Colita Nichols Fairfax

Maggie Lena Walker and African American Community Development

One of the unsung heroines of the African American tradition of community development is Maggie Lena Walker. Walker was the first woman in the United States to establish a bank that still exists today. She also started a merchandise department store, operated a newspaper, and was a prominent leader in a major African American mutual aid organization—the Independent Order of St. Luke. This article discusses Walker’s community development contributions and examines their relevance for contemporary community practice with African Americans.

A change has come: The Obamas and the culture of black marriage in America

Given the historical nature of the Obama presidency, this paper qualitatively examines whether black men and women believe the Obamas can change low marriage rates among blacks in America. By using a marital–political–cultural change framework as our foundation, this exploratory study examined the written responses of 17 blacks between the ages of 23 and 61 years to two questions. (1) “Do you believe that President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have the ability to change low marriage rates among blacks in the United States?” (2) “In what ways can President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama change low marriage rates among blacks in the United States?” Qualitative analyses of the data resulted in four delineated themes: (1) the inability of the Obamas to change the importance of marriage; (2) the inability of the Obamas to change marital motivations and stability; (3) the ability of the Obamas to change low marriage rates among blacks through positive interactions; and (4) the ability of the Obamas to change low marriage rates among blacks as a positive model for marriage. Supporting qualitative data are presented in connection with each theme. Policy implications for black marriage are also discussed.

Ideological Schisms about HIV/AIDS Helping Systems in the African American Community, With an Emphasis on Women

This article is an initial exploration about the impact of ideological beliefs on helping services in the African American community. Newly infected HIV/AIDS cases place African Americans at 45% of such new cases, with African American women becoming infected at a rate 18 times that of Whites. Yet, helping services that are organic to African American women should be stronger through a discussion of cultural beliefs held in the community, where the genesis of helping services exists. Values and beliefs should be at the center of community partnerships, public media strategies, generalist-practice curricula in macro-level systems, and creating more space for relationship dialogue between African American men and women, which includes gender and racial distortions. Given the exponentially high numbers of HIV/AIDS cases in the African American community, a more earnest examination of values and beliefs is warranted.

The significance of African-centered social work for social work practice

Abstract In order to respond to concomitant factors that impact members of the extensive African Diasporic community, African-centered theory/Afrocentricity warrants elevation in the social work literature and scientific inquiry. In preparing for this special journal issue, the editors recognized the dearth of scholarship advancing this critical perspective in social work. This special issue provides information on both philosophical and conceptual thinking about African-centered social work to respond to the current challenges facing these communities. The only academic social work entity entirely devoted to furthering African-centered pedagogy is the Academy for African-centered Social Work of the National Association of Black Social Workers. A primary goal of the Academy is to expand the influence and institutionalization of African-centered social work practice, education, and research. This special issue launches another intercommunicative and inter-educational medium of approaches of this theory to the broader social work community. This introduction provides an overview of African-centered social work, discusses its empirical base, and projects the importance of further examination in the academic literature and practice community.

How Policy Improves Health

A discussion of health equity should be intricately examined in policy and practice discourse about the healthcare industry. This article addresses health equity with strategies to institutionalize it through policy implementation. This discourse is relevant to social work because social workers are charged with elucidating conditions that are maniacal and disadvantageous to racial groups, undocumented workers, immigrants and women. Social workers engaged in policy practice should consider how these stakeholders are excluded from health equity, because of the lack of transformative policy implementation that addresses industry practices that encourage disparity and maintain equity. This article hopes to provide a helpful view of health equity.

African philosophy: The center of African-centered social work

ABSTRACT Social work is an applied science of the best approaches and practices to populations that have been systemically dispossessed of themselves, their humanity, and the philosophical constructs that reflect their psychological and cultural processes. There is a fundamental need for social workers to learn the importance of philosophy in theory and practice, so that interventions are based out of relevant frameworks in a people’s long history. African personhood is a viable philosophical framework with applicable tenants in best practices with the African diasporic community, in areas of employment, education, marriage-family development, spiritual reconciliation, and other aspects of life and living, that, without a philosophical application, renders people without important concepts of being, which is tantamount to living as moral, ethical, and spiritual agents. This article explores the importance of social work, advancing its philosophy discourse, while introducing African personhood as a construct of healing and human transformative dialogical enterprise. Cultural competency is for naught if enlightenment and moral/spiritual/ethical issues are not addressed when people are recovering from human tragedies of abuse, divorce, incarceration, homelessness, foster care, substance abuse, and underemployment. Cultural competency is not only practice acumen, but philosophical alignment with constructs that unravel our attendance to how people conceptualize and understand themselves.

Community practice and the Afrocentric paradigm

ABSTRACT Community practice was developed by social reformers after Black people created communities after enslavement. Given America’s apartheid system of segregation, Black social leaders, also referred to as social reformers, were creating institutions and systems that not only attended to human needs but also affirmed culture, family, and traditions. As the Afrocentric perspective reinterpreted African philosophy, socioeconomic/political realities, and culture in the latter 20th century, social workers should apply this point of view within a community practice context to attend to systemic and environmental issues impacting the African American community. This article explores the intersection of community practice and the Afrocentric paradigm that social workers can apply in the 21st century.

Vivian Carter Mason and Interracial Cooperation During the Massive Resistance Era in Virginia

Vivian Carter Mason successfully utilized her social work skills during the Massive Resistance Era in Virginia. Through organizational strategies with black and white women, her leadership was indispensable, as a social worker who focused on human and civil rights. Her skills were not merely a substructure of the civil rights movement, rather her work provided a major dimension of women’s leadership through the creation of the Women’s Council for Interracial Cooperation. It engaged in community mobilization and made public education a priority for all children. This interracial model has implications for work and can be conducted today among women social workers.

Social Work, Marriage, and Ethnicity: Policy and Practice

This article provides a discussion about marriage with regard to social work policy and practice with cultural groups that experience life differently from predominantly White America. Marriage is influenced by culture, tradition, and economic reality supporting or hindering the success of marriages. Often, parenting is influenced by marriage, as roles are shared and meted through the resources provided by marriage. As an introduction, this article explains the unique contribution of each article in the special issue, showing the need for social work to respond more critically, urgently, and in threefold systemic fashion to create change in the lives of historically vulnerable populations in U.S. society.

What works in foster care?: Key components of success from the Northwest Foster Case Alumni Study, by Peter J. Pecora et al.

The American foster care system has become an enduring feature in the lives of many poor children. Foster care, a programmatic component of child welfare services, is the placement of children and youth in group homes and residential settings when their biological family life has become unlivable. Traditionally, foster care has always been conceptualized as a temporary, respite program; however, it has become a program that oversees most of the developmental years of a child’s life. The book What works in foster care?: Key components of success from the Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study examines the role and quality of care that foster care provides in northwest America. The Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study sample, comprising 479 adults who were placed in foster care as children between 1988 and 1998 in Oregon and Washington (state), participated in an extensive qualitative study. The research questions posed were: