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New initiatives are being developed at the Council on Social Work Education as your membership organization responds to changing
environmental conditions impacting social work generally as a profession and social work education in particular. We are
also restructuring our Offices at 1725 Duke Street in order to streamline our operations, support new initiatives, and most
importantly, to be more responsive to the needs of the membership. At our Website, you will find a full proposal that was
submitted to the Board of Directors on February 26, and is now open for input and ongoing dialogue and discussion by the membership.
While the primary purpose of the Council on Social Work Education is the accreditation of social work programs in the
United States, the mission of the organization also speaks to being an advocate for social work education and research. A
new office has been created in order to give focus, definition, and staff attention to this component of our mission. At
the present time, the Minority Fellows Program funded by NIMH and SAMPSA, and the SAGE-SW project funded by the John A. Hartford
Foundation (described elsewhere in this newsletter), are structurally located under this office. Dr. Aracelis Francis is
the interim director of the office.
New initiatives just approved by the Board of Directors and located in this office because of their support of social
work education are: The Commission on Diversity, chaired by Salome Raheim, the Katherine A. Kendall Institute for International
Social Work Education, and the Center for Equality and Social Justice. All of these initiatives speak to larger environmental
conditions requiring our fuller focus and attention as we strive to keep social work education and its links to practice relevant
and enduring. We expect that other initiatives will emerge and some are simply awaiting out attention - initiatives that
will speak to the larger matters confronting the profession. We invite your participation in the full creation, definition,
and implementation of these exciting initiatives.
In an effort to address the needs for transforming curricula so that the growing numbers of older adults in our society
are well served, we are in the final stages of proposal development to the John A. Hartford Foundation, to create a National
Center for Gerontological Social Work Education, located at CSWE. This proposal has grown out of the highly successful SAGE-SW
and Gero-Rich Projects that are the subjects of other articles in the Newsletter. Nancy Hooyman and Anita Rosen are primary
contributors to this new initiative.
As we look to spring, with its warmth and the growing length of the days, we look with inspired hope and optimism to the
future of CSWE and the Profession of Social Work. We invite your participation in the full creation, definition and implementation
of these exciting new initiatives.
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