Philpott, Florence

Florence Philpott (1909–1992) was a Canadian social worker and leader in the field. Philpott worked as a caseworker, community organizer, educator, and she was involved in social planning and policy development. Philpott demonstrated strong leadership in community organizations concerned with poverty, homelessness, and unemployment. As executive director of the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, she mobilized a Needs and Resources Study that exposed inadequate relief rates and insufficient community support. Philpott contributed to the professionalization of social work in Canada as executive director of the Canadian Association of Social Workers in Ottawa from 1964 to 1971. Her extensive volunteer and work experience in the field of social work illustrates her commitment to advocating better relief rates for those living in poverty, guiding organizations in resource allocation, and promoting the role of social workers in the community.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities: by Davarian L. Baldwin

In today’s politically charged, anti-education climate, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower should be required reading for every urban community organizer and higher education stakeholder. Davarian L. Baldwin blends captivating interview excerpts and thoroughly researched data to tell the stories of the winners and losers in and around well-known universities in urban areas from coast to coast. Cultural differences, policing problems, economic disparities, real estate transactions, taxes, and subsidies are all addressed. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a powerful conversation starter about who really benefits from the physical presence of American universities, and how universities might change their tactics to expand those benefits to communities at large.

Reflections on Teaching and Learning Chemistry Through Youth Participatory Science

This chapter captures a panel discussion from the 2019 conference of Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS, http://seedsweb.org) in Norfolk, Virginia. The panel included two high school students, three high school chemistry teachers, a community organizer, an administrator for a large urban school district, and a university-based science educator. These panelists, the authors of this chapter, had been collaborating on an initiative to support youth participatory science (YPS) projects in high school chemistry classes. We share this lightly edited transcript of our conversation as a way to communicate perspectives about the opportunities and challenges of YPS from viewpoints across these constituency groups. Our conversation is organized around three questions for reflection: (1) What are some of the challenges and possibilities when it comes to engaging with YPS in science classes? (2) How has engaging in YPS exposed both insights and oversights of scientific ways of knowing? (3) In YPS, what are the relationships between learning science and engaging in political and community issues?

Du refus de la représentation à son incarnation

L’élection de Barack Obama à la Maison-Blanche en 2008 ne marque pas uniquement l’élection du « premier président noir » : il s’agit aussi de celle du premier ancien community organizer. Jusqu’alors relativement inconnue, la catégorie « community organizer » devient indissociable d’une trajectoire politique individuelle mythifiée. La politisation de la catégorie éclaire ainsi un phénomène peu étudié : l’intégration de l’espace du community organizing aux filières de recrutement des professionnel·les de la politique étatsunien·nes à tous les échelons institutionnels. Or, ce phénomène apparaît paradoxal : non seulement l’espace du community organizing s’est construit contre le champ politique comme un « contre-pouvoir citoyen », mais les professionnel·les de la mobilisation et de la représentation populaires que sont les community organizers refusent d’assurer le travail de porte-parolat politique, pris en charge par des « leaders » profanes qu’elles et ils forment et encadrent. Pour rendre raison de ce passage du refus de la représentation à son incarnation, l’article s’appuie sur une enquête ethnographique menée à Chicago entre 2015 et 2018.

Role of Professional Social Workers in Promotion of Quality of Life of Children Orphaned by AIDS: A Study

This article discusses the role of professional social workers in promotion of quality of life of children orphaned by AIDS. Children orphaned by AIDS are the children, who have the age of below 18 years, and lost one or both biological parents due to AIDS. It is estimated that there are 13.8 million children worldwide had lost mother or father or both parents to AIDS as of 2020. Children orphaned by AIDS face economic, social, psychological, and health problems. It is very difficult for them to access the basic needs such as food, shelter and clothing as well as education. This study conducted in two states of India i.e. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana with 316 children orphaned by AIDS. The study found that women-headed, granny-headed and child-headed families are more in HIV affected families. Stigma and discrimination were faced by 64.2 per cent respondents. About 35 per cent of the children are not attending the schools regularly, 72.2 per cent respondents required psycho-social support. Social work is a practice-based profession and it believes that every child is unique. There is a lot of scope for the practice of social work profession with these children. Social workers work as a social case-worker, social group worker, community organizer, social activist, social welfare administrator, social researcher, counsellor, communicator, and educator etc. to promote the quality of life of children orphaned by AIDS. This study suggested a strategy to work with children orphaned by AIDS.

The Creative Commons is Starving

Improvising drummer and community organizer Joe Sorbara advocates for the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that will “provide everyone with the space to hear and recognise a calling, and . . . ensure that we all have the capacity and support to answer the call.”

(Re)imagined Possibilities

This essay and accompanying conversation examine the works of filmmaker and scholar Zeinabu irene Davis, whose work centers Black women, engaging their histories and contemporary stories, and thus representing their agency and complex personhood. Davis acknowledges Third Cinema and African/Afro diasporic influences in shaping her style of storytelling and in evolving her fierce Black aesthetic that disrupts the normativity of the dominant white gaze in mainstream media. These choices signify Davis’s ethos and priorities as a filmmaker, a documentarian, a womanist, and a community organizer who humanizes and celebrates her characters on-screen.

A Feminist Still

What can photographic form teach us about feminist historiography? Through close readings of photographs by visual artist and documentary photographer Sheba Chhachhi, who documented the struggle for women’s rights in India from the 1980s onward, this article outlines the political stakes of documentary photography’s formal conventions. First, it analyzes candid snapshots of recent protests for women’s rights in India, focusing on an iconic photograph by Chhachhi of Satyarani Chadha, a community organizer and women’s rights activist, at a rally in New Delhi in 1980. It attends to the way in which such photographs turn personal scenes of mourning into collective memorials to militancy, even as they embalm their subjects in a state of temporal paralysis and strip them of their individual history. It contrasts these snapshots to Chhachhi’s collaborative portrait of Chadha from 1990, a “feminist still” that deploys formal conventions of stillness to stage temporal encounters between potential histories and unrealized futures. Throughout, the article returns to the untimeliness of Chhachhi’s photography, both in the multiple temporalities opened up within the image and in its avant-garde critique of feminist politics through experiments with photographic form.

Resisting Dispossession: Performative Spatial Irruptions and the LA Poverty Department

I was so unimpressed with the city council. … They had a line of homeless people who were allowed to vote because Kevin [Michael Key] was running for councilman and everything. So, they wanted IDs … [The person tabling] asked me, “Well I need some id. Do you have any ID?” And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any id. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible. He was just going through the motions of making the sound. But he didn't know he was dealing with R-C-B. So when I dropped my passport, and I do mean dropped my passport on the table, that's when I got respect.—RCB, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

Hazards of Our Helping Profession: A Practical Self-Care Model for Community Practice

The social work profession is a helping profession; social workers provide services with the intent to improve life opportunities in pursuit of social justice for individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole. Social workers are called to work on behalf of the most vulnerable people in our society, and as such, the hazards of our helping profession are abundant. Though the literature offers numerous frameworks that can be used by social workers in a variety of settings, many issues that are unique to community practice settings can lead to professional burnout and compassion fatigue for social workers. At present there are no comprehensive models for self-care that attend specifically to the unique needs of the community practitioner. This article presents the iM-PAACT model, a four-part conceptual framework that helps to fill this gap in the literature. This practical self-care model has been designed specifically for social workers engaged primarily in community practice settings, including the community activist, community organizer, and community-engaged scholar.