This episode is a special holiday edition featuring a conversation with my daughter when they were home for Thanksgiving. Sadie Bender Shorr is in the early phase of a career in social work, currently working in the University of Arizona's counseling center and planning to begin studies next fall for an MSW.
Social workers talk about the micro and macro levels—which translate, respectively, as service provision versus advocacy—and that's where we started our discussion. For instance health care reform makes a huge difference in opening possibilities for the uninsured through new programs, rules, and resources. But it takes additional on-the-ground work to help people actually receive medical care.
Sadie explained that much of their own work is a matter of helping University of Arizona students navigate the paperwork and hoops the students encounter as obstacles. With Sadie's special interest in transgender and other LGBTQ people, there is often an issue with students' reliance on parents' health insurance. Many of them haven't yet come out to their parents.
As another challenge of prodding bureaucracies to truly serve the populations they're supposed to help, Sadie talked about their earlier job as a case manager for unaccompanied minor migrants. That position with a nonprofit family services agency entailed facilitating family unification for kids with relatives in the United States as well as advocating for kids in a group home who didn't have that option.