Alice K. Johnson

Teaching Family Policy Through a Policy Practice Framework

This article reports on the development of an innovative family policy practice course for direct practice students that emphasizes experiential learning to develop policy practice skills. The course uses a policy practice framework to understand the creation and implementation of major family legislation. A semester-long project provides students with opportunities to develop skills in advocacy, policy development, and planning by working for social change in the community. The article discusses examples of projects that have been implemented by students, discusses challenges to teaching experiential methods for skill building, and provides critical evaluation of the projects and their relevance for macro practice research.

GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW: USING THE INTERNET TO INTERNATIONALIZE SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION

This article discusses distance learning techniques used to operationalize the concept of “globalization from below” in a social work methods course. In the E-Mail Partnership Project, one of the major course assignments, students communicate by e-mail to share information and discuss social issues through professional “pen pal” relationships with students overseas. The author reviews the course design, describes the project and its benefits, discusses the technical and cross-cultural issues that emerged throughout, and presents evaluation results Evaluation results suggest that international e-mail communication is one way to infuse international content into the curriculum.

Predictors of Permanent Housing for Sheltered Homeless Families

The authors analyze 10 years of data on homelessness to determine the characteristics of homeless families most likely to find permanent housing after leaving a shelter environment. They studied 1,156 families from 1983 to 1992 to determine where these families go after leaving the shelter and whether the pattern changed over time. Logistic regression analysis found that the larger the family size and being African American were factors that predicted a decreased likelihood of finding permanent housing. Families with one child were 1.5 times more likely to find permanent housing than were families with three children, and whites were 1.9 times more likely to find permanent housing than were African Americans. Furthermore, homeless shelter residents were five times more likely to find permanent housing in 1983 than in 1992, regardless of demographic predictors. Practice and policy implications are discussed.

Teaching Students the Task Force Approach: A Policy-Practice Course.

Abstract In contemporary society, task forces are commonly used to deal with community-based social problems. Task forces develop, change, and implement policies at all levels of government, and within all types of organizations, including the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Unfortunately, social work educators have not been involved in teaching the policy-practice skills of working on a task force. This article discusses existing literature on task forces. Gersicks (1988) model of task group development is used to structure the teaching of the task force approach. An advanced policy course on homelessness is used as an illustration, and a recommendation is made for adjusting educational requirements to cross-reference courses in the social work curriculum that teach substantive topics and, at the same time, use innovative methods to teach group skills.

Female-Headed Homeless Families: A Comparative Profile

Homeless families are a rising proportion of the contemporary homeless population. However, no data have heretofore documented a profile of sheltered homeless families over time. Data collected in St. Louis from 1983 to 1988 indicate that homeless families are likely to be young, minimally educated, female-headed minority families with one or two preschool chil dren. The emergence of these women and children as the dominant population of homeless families is discussed in the context of the increasing loss of affordable housing in St. Louis, Missouri, and the inability of mothers who receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children to pay market-rate rents.

Working and Nonworking Women: Onset of Homelessness Within the Context of Their Lives

This article reports on qualitative interviews with 25 women who were former residents of an emergency shelter. The interviews used a personal narrative approach to place the onset of homelessness within the context of the womens lives. They revealed that the onset of homelessness was different for working and nonworking women and that the women gained new perspectives on their problems from living in a shelter. They viewed homelessness as part of the process of solving worse problems.

A Profile of the Non-Profit Sector in Romania

With the revolution of December 1989, citizens of Romania gained the right to form non-profit organisations for the first time in 40 years. Since then, Romania has begun to explore the frontiers of private initiative through the introduction of non-profit, non-governmental organisations as well as profit-making businesses. In this article we review the historical development and legal framework of Romanias emerging non-profit sector. We also provide the first empirical snapshot of that sector by applying the International Classification of Nonprofit Organizations (ICNPO) developed by Salamon and Anheier to 499 organisations identified in theSoros Catalogue of Nongovernmental Organizations in Romania: 1991–92. Finally, we speculate on the future development of the Romanian non-profit sector by considering alternative scenarios involving the relationships between indigenous nonprofits, international NGOs and the Romanian government.

Book Reviews : Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women. By Eliot Liebow. New York: Free Press, 1993, 339 pp.,

Tell Them Who I Am is a rare blend of qualitative scholarship combined with deeply involved human interaction. After reading it, I wondered where Eliot Liebow, who solidified his career in 1967 with the publication of the now-classic Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown,1967), had been all these years. A quarter century later, Liebow enters the world of homeless women