Do you remember that question many of us were asked as teenagers: “What is your favorite subject in school? What do you want to do with your life?” When asked this in my junior year, I awkwardly laughed and answered that I liked volunteering better than any of my classes. Then I clarified to say I was good at math and enjoyed Spanish, assuming that I had to pick a subject to think about career options. I do not recall the rest of the conversation that day, but I do remember the follow-up conversation with my mom about a week later. She began that conversation by asking me, “Do you know what a social worker is?” then described how they work in foster care, schools, with at-risk teens, or even the aging. The versatility sounded amazing.
From that first conversation, I was excited. I wanted to be a social worker! Two decades later, I still love social work and am thrilled to share my love of the profession with new social workers.
However, as I progressed through my BSW classes and learned more, I decided I wanted to be a macro social worker. So, what drew me to macro social work?
As I reflect on this question, I see that I have long thought about systems, complex problems, and opportunities for improvement. Before entering social work, I worked to increase opportunities for children with different abilities to participate in my swim lessons, and strategically incorporated social skill development into my classes as a karate teacher. Once in social work, I loved the saying that we needed to work ourselves out of a job. Yet, when thinking about clinical work I struggled to see how that could be feasible? We could help an individual/family to no longer need services, but wouldn’t there always be someone else in need? However, macro work—changing policies, improving social services, and working with communities—these felt like ways we could make systemic change and improve the lives of many all at once. After graduating from UMB SSW, I used my macro skills to develop policies and standard operating procedures for programs, manage a national foster care program, conduct quality assurance reviews, develop networks of providers, and train social work students and professionals.
Kerri Evans is a 2009 Alumna of the University of Maryland School of Social Work with specializations in Management and Community Organizing & Children and Families and is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Work at University of Maryland Baltimore County.
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