Social Work Month: We Want to Hear from You!

For Social Work Month, NASW-CA has decided to interview a number of social workers and post their stories on our social media sites and in our newsletters. We hope this provides inspiration to both upcoming and established social workers.

Though we recognize this small handful of individuals, we hope that the NASW-CA chapter’s appreciation for what all social workers do shines through. We would love to hear your stories as well, so if you would like to tell the story of how you became a social worker, feel free to post it to our Facebook page!

NASW-CA recently talked with the following five social workers — Jessica Agricola, Judge James Mize, Lt. Colonel Val Reyes, Deneica Williams and Jennifer Zelaya We’re sure you will feel as inspired as we do!

Jessica Agricola

Jessica is a rural social worker and has an intriguing story on how and why she chose to be a social worker in a small community.

Where did you go to school?
I received my undergraduate degree at UC Davis and received my master’s in social work from USC.

What was the first job that you had that really made you feel like a social worker?
My current position at Snowline Hospice has made me feel like a competent social worker.

What made you want to be a social worker?
I’ve loved to help people since I was little so deciding to become a social worker was a natural path.

Who is a social worker that is an inspiration to you and why?
I know I should say someone who is of great historical importance, but my first field instructor at Snowline Hospice really inspired me. She showed me that it’s important to know your theories but to rely on your instincts, especially compassion, when caring for your clients.

Where do you work now and how do you implement social work values into your job?

I work at Snowline Hospice. Hospice encompasses many social work values by treating every person, no matter where in their life’s journey, deserves dignity and is valued as a person. Hospice is stresses the importance of team-building and reinforces the importance of human relationships.

What is your advice for upcoming social workers or people interested in joining the profession?
My advice to upcoming social workers is to ask questions, don’t be afraid to make mistakes but be open to learn. Most importantly, surround yourself a great support system.

What are your insights for the future of social work?
Social work is going to become increasingly complex as our society evolves and is only going to get more demanding with increased need for the social worker to become introspective and rely on intuition. You can do anything! The field is so vast and the challenges and clients are so diverse. Each day of direct care is a challenge with the biggest rewards.

How do you feel being a rural social worker as opposed to practicing in a big city?
I love my rural community! Rural communities are often overlooked because of smaller populations but there are fewer resources and that brings unique challenges. I love knowing that I am giving back to people that have helped shape my career in the simplest but most profound ways.

The Honorable James Mize
The Honorable James Mize is a judge with the Superior Court of California in Sacramento. It is with appreciation to him as a social worker and a family law judge that we listen to his social work journey.

Where did you go to school?
I attended Berkeley’s MSW program and graduated in 1971. Prior to that I studied engineering, but eventually graduated from UC in 1968 with a major in psychology and pre-med. Upon graduation from my MSW program, I attended law school at the University of San Francisco and graduated in 1974.

What was the first job that you had that really made you feel like a social worker?
On some level, everything can make you feel like a social worker, even in your own family. Sometimes we are called to deal with “Crazy Uncle Harry” who sits in the corner and seems to have a weird way of doing things and happens to offend everyone. As you help stabilize the tension of what “Uncle Harry” really means, you may act almost as a mediator within the family; that’s the real social work.

In every work situation I have ever been in, there has been a need to keep people working together within their systems. Part of my job is to enable people to get the most out of their talents, and help them not get distracted with the negatives and difficulties they face.

What made you want to be a social worker?
I am a product of the 60s. It was during the time when President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” I always felt there was something I had to do with my life to give back, and it sounded to me that social work meant you were helping people take care of themselves and get themselves where they wished to be. I majored in community organizing during my social work education, and it wasn’t until Barack Obama announced that he was a community organizer, that people really started to understand what that meant. Because I was a product of the 60s, I wanted to change the world and make it a better place. I wanted to take that a step further and work in the world of advocacy. For example, I wanted to take groups of tenants harmed by a landlord and help the tenants identify and advocate for their rights and help them out of their horrible situation. My goal was to get people together and move toward the greater good.

Who is a social worker that is an inspiration to you and why?
There were a number, but the teachers that taught me at Berkeley were my biggest inspirations. Specifically, there is a wonderful attorney in Sacramento named Ann Schwing whose mother, Hasseltine Byrd Taylor, taught me two or three courses in the late 1960s. Now, it’s been 40 years since I took the classes from her, but I still benefit from her inspiration. She would take her class to her house in the Napa Valley and we would have these wonderful discussions. I emulated her and felt like if I could be like her I could be a success. Another inspiration was the dean of the Department of Social Work at Berkeley, Dean Harry Specht. He, too, was remarkable and someone to emulate.

Where do you work now and how do you implement social work values into your job?
I am a Superior Court judge, so the better question is, where do I not use social work values and skills in my job, especially in the area of family law? I have served as a judge in various departments for 12 years and am now assigned to the family law court. In criminal law court the rules are more rigid. There are plenty of things I cannot do and say in criminal law, because it could risk a reversal, potentially by not following rules. In family law, there is more freedom to be able to influence the future of the children behind every case in front of me. I try to take the opportunity to encourage communication skills and to encourage focus on the relationship as being bigger than just between the two of them. Family Law Court, obviously, includes children, who ultimately are the future of our civilization and of our country. We all have an obligation to raise children to be our leaders. I believe there are two types of judges: “just the facts ma’am” judge and the social worker judge. While all judges take on each persona at different times, I am more frequently the social work judge. There is nothing wrong with either kind of judge, but for me it is critical not only to ask what is happening and to make a decision, but also to get to the “why?” I try to ask questions to come up with a remedy that will solve the problem and allow them to be better parents.

What is your advice for upcoming social workers or people interested in joining the profession?
I have so much, do you have another day? Let’s see if I can be succinct: start by entering any profession, including social work, with the understanding that you will be the very best person at the job you are doing. What I mean by that is that as your life progresses, you may master certain circumstances and after a while you will find success in dealing with those situations. People in those situations will gravitate to you for leadership and advice. You can build a name for yourself, to be the best social worker in the area you choose. Expect and strive to be the very best.

It can be easy to become complacent or to consider daily matters mundane, but it’s important to remember that every case is critical to the people with whom you are dealing. Even though it may be the 100th case you’ve had, it’s their first. That applies both in the court and to social work. It has to be important to you so you can be effective in their case. You must generate that energy, that focus, that perseverance and dedication to the job. Social work requires the best.

What excites you about social work profession or becoming a social worker?
The most exciting concept for me is that if you are doing your job well, the world is a better place. For everything you do, whether it’s for an individual, a couple, or a group, what else are we as social workers here to do besides make the world a better place? Most social workers can have written on their tombstone “He/she walked upon the earth and when he/she left it was better for him/her having been here.”

What are your insights for the future of social work?
The first insight is that it will never be a dead-end profession. While there are a lot of quasi-tech fields that are hot and may pay more, technology can change in a heartbeat and you can be out of work. For social workers, there will never be a substitute for a person’s ability to analyze the myriad of movements going on not just within a person’s evolution, but also within the sphere of two people or a group and all the interaction between them. You cannot make a computer program that will define all of the variables within a single human, much less how all those variables interact with other individuals to spit out a solution or method of them getting along and moving forward. Whether you talk about psychologists, psychiatrist or social workers, any of those helping professions, there is no substitute for the well-educated human analysis.

When I was a psychology undergrad, I had an interest in physical psychology. I am interested in how the brain works and how people technically react with one another. Over our lives, we do things “intuitively.” People say and do things and we formulate an action plan. In the future, we may be able to map out scientifically what we previously called “intuition.” We may be able to have physical tests that will designate talents and abilities that will lend itself to a particular solution from a scientific cause/effect standpoint and exclude other intuitive remedies. By way of example today, if you took a Meyers Briggs result as a determinate of how a person responds to certain situations, we know now that it is difficult to make that person respond in another way without some effort. It is easy to have them respond in a way they are naturally inclined to respond. The science of physical psychology will never be 100% accurate but if we tap into a brain and verify our observations we will have an exciting new frontier of understanding relationships.

 You’re in a position where you can see social work progression in a way that other social workers do not have access too. How do you see the development of social work in your field and how can other social workers prepare for the social movement?In court, we have constant interaction with social workers. The social workers themselves probably don’t realize how good their work is and how critical their input is to the decision making of the judge. If there is a CPS case and a social worker does an investigation and says certain things about mother and father, although it is clearly my decision as a judge, I have to make the decision based on all the information available to me. I would be foolish to ignore totally the recommendations of the social worker who has been working that case, likely for 100 or more hours, while I may see the case for only 10 minutes. I don’t just admire, I am in awe of the work that social workers do in preparing the cases for the judge to be able to make the decision. I thank and thank and thank them. Since I cannot thank them on the record of any case, I hereby am thanking them here.

Lt. Colonel Val Reyes
Lt. Colonel Val Reyes (US Army ret.) is a military social worker and a recipient of NASW-CA’s 2013 Social worker of the Year award.

Where did you go to school?
I attended UCLA School of Social Welfare and graduated in 1982.

What was the first job that you had that really made you feel like a social worker?
I worked in the Department of Mental Health, Metropolitan State Hospital as a psychiatric social worker. I worked with mentally ill and schizophrenic individuals in the chronically mentally ill inpatient program. It was at Metro that I learned compassion toward the mentally ill and respecting them as human beings. I also learned esprit de corps within my interdisciplinary team of clinicians, that creativity could be applied to group therapies and the importance of discharge planning to help a person reintegrate back into society with the assistance of a supportive, caring board and care operator.

What made you want to be a social worker?
I grew up in a military family: My father is a WWII veteran and a survivor of the Bataan Death March who was imprisoned for three months in a prisoner of war camp. My father was a part of that great post-WWII generation of veterans who obtained his college degree, worked hard and raised a good family. My father encouraged me by saying, “When you grow up I want you to help your country and community.” However, my father’s generation did not have any programs for dealing with combat trauma and I grew up in a home atmosphere where I noticed that my father was affected by signs of PTSD. It was through my close relationship with my father that I became interested in combat trauma and military service. After I received my license, I applied with the Army Medical Department and was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Medical Service Corps as an Army Reserve social work officer.

One day, well into my career as a social work officer, my father showed me his records from the Bataan Death March and told me that he wanted his Prisoner of War Medal. He had tried to get the award on his own for years. I called up my local congresswoman and explained the situation, and she got his POW medal in just one month. The day I was promoted to Major in the U.S. Army, my father was presented with Prisoner of War Medal by Congress. It was one of the best days of my life.

I was the social work officer assigned to the first deployed Combat Stress Control Team in Afghanistan six months after 9/11. The team consisted of a psychiatrist, two mental health technicians and myself. The four of us set up a treatment tent in 130-degree weather and provided mental health services at Bagram Airfield, located in the northeastern section of the country, where we served approximately 8000 soldiers. For about four to six months, I was the only social worker in Afghanistan, so I did a lot of outreach, where the psychiatrist and I would visit different front-line combat units every day. We provided mental health assessments and psychiatric triage in the combat support hospital, conducted individual counseling for suicide ideations, combat and operational stress, home front issues, military sexual assault and grief reactions. We also provided group therapies including anger management, did mental health evaluations for prisoners in the inmate detention facility and conducted the first AA meeting ever held in the country. We also provided mental health services to the civilian population in Afghanistan. Local children would step on land mines and be treated at our hospital, so through an interpreter, I used CBT for depression and conducted art therapy. It felt great to help in nation building by providing therapy to Afghan civilians. It was a very fulfilling experience to help soldiers and the Afghan people alike. Though I am retired from the US Army, I continue to help veterans in the community recover from PTSD.

Who is a social worker that is an inspiration to you and why?
Dr. Ray Scurfield, LCSW, is a Vietnam combat veteran and an educator. He was awarded the NASW National Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. Dr. Scurfield was the first clinical social worker to be considered a specialist in treatment of PTSD and combat stress. He is highly respected. Dr. Scurfield is my social work hero; he is approachable, helpful, and knowledgeable on how to help veterans on community level. Though he is Professor Emeritus in the Southern Miss. School of Social Work, he still doing work in the communities to help with reintegration from military life. Not only is he compassionate as an individual, he is very active in publishing, teaching, helping, and mentoring social workers.

Where do you work now and how do you implement social work values into your job?
I am a military liaison and therapist at a veteran hospital that just so happens to be the only western region tricare inpatient PTSD unit; I work with active duty, veterans, reserves, and national guard on issues such as PTSD, eating disorders and sexual trauma. I have aligned my work with Janlee Wong, NASW-CA’s executive director, to provide social workers with the latest information on Veteran Care and support in the community. Together, we provide access and points of contact for returning veterans and their military family members with effective and compassionate social workers to provide mental health support. This support includes treatment for PTSD, families and relational problems, parenting skills, and an arraignment of different issues that these men and women face when they come back from deployment. We provide vocational training and higher education. Not only do we provide the individual with mental health treatment, we help get them referrals and connections to colleges and universities or vocational training to enter a career field. We work with homelessness and substance abuse treatments within the veteran community to provide treatments and permanent housing.

There are very high numbers of suicides and attempted suicides within this population. As social workers, we need to do our best to reduce suicide rate and be more proactive with assessments. We are working toward building strong community partnerships to work collaboratively to set up task forces within the framework of encouraging government and social service agencies to work together to help veterans reintegrate in society successfully so perhaps suicide rates will drop down. We network with liaisons for agencies to provide jobs, and set up a service provider on campuses to help aid the veteran students matriculate.

I was recently appointed as a member of LA City Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Veteran Strategic Planning Committee and am beginning to meet with other representatives of vet service organizations in the LA area to devise strategy for a citywide plan to develop more comprehensive and caring services to residents.

Through all of this, I align myself with NASW and meet with Janlee Wong to create feedback groups and to keep social workers that are connected to NASW on the forefront of the leading advancements in military social work.

Do you have advice for upcoming social workers?
It is important to ask yourself if you have the desire to want to make a difference in the community. Get as much info as possible and be a subject matter expert in whatever field you are interested. Apply knowledge and passion and really listen to needs of clients. I believe we have a good generation of social workers that want to make a difference; the passion is there, but there is a need to listen and take individual needs into consideration to try to develop a workable plan of action based on clients’ strengths. It is important as social workers to understand communities and cultures and traditions to help the client become a better more productive citizen. Learn to develop good people skills; the greatest skills are rapport building and understand with compassion and forgiveness to work to problem solve.

As an ending note, I am happy about social workers who are interested in working with service members, veterans and their family members. When you help children of service members, you help the future of society. I am inspired by social workers that want to help children deal with the loss and trauma of their parents who are affected by the war, both physically and emotionally. If we as social workers help the child adjust to these loss and traumas, that child will grow up knowing that social workers care, which in turn will create trust to help with continuing needs throughout the years. We can represent the best care society can offer.

Deneicia Williams
Deneicia Williams, BSW, is a student of social
work and is interested in sharing her story on
her road to social work.

Where do you go to school?
I currently attend Sacramento State University in the undergraduate Social Work program.

What was the first job that you had that really made you feel like a social worker?
I worked for an after school program that was integrated with grades K through 8th. I worked in a class consisting of 25 to 35 students with half of them having behavioral problems. It really challenged me as a social worker to implement different behavior modification models and positive coping tools for the children who were going through distress. I’ve also had my run in with CPS while working there as well, and working with those cases taught me when to trust myself and make the right decision for my students.

What made you want to be a social worker?
My first major was psychology, but I realized that I didn’t want to be stuck doing a lot of paperwork and I really wanted to be hands-on with my clients. I didn’t realize that I would still be doing a lot of paperwork as a social worker either with all the progress notes, but I guess that comes along with the job so I take it as an opportunity to learn and practice writing my notes.

Who is a social worker that is an inspiration to you and why?
I would say that my professor Susan Taylor, MSW, PhD. She is an amazing woman with an enormous amount of knowledge. She challenges and makes you explore yourself as a social worker. She emphasizes the importance of being ethical and most importantly having compassion which sometimes is overlooked. Although she has been in the social work field for more than 20 years, she still loves her job and most people can’t say that. She truly is an advocate especially in the mental health aspect of social work and I hope that when I get older I can blossom into an accomplished mental health social worker like her.

Where do you work now and how do you implement social work values into your job? What is your advice for upcoming social workers or people interested in joining the profession?Currently, I’m interning at TCORE, which is an outpatient mental health facility. They’re about recovery and helping clients reengage in their community. My advice to upcoming social workers is to learn as much as you can. When coming into this field it’s important to have a strong support system.

What are your insights for the future of social work?
I believe social work is going to get a new name for itself. It will become global and incorporate various disciplines, such as medicine, biology, law, and economics. In this case it would be beneficial for social workers to have this knowledge, and it can help provide better service to our clients.

What excites you about social work profession or becoming a social worker?
The great thing about being a social worker is that we can change and adapt to new situations. We are also able to create new interventions in dealing with certain populations. It is amazing that we can create social change and change within the legislation. We are social workers fighting for social justice. Being a social worker opens your eyes and creates a gift in being able to assess life through various social work lenses.

 
Jennifer Zelaya
Click on this link to see the YouTube video
interview with Jennifer:

http://youtu.be/RxhEz5l5zwE