SOCIAL WELFARE POLICY

Catalog description

Baccalaureate degree from an accredited institution. This course will provide students with knowledge of the historical and conceptual context within which social workers and other human service practitioners have operated. The course emphasizes the development of social welfare policy at national, state, and local levels. Its attention to the macro-level aims to provide an understanding of the policy framework that shapes generalist social work practice. While the focus will be, initially, British and, then, mostly, United States social welfare historical development and policy analysis, there is a considerable amount of cross-cultural consideration of the social welfare approaches of other advanced industrial societies and some of the innovative models in a few of the poorer nations of the Third World. The course emphasizes the Social Work profession's commitment to social justice and human diversity, highlighting the ways in which social welfare policies impact upon the most historically oppressed populations, e.g., African-Americans and other people of color, immigrant working people, women, older adults, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and the developmentally disabled.