VCU School of Social Work

by Melissa L. Abell, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Timothy L. Davey, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Community Engagement

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP, 2009), 32 percent of Virginia's children reside in low income families, defined as those families that earn 200 percent or less of the federal poverty threshold. Poverty threatens the health and well-being of children. Compared to non-poor children, low income children have an enhanced risk for a number of problems including poor mental and physical health, academic failure, and behavioral outcomes such as aggression, substance abuse, and delinquency (Fraser & Galinsky, 1997).

Certainly not all children who live in poverty experience such pessimistic outcomes, so it is important to understand those pathways through which low income may have an adverse effect on children's health and welfare. Systemic factors such as the absence of a living wage, discrimination, neighborhood disorganization, and poor school environments enhance the possibility of negative outcomes; however, family life, including positive parent discipline, ample supervision and an affirmative family climate, may alleviate some of the harmful effects of poverty (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). In the absence of a living wage, parents who are poor often work long hours and/or multiple jobs to meet their families' needs. Or, they may be unemployed or underemployed feeling powerless to effect change in their families' income. Such stressors may increase frustration and depression contributing to parenting styles that are harsh and punitive or conversely, lax and neglectful. Either parenting style may contribute to negative behavioral outcomes for children. Social workers may be able to collaborate with families to enhance family life including parent discipline and supervision that may, in turn, create healthier outcomes for poor children.

Sarah Kye Price, Assistant Professor

When I was a community social work practitioner, I had the opportunity to be curious about many nuances of my client's lives: their capacities as well as their challenges. Sometimes, I found my own intellectual curiosity stimulated when so many different clients with so many different lives started to express or experience some of the same things. For example, after spending several years in direct practice with older adults, I became curious about the number of older adult women that I saw for grief and bereavement issues that voiced lingering, intense emotions related to pregnancy and childbearing losses that had occurred decades earlier in their lives. Sometimes, they had never spoken to anyone regarding the loss, except their spouse. Their expressions of grief during spousal bereavement seemed uncharacteristically intense, and they would express a commonality of the earlier loss of a child being now intimately connected with the death of their partner in a parental loss that society had not acknowledged. Through these experiences in my professional social work life, I had become quite intellectually curious.

This curiosity first created a desire to focus my practice around bereavement response to perinatal loss and infant death.

F. Ellen Netting, Professor and Samuel S. Wurtzel Endowed Chair in Social Work

Scholars come to Richmond to study its history, and what a wealth of history we have in Richmond! Did you know that the Female Humane Association, founded over 200 years ago (1807), was given the first license issued by the Department of Welfare and Institutions to a child-care institution in Virginia? Now known as the Children's Memorial Foundation, this organization funds children's charities in the city. The Virginia Home for Boys and Girls (formerly the Richmond Male Orphan Society, founded in 1846) is one of the oldest children's homes in the United States. St. Joseph's Villa, founded in 1834, was the first cottage-style orphanage in the Eastern United States, and Friends Association of Children (1873) was the first African American agency to join the Child Welfare League of America. Within the city, the Instructive Visiting Nurse Association (IVNA) was the first agency in Richmond to provide home nursing visits, to open a TB Clinic, to work with insurance companies to provide nursing care to policy holders, to assign an industrial nurse to work with industry laborers, and to open a crippled children's clinic. The Virginia Home, originally known as the Home for the Incurables, was the only institution of its kind in the Commonwealth, and Retreat for the Sick (founded in 1877) was the oldest nondenominational privately supported public hospital in the South. Richmond's YWCA (1887) is the oldest YWCA in the South, and in 1889 the Richmond Colored YMCA became the first African-American YMCA to own its facility (on East Leigh Street in Jackson Ward).

Several years ago, three faculty members at the School of Social Work began a journey to uncover the rich legacies of the health and human service agencies in the city. We wanted to learn how these agencies and institutions built capacity within their organizations and programs and how they had sustained themselves through difficult times.