Paul H. Stuart

The Community Organization Method in Social Work Education (1959)

For this themed issue on the state of community practice, “From the Archives” presents excerpts from The Community Organization Method in Social Work Education by Harry L. Lurie. This report was published as volume IV of the Council on Social Work Education’s landmark Curriculum Study (New York: Council on Social Work Education, 1959). Published 7 years after the merger of the American Association of Schools of Social Work and the National Association of Schools of Social Administration resulted in the creation of the new Council on Social Work Education, and 4 years after the merger of seven practitioner organizations resulted in the creation of the National Association of Social Workers, the curriculum study represented an attempt to define educational requirements for a newly-united profession. In an introductory volume by project director Werner Boehm, titled Objectives for the Social Work Curriculum of the Future, and 12 volumes on specific topics in social work education authored by prominent educators, the curriculum study outlined new approaches in social work education that would be important in the next decade and beyond. The curriculum study emphasized the importance of the social sciences and research. It included a volume on the emerging field of corrections social work by Eliot Studt and a report on the place of the undergraduate program in social work education by Herbert Bisno. Muriel Pumphrey contributed a landmark volume on the teaching of values and ethics in social work education. For readers

Concurrent Participation in Federally-Funded Welfare Programs and Empowerment Toward Economic Self-Sufficiency

Abstract This research examined the impact of participation in federal means-tested welfare programs on the attainment and maintenance of economic self-sufficiency. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this quasi-experimental investigation compartmentalized 4216 low-income households into an intervention group (n = 2436) and a comparison group (n = 1780). Households in the intervention group received one or more welfare benefits for the most part of the 2008–2013 quinquennium. By contrast, those in the comparison group – although eligible for these benefits – did not receive them. The survey respondents were measured repeatedly over a 56-month period to assess whether welfare receipt impacts their household income steadily beyond 150% of the federal poverty level, after controlling for known predictors. Multivariate analyses displayed medium effect sizes indicating that participation in public assistance did decrease the likelihood of economic self-sufficiency. Macro-implications of these findings for poverty and social welfare stakeholders were discussed.

From the Archives: Community-Based Participatory Research at Hull House in the 1890s

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is the modern name for a style of research that was pioneered by settlement house residents and other early social work researchers (Sohng, 1996). In this article, presented to the 21st annual session of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Nashville in 1894, Hull House resident Julia C. Lathrop describes the settlement’s research program in its early years. Hull House had been founded in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward on the city’s Near West Side in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr and had attracted the attention of social scientists because of its unusual approach to urban life and to social research. Daniel Fulcomer, a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago, invited Lathrop to discuss Hull House’s sociological research following his paper reporting on a survey on the teaching of sociology in colleges and universities (Fulcomer, 1894). Fulcomer was probably aware of the survey of the Nineteenth Ward that had been recently completed by Hull House resident Florence Kelley for a US Department of Labor publication on city slums, which would be expanded and published in 1895 as HullHouse Maps and Papers. Rather than launching into a description of the research, Lathrop (1894) first described the neighborhood in which Hull House was located and the settlement’s program. “Every activity of the House has sprung out of some neighborhood need” (p. 314), she said, providing the context for the settlement house’s research activities. She went on to describe the settlement house program, ending with a brief description of two research projects, the survey that would result in Hull-House Maps and Papers (Residents of Hull House, 2007) and a study of dietary practices of five ethnic groups in the Hull House neighborhood. Hull House “is constantly adding to its stores of recorded data upon all the matters with which it has to do” (p. 316), she concluded. It was possible to gather information because the settlement house’s “acquaintance gives

Assessing Refugee Poverty Using Capabilities Versus Commodities: The Case of Afghans in Iran

This study is among the first to calculate poverty among one of the world’s largest refugee populations, Afghans in Iran. More importantly, it is one of the first to use capability and monetary approaches to provide a comprehensive perspective on Afghan refugees’ poverty. We estimated poverty using data collected from a sample of 2,034 refugee households in 2011 in Iran. We utilized basic needs poverty lines and the World Bank’s absolute international poverty line for our monetary poverty analyses and the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for our capability analyses of poverty. Findings show that nearly half of the Afghan households were income-poor, approximately two percent of the households had less than USD 1.25 per person per day, and about 28% of the surveyed households were multidimensionally deprived. Results suggest that 60% of the income-poor households were not deprived from minimal education, health, and standards of living based on the MPI criteria, and about 32% of the multidimensionally deprived households were not income-poor. These findings call for more attention to poverty measurement methods, specifically for social workers and policy makers in the field, to gain a more realistic understanding about refugees’ wellbeing.

Pioneering Health Care for Children with Disabilities: Untold Legacy of the 1916 Polio Epidemic in the United States

ABSTRACT In 1916, the United States experienced its first polio epidemic, resulting in 6,000 deaths and 21,000 injured individuals. Medical practices were ill prepared to stop the disease and treat survivors. Historians have documented the creation of the polio vaccine during the 20th century, but less is written about efforts to provide rehabilitation services to children afflicted with polio. This research looked at Polio After-Care Committees, a new form of community practice that provided care to children with disabilities. The Committees worked to change community-level systems of care while providing medical care, demonstrating that new forms of community-based service organization could reach children.

“Economic Stabilization of the Family: The Standard of Living”: Harry L. Lurie’s Call for an Adequate Family Income in the 1920s

The 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, provides an occasion for reflection on social workers’ efforts to address poverty in past years. The 1920s was a decade, in some ways, like our own. Businesses were doing well, but prosperity was threatened by increasing inequalities in wealth and income, evident to some observers even before the stock market crash of October 1929. For low-wage workers, the result of income inequality was an increasingly difficult balancing of inadequate income and the maintenance of a standard of living that was viewed as normal for the United States. Low-wage workers struggled to maintain an acceptable standard of living. Similarly, as the United Way’s ALICE Reports show, over a third of families in six states “struggle to afford basic necessities” today (United Way, 2014, p. 2). In this paper, presented to the 1928 National Conference of Social Work, Harry Lurie, the director of the Chicago Jewish Social Service Bureau, reported on a study of the family incomes of low-wage workers in Chicago, conducted by Leila Houghteling of the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Lurie was superintendent of the Chicago Jewish Social Service Bureau and a part-time lecturer at the school. Social agencies in Chicago had developed the Chicago Standard Budget to govern the amount of assistance provided to families on relief; the family budget was revised periodically during the 1920s as the cost of maintaining what was considered an acceptable standard of living increased. By the mid-1920s, when Houghteling initiated her study, the question had been raised whether the Chicago Standard Budget exceeded the earnings of low-wage workers

“Control of Sanitary Standards”: Julius Henry Cohen's Recommendations for Enforcing Occupational Health and Safety in the Progressive Era

The recent fires, building collapses, and other industrial accidents in the Third World bring to mind the campaign for safe working conditions in the United States following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911. The Triangle Fire, which followed a failed strike at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, resulted in the deaths of 146 garment workers, most of them women and girls. The fire, which was witnessed by many in the factory’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, including social worker Frances Perkins, provided the impetus for the creation of a New York State Factory Investigating Commission, which pressed for the enactment of dozens of state and local workplace safety laws in the next few years. Ironically, in 1910 a strike of the cloak makers, another segment of the women’s garment industry, had resulted in the creation of a process to improve workplace safety that involved the cooperation of management, labor, and consumers, known as the Protocol of Peace (Greenwald, 2005). Recent Third World industrial disasters have been as deadly as the Triangle Fire and other Progressive Era industrial accidents. Three which occurred in 2012 stand out. On April 24, the Rana Plaza building, a multistory structure in Dhaka, Bangladesh that housed several garment factories, collapsed, killing over 1,100 people; five months later, on September 12, nearly 300 garment workers perished in a fire at an apparel factory in a suburb of Karachi, Pakistan; and on November 24, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion Factory in Dhaka killed 117. These disasters occurred at factories producing clothing for the North American and Western European markets. Like the

“A Year's Progress in Remedial Loan Work”: Arthur H. Ham's Report on the Russell Sage Foundation's Efforts to Promote Small Loan Reform in the Progressive Era

In response to the financial problems experienced by many in the current recession, promoting clients’ financial capability is increasingly a priority for social workers. Problems of excessive mortgage and credit card debt, high interest rates, payday lenders, and other financial practices that victimize poor and middle-class individuals suggest the need to provide financial education and well-regulated financial instruments. As this From the Archives document shows, social workers were concerned about clients’ financial capability in the Progressive Era, too. In “A Year’s Progress in Remedial Loan Work,” Arthur H. Ham provided an account of progress in developing remedial loan associations and promoting legislation to regulate the small loan business in 1909–10. Arthur H. Ham graduated from Bowdoin College in 1908 and received a fellowship from the New York School of Philanthropy’s Bureau of Social Research, one of the research centers established in schools of social work by the new Russell Sage Foundation. The Foundation published his report, The Chattel Loan Business (Ham, 1909), a study of businesses in New York City that loaned small amounts of money using personal property, such as furniture, as collateral. Among these were a small number of philanthropic societies that provided small loans at rates one-quarter to one-tenth what the “loan sharks” charged; Ham discovered that “there were 15 such societies located in 14 of the largest American cities” (Gallart, Hilborn, & May, 1932, p. 54). The Foundation suggested that the existing associations form an organization and appointed Ham the Director of a new Division of Remedial