Capacity building for integrated family-centered practice.

Briar-Lawson, Katharine

Economic and Social Supports for Families: Historical Antecedents

The birth of social work and other helping professions at the turn of the 20th century helped to launch social welfare programs that were seen as preventive social and economic investment strategies. These strategies resulted in "mother's pensions," public schools, worker's compensation, vocational rehabilitation, child labor protections, child welfare, juvenile justice, as well as parent and child health initiatives. Leading social work reformers advocated for integrative approaches to employment, income, economically oriented casework, and social support for family well-being. For example, Florence Kelley led the National Consumer's League and authored Modern Industry in Relation to Family Health Education and Morality (1914). Josephine Shaw Lowell, who promoted the Charity Organization Society and the need for broad reforms, wrote Industrial Arbitration and Conciliation (1893). Mary Parker Follet pioneered workplace reforms and to this day is quoted in business schools for her creative work in bringing union and management perspectives into a new dialectic of "coactive power." Her book Creative Experience (1924) delineated her work in unions and management and her advocacy for the improvement of living and working conditions. Bertha Capen Reynolds's advocacy for workers, their families, and collective well-being inspired the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society of today. Her book Social Work and Social Living continues to be read as a classic in the field (Longres, 1996).

Historical accounts of some of the professional debates that occurred when the profession was founded reveal how interconnected economic and social welfare perspectives were made to seem dichotomous and then were pitted against each other. For example, Popple's (1995) historical renderings include citations from Mangold. Mangold argued in 1914 that technique-based practice needed to be subsumed within approaches promoting permanent improvement in social conditions. According to Mangold, preparation for social work practice necessitated the study of the economics of labor, which was seen to be the basis of living conditions. Mangold argued that helping a family here or there brings only slight gains compared to the gains policy reforms bring.

Mary Richmond represented the more micro focus or social casework emphasis of the profession. Calling her approach the retail version of reform, she argued that the client is the starting place for reform and that practice does not stop at the client level (Bolin, 1973; Richmond, 1917, 1922). Jane Addams's (1922) work Peace and Bread in Time of War also helped depict the link between hunger at the individual level and war's diversion of resources that needed to be reinvested in peace and human well-being.

None of these leaders was saying that macro reform should be separate from individual and family help giving. Each may have had a different starting place, but most advocated for the integration of economic and employment issues with individuals at the direct practice level as well as macro social and economic reform agendas. Despite this more integrative thinking of our forebears, polarizing debates, along with the predominance of social casework, characterized the field for the rest of the century. Even as more micro-focused and dichotomous versions of social casework emerged as the preferred concentrations of the profession, social workers nonetheless helped to build key foundations for human well-being, the historic reform legacies of the Great Depression.

From Integrative Social and Economic Advocacy to Psychologically based Practice

Social workers used their frontline experience with rising numbers of homeless and jobless families to name the crisis that had engulfed the country a "depression," despite attempts by President Hoover and others to reframe such conditions as a recession. Social workers were the architects of Social Security, now seen worldwide as a foundational safety net for human and global well-being. Social work pioneers simultaneously pushed for full employment. In fact, frontline social work practitioners became an Achilles' heel to the Roosevelt administration: These social workers had no tolerance for unemployment among people who wanted and needed work. Thus, they demanded employment for every worker, not just New Deal beneficiaries (Bolin, 1973). Further attesting to the role of social work in employment policy was the appointment of a social worker, Francis Perkins, as the Secretary of Labor during the Depression.

Paradoxically, with these and other historic milestones in place, much of social work's attention was then diverted from social insurance, employment reforms, and integrative social and economic interventions (Bolin, 1973). Instead of looking at these issues, predominant agendas involved professionalizing the field with psychologically based inventions. Thus, it is not surprising that, despite the War on Poverty during the 1960s and its related innovations, much of the social work profession had already begun to drift away from working with poor people and from economic, occupational, income-generating, and enfranchising practices. Despite the re-emergence of occupational social work during the past two decades, economic, occupational, and employment initiatives are neither practice cornerstones nor professionwide missions. Integrative practice involving social support and counseling and occupational, employment, and economic development is an exception, not a rule.

Rising Threats to Well-Being

Although the conditions that gave rise to social work and its debates about the need for an integrative, nondichotomous focus on families, workers, and economic well-being are different now, the needs are even more compelling. These needs result from a number of factors. A few are pivotal and need to be mentioned. They derive from (1) the human disinvestment process in the United States, which creates casualties every bit as disturbing as the crises at the turn of the century, (2) the globalization of economic markets and their scarcity-based assumptions, (3) rising systems failures, and (4) nondemocratic policies and practices.

Globalization and Market-based Distribution of Goods and Services

Rising threats to well-being from increasing human, family, and community disinvestment processes are one result of globalization. These disinvestment processes create casualties and impede democratic practices in the United States and worldwide. When practices are democratized, they not only must be held accountable but also must be guided by, if not led by, those affected. In the case of globalization, corporations, often wealthier than some nations, can move freely around the globe. They may do harm to people, their communities, and the environment, yet they answer to virtually no one. The rare exception involves a remote tribunal in Western Europe, which may review and render a decision on a trade technicality (Nader, 1995).

Market-caused demise syndromes have overtaken families and communities, and they may not be easily reversed (Halpern, 1995). "Demise syndrome" is a result of the market economy's producing winners and losers (Peterson, 1994; Rifkin, 1995; Wilson, 1996). The market model assumes that there needs to be a scarcity of vital goods, services, and jobs. Yet human well-being depends on an abundance of investments and supports, not a scarcity model, which undemocratically rations goods and resources to more privileged groups.

Because of the rise of industry, trade, and the monetarization of goods and services, economic forces have been seen as rupturing the fabric of human and community well-being and violating relationships, interdependence, and civility. Such market forces can also throw an entire resource-based community into an economic crisis overnight with a single plant closure. Underemployment and frequent layoffs and job changes plague many communities.

Nondemocratized Practices and Policies

Democratizing economic and social supports for families historically has involved ongoing struggles by the profession to address racism, patriarchy, sexism, homophobism, classism, ageism, and discrimination against people with disabilities. Some of these struggles to democratize practice are reflected in our history of settlement houses. For example, despite Jane Addams's advocacy for culture-preserving enterprises and occupational roles, Hull House was seen as exclusionary in its treatment and advancement of African Americans (Halpern, 1995). Similarly, mother's pensions were crafted in part by early social workers and served as the forerunner of Aid to Dependent Children and its successor Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Enacted to address the fact that no mother should have to work full time and be a full-time caregiver, such income supports nonetheless excluded African American recipients in many states (Halpern, 1995). These human rights issues are interconnected with the distribution of goods and resources, including educational access and jobs. They also implicate market-driven professions, which may engage in inhumane and discriminatory practices.

For example, families increasingly report that they feel maltreated by many of the helping professionals in their communities. In turn, families mirror the nondemocratic and hurtful practices of the wider community. Rising domestic violence and the doubling of child abuse reports (Williams, 1996) are both symptoms and by-products of gendered stresses, labor burdens, and patriarchy. These may be worsening with the new welfare regulations, because as many as two-thirds of women on welfare have been victims of domestic violence (Allard, Albeda, Colten, & Cosenza, 1997). It is often women who are blamed and "clientized," or made to be dependent on the service provider (Cowger, 1998). Root causes of distress such as patriarchy, racism, exclusion, sexism, classism, and economic disenfranchisement go unaddressed.

Systems Failure

When systems designed to serve families fail, families cannot succeed. Societal and intergenerational consequences are humanly and fiscally costly. In fact, the cost of failure of both children and families and the systems that serve them, such as schools, child welfare, and juvenile justice agencies, far outweighs the cost of family-centered investment and support strategies (Bruner, 1993). For example, since 1980 the nation has built more prisons than schools. This approach of locking up and throwing away people is aggravated by policies that require that families maim those they love to get help. Then they are blamed rather than provided with the supports they need to be nurturing rather than injurious.

As evidence of systems failure, in 1995 the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) declared the U.S. foster care system to be in crisis, with the systems of child welfare in more than 30 states operating under some sort of class action law suit, legal supervision, or consent decree. Like child welfare systems, many school districts also operate under consent decrees. In many urban schools one-third of youths are absent on any given day, and nearly 50 percent drop out (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1998). Systems failure is reflected not only in litigation and poor outcomes but also in a symptom-, incident-, and offense-based focus; occupational and intergenerational family investment strategies are seen as irrelevant. Paralleling these system failures is the rising population of deinstitutionalized family members who are not cared for; who are challenged by mental illness and disabilities; and whose needs have resulted in unmitigated personal and family stress, rising homelessness, and incarceration. In fact, jails have become the new asylums for some of these deinstitutionalized and impoverished individuals.

Compounding these challenges is the fact that some systems reforms have proven problematic. Philanthropic foundations and state leaders have declared the task to be daunting and fraught with resistance so far (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 1995; Wayson & Cox-New, 1995). Nonetheless, in deriving lessons from initiatives, the Annie E. Casey Foundation (1995) found that economic and employment supports needed to be integral to the systems reform process to serve children better and to improve outcomes. Such findings are mirrored in the changing investment strategies of other philanthropic foundations. Author Lisbeth Schorr has spent a decade studying what works for children, families, and communities and concludes that we cannot "service our way of poverty" (Weiss, 1995). Such a discovery is not new to social work but serves as a helpful reminder of the need for expanded economic, occupational, and income-generating tools and strategies.

Crisis in the Welfare State

The shift in the welfare state from publicly provided income assistance to private market wages and employment portends dire consequences for the entire citizenry. The Great Depression of the 1930s and research on the human costs of unemployment since then have taught us that no worker or family is immune from the vagaries of the market economy, such as the boom and bust of business cycles and the ongoing capital disinvestments in the United States (Briar, 1988). Because the United States has never adopted a full employment and job guarantee policy, despite advocacy from the social work community and others, the prospects for the poorest of the nation's children and parents are particularly catastrophic. Already states have found that parents receiving aid under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programs who can move into jobs easily have done so. But between 30 percent and 67 percent of assisted families have chronic and persistent barriers to work (Pavetti, 1998). Consequences of welfare termination include homelessness, child abuse and neglect, crime, and the destruction of already vulnerable families (Digre, 1997; Edelman, 1997; U.S. Conference of Mayors, 1998).

Even with brisk local economies and unemployment rates below 5 percent, wage levels for welfare to work recipients are so low that they do not cover requisite child care, health, transportation, and housing. Moreover, despite claims of unprecedented levels of unemployment, the real rate of unemployment is 15 percent of the workforce (Miller & Collins, 1996).

Poverty, unemployment, and income insecurity alone are tragic social indicators of preventable human suffering. Inequality compounds these conditions. Ogbu (1978, 1995), for example, argued that poor children of color are relegated to a caste system that impedes occupational, social, and economic mobility. Thus, schools cannot be "great equalizers," but are instead de facto sorters and trackers. Moreover, marginalized children and youths live in a "Catch 22" world. They know that they will not have access to the same opportunities as their well-off counterparts. Yet they articulate some of the same views and dreams as their counterparts who are not poor: They want to go to college, they want a career, and they want a well-lived life. The difference is that many of these marginalized children and youths believe they will be dead before they are 21 (Briar-Lawson, Lawson, Collier, & Joseph, 1997). Such developmental and educational predicaments for children and youths are relevant to longer-term economic, employment, and occupational outcomes, because education is a predictor of adult and family well-being (Reynolds & Ross, 1998).

Adults suffer as children do from inequality and the resulting diminished quality of life and diminished economic, employment, and occupational outcomes. Wilkinson (1996) has found that inequality has worldwide health consequences. Societies that have more social and income inequality have far greater rates of premature death, disease, and crime. What makes such findings greatly relevant to this nation is the fact that the United States currently is experiencing the greatest income disparities since its founding (Danziger & Gottschalk, 1995). The only other time income inequality in the United States was so high was immediately before the Great Depression.

Moving from Residual Crisis Services and Policies to Investment-Driven Approaches

Ozawa (1995) argued that the two pillars of income security policy for the nation - social security and welfare - should now be joined with a third pillar that involves an emergent investment ideology and a set of strategies for children. These investment ideologies and strategies are essential to counter the massive disinvestment agenda by welfare state antagonists, symbolized by authors such as Charles Murray and by corporate and venture capitalists. Moreover, these investment ideologies are necessary, because the trickle-down economic benefits of corporations, monetary and fiscal policies, and attempts to "make work pay" simply are insufficient for durable and sustainable child and family well-being.

The profession's historic commitment to families and family-centered practices and supports positions it in the next century to lead an agenda of family insurance, investment, and enfranchisement that integrates social supports with economic, employment, and occupational rights. The profession historically has been family centered, recognizing that family supports need to replace many child-rescue or family-blaming approaches of the wider society. Moreover, families, however self-defined, have always been seen by social workers as one of the starting places for ending patriarchy, violence, and all the related harms and human rights violations mirroring the wider society. Thus, democratic, family-driven approaches may provide a framework for integrative policies and practices for the next century.

Families as Foundations for Welfare State Investments

Families and family-like support systems are a fundamental component of the social safety net. They are the basis for 90 percent of the educational, health, counseling, entrepreneurial, and small business development in the United States and in nations throughout the world. When these support systems fail or are unable to provide the services required by society, welfare state programs institute residual and costly interventions that often could have been prevented with insurance-based entitlements and investment approaches. Families are also the engines of economic development (Burggraf, 1997), because most businesses and other economic enterprises begin in and with families. Yet economic development and investment decisions disproportionately focus on large-scale worldwide investments, not family- and neighborhood-based capacity building.

Despite the crisis of TANF for children whose parents cannot get jobs, there is an emergent investment focus on children as "human capital" for the nation's future and competitive role in the world. Such a focus on children, albeit well intended, may be an insufficient paradigm for policy and practice in the next century, because children often will "be what they see" - if their parents and other adults in their lives have no job and no livelihood, then children often assume there will be no work for them in the future either. Thus, children may not be effective "investment targets" outside the context of their families and communities.

Most, if not all, challenges faced by vulnerable children also involve challenges to their families and communities. Children need to be aided in the context of their families and communities. Moreover, this past century has proven that the state does not make a good substitute parent and that the rescue of children needs to be replaced with family supports and capacity building.

Despite the success of Eugene Lang in New York City, who invested in poor children from eighth grade through college, many child-centered approaches often fail and result in family blaming rather than in sustainable and intergenerational capacity building. Thus, social work leadership is essential to promoting child-centered, family-driven policy and practice, including family-based income security policy involving social security reform, welfare redesign, and investment approaches.

Family-Driven Policy and Practice

Interventions by social workers have resulted in different choice points for professionals as capacity builders and advocates. These involve professional practices and policies that strive to promote

* family-accountable professional services and policies - services and policies that take into account family members' perceptions of needs and solutions

* family-partnered service approaches and policies - services and policies that treat families as experts and collaborators in goal setting and in the mobilization of solutions

* family-led services and policies - services and policies that are designed by families; families convene their own case staffings, summits, and congresses

* family-delivered services - services that are delivered by families, one to another

* family-organized service systems and policies - policies, service systems, and programs that are developed by families to meet needs and to address aspirations, involving culturally competent, indigenously congruent, and often resource-based mobilization.

Despite increasing claims by policymakers, agency directors, and others that services and policies are responsive to the individuals they serve, families are rarely the authors and stewards of the policies and practices that affect them. As key stakeholders they often remain supplicants, not experts and guides about what hurts and what helps. Next-century reforms can be advanced by democratizing practices. Moreover, child-focused, family-centered policies and practices may create new roles and opportunities by which those who are the focus of change become supported in their own self-mobilization and goal setting.

As debates about the reform of the Social Security Act continue, there are few campaign efforts to involve families. As the social security system undergoes an overhaul for the next century, it is possible that social workers and families themselves could play a leading role in crafting explicitly child-focused, family-centered investment and insurance strategies (National Commission on Children, 1991). The United States remains the only industrialized nation without children's or family allowances or demogrants. The growing reliance on earned income tax credits for the working poor people and their children may be segues into the future development of family allowances or children's demogrants. Income supports and wealth creation recommended by Lindsey (1994), Oliver and Shapiro (1995), and a host of others call for various forms of investment strategies, especially for families and children who are impoverished, marginalized, and victimized by discriminatory societal practices. Without such fundamental income supports through asset development, demogrants, and microeconomic investment strategies, the capacity of families to do their job is impaired, and the costs to society, to welfare state institutions, and to future generations mount. Thus, various forms of taxable family insurances and children's allowances become sound investments that far outweigh costs.

Investment-based Approaches with Children and Families

Investment and asset-building approaches are seen as promising counterattacks on disinvestments in children, families, and communities. Some of these are social work facilitated, whereby individuals, families, or entire communities are seen as endowed with assets, as gifted, and as worthy of investment in their talents and contributions (Kretzmann & Mcnight, 1993). Such investments begin prenatally and continue through guaranteed college educations, jobs, and wages above poverty level.

Some asset- and investment-based practices and policies advocated by Sherraden (1991) use TANF grants, unemployment compensation, and other sources to build individual development accounts. These accounts are similar to savings accounts; they have been endorsed by the National Governor's Association and now involve nine pilot sites.

A corollary is the microcredit-lending approach that, unlike the homogenization of goods through globalization, simultaneously preserves cultural and ancestral girls and traditions, offers social support as collateral, and has higher repayment levels than traditional bank loan programs. Micro-entrepreneurs can advance and market the textiles, weavings, and other artifacts of ancient cultures being lost rapidly today in the commercialization of the globe. Instead of banks engaging in large-scale investments and paper profits in world financial markets, a portion of their work can be building capacity with microcredit institutions.

Microcredit is issued because an individual has a group or social collateral arrangement in which colleagues vouch for the micro-entrepreneur and agree to serve as advisers on the project. Social credit replaces financial collateral. Currently, 8 million poor people worldwide receive microcredit and establish micro-enterprises. Micro-entrepreneurs can offset low wages, poverty, and underemployment with the support from these loans. The recent Micro Credit Summit (1998) set a goal of reaching 100 million of the world's poorest families with micro loans, including 400,000 people in industrialized nations. Some of these lenders will be social services agencies and other community-based organizations with sound knowledge of and credibility in the communities they serve. Loan default rates are lower than those involving large-scale loans. In the United States the South Shore Bank in Chicago is one of the leading U.S. microcredit lenders with a 97 percent repayment rate.

Entrepreneurial work is also shown to be effective for youths. One middle school store in an impoverished community in New York City clears over $40,000 a year from the entrepreneurial work of the students. Social services and related community-based organizations can serve as the key facilitators of occupational and entrepreneurial roles for impoverished community members.

Other Capacity-Building Supports

Indigenous Helpers as Primary Service Providers

The social work heritage of neighbor to neighbor and community capacity building can move to center stage as a key component in such a reinvestment agenda. Such a reinvestment agenda does not need to be dependent solely on monetary capital. Diverse nonmonetary social and cultural capital can become the foundation for much human and economic exchange. This reinvestment agenda positions social workers to value and promote nonmonetary work and services that are delivered daily in families and communities and to build on these enduring assets.

Helping relationships are often experienced by families as hierarchical, privileging the professional as expert (Alameda, 1996). In a more democratic practice scenario, each "client" is treated as a potential expert who knows best the barriers and the conditions that may need to be addressed for sustainable and effective change to occur (Foree, 1996; Lipscomb, 1996). Often, such change compels resource mobilization rather than social treatment.

Such policy and practice innovations are in response to the mismatch between what families say they need help with and the help social workers are able to provide. For example, families in one demonstration project said that, rather than counseling, they needed a membership to the local recreation center to reduce stress and abuse in the home (personal communication with M. Webber, National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect, Chicago, 1995). Others say that they need a new front door to feel safe. Without these things they cannot imagine embarking on more interpersonal or intrapsychic therapies. Still others claim that they need jobs. In fact, the social work challenge is to honor and meet these concrete needs. Such responsiveness is often a precondition for effective service follow-through and utilization.

Because most social workers and their agencies lack the concrete resources that address these necessary conditions for service efficacy, they are forced to redefine families' needs to fit the counseling services they can offer. In so doing, practice becomes unresponsive, undemocratic, and potentially ineffective.

The rapid rise of self-help groups, which serve more than 25 million individuals in the United States (Kessler, Mickelson, & Zhao, 1997), attests to the creative ways in which self-determination also results in self-help through reciprocal and mutual aid. Social workers have long known that indigenous experiences are prized, because they are based on a giving and benefiting ethos (Reisman, 1997). Self-help values often promote nonelite, nonhierarchical peer power. To be helped means being a helper, through reciprocal aid and advocacy for one another. Although there are downsides to self-help, there is a need for paradigmatic expansion of professional theories and practices to promote and facilitate mutual aid as part of family capacity-building strategies for the next century.

Time-Dollar Programs

Paralleling self-help movements is the rise of skill exchanges and barter systems often called time-dollar programs (Cahn & Rowe, 1992; Cahn, 1997). Across the nation, neighborhoods exchange over 100,000 hours of care to meet one another's basic needs, enabling them to stretch the value of the little income they have. It also helps to build trust in communities and among neighbors who have become atomized and alienated because of gentrification, housing displacements, job loss, homelessness, and deep persistent poverty.

Some community-building and self-help movements rely on mutual aid and exchange. Time-dollar programs promote the coproduction of goods and services for which the market has no use. For example, time-dollar programs provide family supports and respite. Because of their explicit attention to complementing the market-driven distribution of goods and resources, time-dollar programs are an essential component of community and family capacity building. Such programs are not meant to replace welfare state investments, nor do they attempt to replace the market. They fill a gap and, in the process, help to build individual, family, and community assets and trust and improve well-being. To date, there is no evidence that benefeciaries of time-dollar programs have used them for harmful purposes or to prey on or injure other people (Cahn, 1998).

One of the best examples of time-dollar programs is at Grace Hill Settlement House in East St. Louis. There, neighbors exchange over 40,000 hours of services for one another. Some of these services are used to barter for goods from local merchants (Grace Hill Settlement House, 1995).

Self-help and time-dollar programs reveal the capacity of indigenous helpers to serve as frontline service providers in formal service systems. Design work by University of Chicago faculty and staff at Chapin Hall suggests that service systems be reconstructed so that indigenous helpers function as primary service providers (Wynn, Costello, Halpern, & Richman, 1994). Such primary service roles position them to be the first stage of helping and to be the substructure or the foundational elements of family-to-family, 24-hour supports in caring neighborhoods and communities. State-of-the-art and often computerized referral, information, service, and support networks may then emerge.

This does not mean that abusive and challenged adults are enfranchised to become immediate paraprofessional social workers or frontline service providers. It does suggest, however, the need for programs like New Careers of the 1960s that created occupational and educational ladders for poor people across the United States (Natoil, 1997).

Many social work-facilitated innovations that are in partnership with former "clients" have sprung up all over the nation. Trained initially as paraprofessionals and enfranchised in occupational, educational, and employment ladders, the clients serve as frontline practitioners. They are seen as those with the most expertise involving what it will take to solve individual, family, and community problems. Examples include R.A.I.N. makers and Drug Addiction Treatment Aids in South Florida, who have come from the ranks of those who need service and who simultaneously received training, support, and supervision as they invented new ways to reach cocaine addicts, parents, and children caught in cycles of despair and a sense of failure. Their effectiveness stands as an exemplar of what primary service providers can do to address cycles of school failure and cycles of addiction with crack and cocaine. They are also a force addressing service gaps and root causes of poverty, racism, and unemployment. As they deliver services and design programs, they are also being laddered occupationally, with some pursuing higher education in the helping disciplines.

These primary service providers are often facilitated by social workers. The social worker serves as the capacity builder and consultant; the teams deliver primary or frontline services. Similar innovations found in many communities across the nation are underway with the co-founder of the much-heralded Homebuilders Program in Washington State. This neighbor-led, family-to-family work is a nationally acclaimed innovation. Here, clear new roles are laid out for professionals and for primary service providers (Apple et al., 1997).

Such models may be increasingly relevant to TANF. Families with persistent employment barriers can be aided by occupational and educational ladders and can then address their own challenges more effectively, because work and meaningful helping of others is therapeutic for the helper. Moreover, the swiftest route out of poverty is not just a job, but a career ladder that involves higher education (Gittell & Covington, 1993; Gueron & Pauley, 1991).

The Future

Rebuilding will involve much more grassroots leadership - agency by agency and school of social work by school of social work in partnership with disenfranchised populations and allied professions. Each social services agency and school needs to be a testimonial to the work of our forebears, every bit as progressive and inventive as the settlement house and a demonstration site for optimal practices and supports as well as a platform for advocacy. Interprofessional collaborative reforms enable the profession to join the chorus of committed helping disciplines to make the health, education, social service, and criminal justice communities a force more powerful than corporations, globalization, and the military. In this war against the status quo lie the hope of the nation and the future of its children, families, and communities.

These agendas require capacity building in the profession and in allied helping disciplines. A social work summit such as the famed Milford Conference is needed for the profession to promote an innovative exchange of the most promising integrative psychosocial, economic, occupational, employment, and enfranchisement practices. From this exchange, sustained efforts to build professional capacity must occur, involving strategic reintegration of reclaimed practice agendas. The resulting innovations can build democratic paradigms consistent with the strengths-based and empowerment focus in the field, as well as the growing attention to policy practice and generalist practice perspectives.

Indicators of such improvements would be (1) the preparation of practitioners who facilitate indigenous experts to be primary service providers; (2) professional missions that promote such enfranchising innovations as foundations for new human, community, and global social welfare; (3) new theories addressing resources, capacity-building and economic, occupational, and income supports as key shapers of human functioning and social welfare; (4) practice and policy debates focusing as much on economic, employment, and income issues as they do on their by-products such as depression and child abuse; (5) systems reforms centering on new primary service providers partnering with professionals; and (6) advocacy for social security through social insurance and demogrants for children and families.

Social work schools, departments, and accrediting teams would question why economic, employment, and occupational supports - critical measures of whether educational preparation is relevant to the needs of the day and the next century - are left out of curricula. Clinical practice would be grounded in the therapeutic benefits of enfranchisement and occupational supports and would mobilize new primary service helping roles as social work "treatment" strategies. Reforms and demonstration projects would be driven by indigenous experts' knowledge of the barriers that need to be overcome. Research strategies would not only derive hypotheses from individuals to be served but would empower indigenous experts to be research associates and coproducers of research findings. Research variables regarding individual, family, and community functioning strategically would include economic, employment, and occupational status, well-being, and their effects. Instead of the traditional neutral stances of researchers, the research itself would be one key intervention component that developmentally would drive trial-and-error, data-based, and consumer-guided approaches to what works. Research would be aggressively formative and not just summative (Springer & Phillips, 1994). Naturally occurring quasi-experiments would be seized as opportunities to document qualitative and quantitative outcomes.

History will record social workers' silences and advocacy. Social workers must lead with their strengths and follow the rigors of integrative practices, keeping the profession on the path laid out for them by their forebears.

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Katharine Briar-Lawson, PhD, is professor and associate dean for research and doctoral studies, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112; e-mail: [email protected]. The author acknowledges the helpful suggestions of the editor-in-chief two anonymous reviewers, and Hal A. Lawson.