(Alliance E-News Service) — Families in Society, the Alliance’s social work journal, recently published several new articles online. Subscribers and, for a limited time, free registered users have access to these articles, which later will be included in the upcoming fall 2010 issue.
“One fundamental challenge is that prevailing approaches to accountability are not responsive to the complex realities that leaders encounter,” Campbell explains. “Leaders face a diverse set of constituents, including both the people meant to benefit from their work and the funders (both private and public) who support them. As a result, they encounter competing assumptions about how to demonstrate accountability to their constituents.”
 Campbell goes on to discuss a six-element framework of feedback purposes. The article also explores findings that suggest providers are actively engaged in feedback activities but are dissatisfied with their efforts—something Campbell attributes to disagreements over the purpose of feedback, concerns about the value of data collection instruments, and the lack of organizational capacity to effectively execute the necessary processes.
Furthermore, although providers recognize multiple purposes for feedback, they perceive that funders emphasize a single purpose—fund accountability—and that funder purposes are consistently not aligned with providers.
Additional E-Advance Articles of Interest
Joel M. Carp
In this article, Carp discusses how disaster mental health work requires additional skills and a broadened vision of the human condition, that values the resiliency and strengths of people.
The article explores the argument that using the models most social workers are trained to apply in clinical work to disaster mental health work is a potentially dangerous trap. He believes that when these models are applied people are likely to be perceived by professionals as victims or broken people who lack strength and resilience.
Carp also finds that by focusing only on the individual in these situations, professionals can lose the ability to focus equally upon the institutional and communal social systems that also have been thrown into chaos.
Eunjung Lee
In this article, Lee proposes revising the construct of cultural competencies to cross-cultural competencies, which would include relational and dynamic aspects from clinical social work practice.
His approach moves the construct beyond a one-person system (i.e., cultural competence as a clinician’s characteristic across diverse clients) to a two-person system that encompasses interaction between two cultural beings, client and clinician.
In the article, he compares the National Association of Social Workers “Standards for Cultural Competence in Social Work Practice” with the American Psychological Association “Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists,” to illustrate the unique emphasis of clinical social work practice on cross-cultural interactions.
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Free Access to
Families in Society
All articles and content on the Families in Society website are available free-of-charge to staff of Alliance member organizations. This includes more than 3,600 articles about a vast variety of topics related to social work.
Contact Families in Society staff for information about how to access your agency’s complimentary subscription. |
