Social workers reinvent themselves

Financial literacy
Even with the dearth of finance-oriented training in social work schools, social workers have helped develop numerous financial-awareness and asset-building programs in recent years.

Michael Sherraden, a social work professor at Washington University in St. Louis, devised the concept of Individual Development Accounts, which help low-income families build assets to reach long-term goals such buying a home. Many social service agencies have launched so-called financial literacy courses.

For example, New York City's Administration for Children's Services recently started a program for youths aging out of foster care that teaches basic financial skills and enables them to open savings accounts. The Children's Aid Society, a New York-based nonprofit, offers workshops to struggling families on dealing with banks, confronting credit problems and avoiding scams.

Dick Cook, the University of Maryland professor, said an infusion of financially savvy social workers could be vital as the economy flounders. He said banking services are likely to shrink in low-income neighborhoods, where many poor people patronize check-cashing services that charge burdensome fees.

"By building this new field, we're creating an infrastructure that can be pulled in to help," he said.

ABCs of money
C. Warren Moses, chief executive of the Children's Aid Society, said social workers can acquire specific financial expertise on the job, but he also favors incorporating the topic into social work schools' curriculum.

"It would make students realize it's important," he said.

Margaret Sherraden, Michael Sherraden's wife and a social work professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is playing a lead role in efforts to boost financial education in social work schools. Thus far, she argues, the standard curriculum has "lagged behind" real-world developments and produced students unprepared to meet needs of vulnerable families.

"The growing field of economic empowerment represents an exceptional opportunity for the social work profession," she wrote in proposing a forum on the topic. "Arguably, no other profession is as well positioned as social work to assume leadership."

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