Mary Katherine O’Connor

Mixing and Phasing of Roles Among Volunteers, Staff, and Participants in Faith-Based Programs:

In this grounded theory research project, face-to-face interviews were conducted with program participants, board members, administrators, coordinators, and collaborators in 15 faith-based programs. Findings concerning the roles played by participants, volunteers, and paid staff reveal the wearing of multiple hats, facilitated by a tendency toward cross-training, role diffusion, and doing what is needed. Boundaries created by roles appear to be less important than pragmatically responding to meet human needs. The moral imperative or faith-based nature of the work appears to be a recruiting tool for both paid staff and volunteers, as well as an expressed personal benefit for both. Challenges include turnover among paid staff and volunteers, heavy reliance on volunteers, and low pay. Psychological contracting with a faith-based community may be related to the ability to cope with fluid role expectations and associated ambiguities.

Understanding How Community Organizing Leads to Social Change: The Beginning Development of Formal Practice Theory

Community organizing practice can be traced back to the settlement house era. Although the literature of community organizing is rich in approaches to practice built from practice wisdom, case studies, and conceptual frameworks, the literature lacks formal practice theory. This article provides beginning results from research with a long–range aim of building formal practice theory for social workers engaged in community organizing practice with empowerment related social change goals.

Voice and Community in the Corporate Academy: A Collective Biography

This article is the story of the simultaneous feminization and corporatization of universities, themes that emerged in a test of a collective biography, a qualitative research method. Organizers brought together 12 macro social work academic women across generations and, through sampling, attempted to avoid the intergenerational splitting that seems to be leaving junior faculty to be socialized by administrators while simultaneously isolating senior faculty from their generative role. Our analysis identified several trends developed from our collective experiences including changes in faculty governance, formalized mentoring, intergenerational faculty relationships, and shifting expectations. With these changes, we sense a reduction in what we used to think of as a collegium, now in danger of becoming an historical artifact.

Lady Boards of Managers: Subjugated Legacies of Governance and Administration

Three traditions of women’s organizations emerged in the 1800s: benevolence, reform, and rights. This article focuses primarily on women who founded the forerunners of today’s nonprofit health and human service agencies. Using Richmond, Virginia, as an example, it draws from historical documents, as well as the literature, to reframe the importance of what Lady Boards of Managers did in shaping the governance and administration of early human service organizations. Of particular importance is the invisibility of their actions, which were extraordinary for the times in which they lived, in the theories and practice models that drive current macro-social work practice.

A Missing Tradition: Women Managing Charitable Organizations in Richmond, Virginia, 1805–1900

Historical research on charitable organizations in Richmond, Virginia, reveals the roles women played in founding, managing, and developing agencies that have survived since the 1800s. Findings from an examination of the records of 24 agencies and associated secondary sources suggest that many of the ways in which women worked reflect characteristics that writers would later describe as alternative, collectivist, and feminist. Women created traditions in Richmond that nurtured the growth and development of sustainable health and human service cultures. The study concludes that one such tradition, missing from the literature, describes typical patterns of work in charitable agencies. More than merely an alternative approach, this missing tradition has been obscured by dominant approaches that became privileged in human services management.

Faith-based evaluation: Accountable to whom, for what?

Findings, issues, and lessons learned about program evaluation are examined from a national qualitative study of 15 faith-based human service programs targeting those in need in urban areas. Using a grounded theory design, five properties emerge as part of the evaluation network: (1) philosophy of accountability, (2) legitimacy, (3) evaluation design, (4) feedback loop, and (5) barriers to evaluation. While funders expect measurable outcomes to evaluate service effectiveness, respondents acknowledge other competing expectations of multiple constituents in religious and secular communities. What emerges is an excellent example of managing multiple program evaluation demands in programs that are particularly facile at process evaluation in the interest of quality service and relationship building. The article concludes with important lessons learned about the process of program evaluation.

Maidens Fair, Matrons Plump, Fat Cats, and Sugar Daddies Fund-Raising for Richmond’s Early Charitable Agencies

This article discusses the emergence and development of women’s fund-raising for charitable centenarian agencies in a southern city. These activities set the stage for the diversification of strategies that still have gender and racial overtones in the contemporary fund-raising activities of the city. The findings reveal that women did whatever they could legally do to raise funds and in-kind contributions. Women were active, visible agents, “pounding the pavement” to solicit or beg for funds. Gendered and racial roots of philanthropic activities in these centenary organizations still influence both the intentions and actions of these organizations today and have implications for women in fund-raising positions.

Resurrecting Nannie Minor and Orie Hatcher Emergence of Professional Social Work Education in One Southern City

In this article, we raise two feminists (Minor and Hatcher) from erasure by recognizing the importance of their roles in the development of professional social work education. First, we tell a story of how emerging semiprofessions were intertwined, only to become separate over time. Next we focus on the influence of two feminists who came from other semiprofessions than social work and were instrumental in cocreating a School of Social Work. Minor and Hatcher’s erasure in the formal histories of the School demonstrates the gendered nature of the professional education process.

Using Prosopography to Raise the Voices of Those Erased in Social Work History

In this article, we introduce prosopography, a valuable historical research method that can be used by feminist social work scholars. While feminists in various fields use this methodology to investigate background characteristics of women in history through collective studies of how they have established relationships and networks to influence change, our review of the literature suggests that it has been little used in social work. We provide a brief overview of prosopography, strengths and limitations, and an illustration of the method as enacted focusing on the roles of early feminists within the development of nonprofit human service organizations. It is our intent to demonstrate the possibilities of prosopography to identify and understand groups of women who have been erased in social work history.