Executive Director’s Message

My 20th Anniversary with NASW-CA

By Janlee Wong, MSW

When I first came to NASW, I was excited to start a new adventure in my long social work career. I had already served in local private non-profits, county government and federal government. Now was my chance to serve at the state level in California’s capital.

Having served as a manager in public and private non-profit administration, I knew my first tasks were to provide maximum value and customer service to our membership. To do so, we had to have the most efficient administration and the greatest value for our members’ dues dollars.

In the mid 1990s, automation and high tech had become the wave of the future. When it came to providing the most cost effective and efficient services for a private non-profit organization for an organization like NASW, my two predecessors — Ellen Dunbar and Jonathan Lightman — had already set the stage from paper to digital. We had some green screen computers and basic standalone software such as WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and rBase. While functional, we needed to step up the efficiency and we did by going with an integrated suite of software. We acquired anti-virus software and it was then that we discovered we had an infected computer.

We had Internet access through 300 and 1200 baud modems, but we had no internal network to share files. Floppy disks carried by human hands was our network.

We didn’t have email, can you believe it? So we like millions of Americans went with… AOL. Does anyone even remember what AOL stands for? We had no website. No NASW chapter nor the national office had a website. We built the first NASW website ever with a local company called CalWeb. They told us how to create our own webpages simply by uploading a WordPerfect document. Of course that didn’t work because word documents were just formatted text, not html coding.

We had a wonderful in-person CE program and annual conference but no online CE. Today, through the efforts of Lora Pierce, we have the best NASW online CE program in the country, generating strong revenues that have secured the future of our chapter.

We helped bring social work licensure into the modern age with CE requirements, improved and national exams, and more mobility. We provide affordable continuing education to social workers and free ethics consultation. We’ve provided leadership opportunities for hundreds of our members and trained dozens of policy oriented social workers through our internship program.

We had a small Lobby Days program (around 200). Luckily Wendy Hill helped us develop the organization and management of lobby days so it is now the largest in the country with the largest attendance (soon to reach 1,400 participants). It’s still a major logistical effort but so highly efficient that we can make lobby day visit appointments with nearly 120 offices (almost all the legislators and the Governor). No other NASW lobby day program does this.

NASW continues to be the premier professional social work organization in the world. While we’ve made some incremental progress in title protection, we won’t give up until we get full protection in California. In the area of services, we were part of a wonderful coalition that achieved the Mental Health Services Act and the Affordable Care Act, tremendous once in a lifetime achievements for social workers and their clients. We have been part of a 25-year effort to professionalize and provide masters level social workers to child welfare, aging and mental health. We assisted in the development of MSW programs at almost every state university in California. With our allies, we worked on significant civil rights legislation including the ban on the discredited sexual orientation change efforts for minors.

Our future goals include better working conditions and increased compensation for social workers, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts.

When I started we had six permanent staff. Today we still have six permanent staff along with several part time staff and independent contractors. I fulfilled my beginning pledge to bring more customer service to our members in the most cost efficient way possible.

NASW stands for social workers and their clients. NASW stands for social justice, social and political action. No other professional organization does that. We are the National Association of Social Workers, NASW, still going strong after my 20 years and our founders’ 60 years.