At the BPD 2008 Annual Conference the Society for Social Work and Research offered a preconference workshop on "Community-Based Research Workshop on Program Evaluation in Community Agencies" given by Dr. Martha Dore from The Guidance Center, Inc in Massachusetts. This workshop was cosponsored by the BPD Research Subcommittee whose chairperson Dr. Rowena Fong from the University of Texas at Austin had arranged an agreement for this collaborative event when she was a member of the SSWR Board. There will be one more collaborative workshop given by SSWR at the 2009 BPD Conference.

Two Board Sponsored Research Subcommittee presentations were given at the BPD 2008 Annual Conference. One was about BSW-MSW Research Curricula offered by Elizabeth Twining-Blue, University of Wisconsin Superior; Jay Wolterstoff, University of Wisconsin Superior, and Frances Kominkiewicz, St. Mary's College in Indiana.
The other presentation was on Defining and Implementing Evidenced-based Research in BSW Research Initiatives given by Rowena Fong, The University of Texas at Austin, Stephen Cooper, Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas and Joan Zlotnick from IASWR.

Next year's priorities for the Research Subcommittee will be 1) to continue to find out what kind of research and what kind of competencies do undergraduate students have in doing research, 2) to develop a mentoring program and determine who might want to be mentors and what kind of mentoring is needed and 3) to develop more research related offerings at BPD in conjunction with what IASWR offers, perhaps a Faculty Development Institute.

The Research Subcommittee will be co-chaired by Rowena Fong at the University of Texas at Austin and Elizabeth Twining-Blue at the University of Wisconsin Superior.

 Rowena