laws and policies designed to marginalize lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans.

The Geography of Inequality
The Advocate
As social science research over the past three decades confirms, children of same-sex parents are as healthy and well-adjusted as those raised by opposite-sex parents.

Making Public Policy Work for All Households
Center for American Progress
Public discussion about American families often assumes the nation is largely made up of married heterosexual couples raising their biological children. Yet less than a quarter of all U.S. households fall into this category.