Hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 are trending down according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data. Still, only 17% of eligible people nationwide have received an updated booster dose. Trends noted from CDC data collected in 2021 showed the general population being fully vaccinated at 59.8% while only 25% of people experiencing homelessness (PEH) were vaccinated. These statistics indicate that vaccination rates among PEH have also dropped.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) began approving vaccines in late 2020. The FDA has now approved a 4th vaccine, Novavax, that is approved for a 1st and 2nd dose to children and adults age 12 and up. More information on the different vaccinations is available on the CDC’s website. Still, COVID-19 remains an active concern. Recent CDC information shows that more than 1 million people have died of COVID-19 in the US as of November 2022. The virus continues to mutate and currently we are learning about long COVID’s disease process and presentation.

The National Health Care for the Homeless Council (NHCHC) noted in a 2020 brief that PEH are at risk for experiencing chronic medical conditions as well as behavioral health concerns. NHCHC notes that demographics collected in 2018 showed 40% of the 1 million clients served were age 50 or older. These health risks alone open PEH to higher risk of infections. Additionally PEH often have limited access to hygiene facilities making it difficult to follow public health advice.

Continuing Challenges Reaching the PEH Population

Even as availability to vaccines becomes more widespread, challenges remain in reaching the PEH population. Mistrust of healthcare institutions is one factor to consider. If previous experiences with clinics where vaccines are being offered were negative, a person might not be motivated to return. Further concerns come with the need for a secondary dose and potential side effects from the initial vaccine. Adherence to masking and social-distancing guidelines remain difficult to guarantee.

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) provides information on how to reach people with limited access to COVID-19 vaccines in the Connect to End COVID resources.

While challenges remain in the delivery of healthcare to PEH, this pandemic experience has been an opportunity to expand all health care to PEH. Some states participated in the National Health Care for the Homeless Council’s Vaccine Ambassador Project to engage people experiencing homelessness and provide education around the vaccines while also developing strategies to assist with distancing. The NHCHC recognizes some of the lessons learned from the Ambassador Project in a brief from November 2022, COVID-19 and the HCH Community: Lessons Learned from the Pandemic.

Social Workers as Trusted Messengers

Social Workers are present in many systems that PEH access, providing us an opportunity to utilize these lessons for the benefit of our clients. One important lesson learned is including people with lived experience into the decision making process when seeking new ways to connect PEH with vaccines or education in changes with the COVID19 virus. Hiring a Vaccine Ambassador into organizations working with PEH is a great way to include someone with lived experience. The expansion of virtual healthcare is another opportunity to engage PEH with healthcare professionals.

Some suggestions from the brief are to invest in portable technology that might be taken to encampments, or arrange for a private room in a shelter or resource center to allow clients to have virtual medical visits. Creating partnerships with other providers and services has been a key part of some success in distributing vaccines. One example was partnering with local food banks to provide snacks during a vaccine drive. Additionally, sharing information with local providers can assist in offering more opportunities for PEH to access a vaccine drive and potentially encounter a provider they trust. The CDC has information on arranging a mobile vaccine on its the CDC website.

As social workers, we are seen as trusted messengers by our clients, including those who may be experiencing homelessness. We meet people where they are and give them the information they need in a non-judgmental way so they can make an informed decision about vaccines and self-care. Educating ourselves about the virus and the latest developments about vaccines is the first step toward helping our clients and communities.

For more information about NASW’s Connect to End COVID-19 initiative, visit the NASW website.

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This project and blog post are supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $3.3 million with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government.

She recommends that a worker who intends to facilitate a group for homeless mothers should keep in mind four important considerations:

• a group worker must remain flexible, ready, and able to be responsive to the changing, often unexpected, needs of members and their shifting sense of urgency
• a group worker should remain nonjudgmental and adopt a neutral stance
• group workers need to be prepared to address differences that exist between the group members and themselves and members’ mistrust of them
• a group worker need to identify and build on group members’ strengths

Keeping these considerations in mind allowed her to facilitate the group and gain insight into using a strengths perspective in group work. From this group work, Knight noted that several interrelated themes emerged:

• Anger and/or resentment, which is directed at numerous sources, including the worker, the shelter or day program, or the homeless mother herself
• A tendency to blame themselves
• The stigma associated with being homeless
• Feelings of being overwhelmed

Knight cites several illuminating examples to illustrate these themes of anger, blame, stigma and the sense of powerlessness, and models how she used strength-based perspectives to deal with these themes.
She concludes:

Facilitating a group for homeless mothers can be challenging, given the multiple difficulties they face, the limited resources available to them, agency constraints, and members’ self-defeating views of themselves. Yet group work is a natural vehicle through which homeless mothers’ resilience can be nurtured and their growth promoted. The mutual aid that results from members’ interactions with one another encourages members to share their challenges and receive support and validation. More important, it reveals members’ strengths, providing them with the incentive necessary to persevere in their attempts to improve their circumstances for themselves and their children.

When Georgia Van Cooten walked into New York City’s Penn Station to participate in the homeless count this year, her thoughts went to two people.

A second-year master’s in social work student at Touro College in New York City, Van Cooten also had taken part in the 2015 count. Back then, she talked with a couple resting in a stairwell who had come to New York from Florida for a fresh start.

“They got engaged and had a friend here who was going to help with a place to stay and jobs,” Van Cooten said. “The plan fell through, and they were left at Penn Station.”

The two were offered a place to stay but declined, she said. Since they were not married, they could not stay together in a shelter, and they did not want to be split up.

“All they had was each other,” Van Cooten said. “I could see on their faces how hurt they were, see the frustration. I wish we could do more, but we had to walk away. It was difficult to just walk away. This year I looked for their faces. I didn’t see them, but they were on my mind this time around.”

Homelessness is one of the main challenges social workers are tackling by using programs and resources that address issues like addiction, substance abuse, mental illness or joblessness. Homelessness affects a wide range of people, including veterans, families, single adults or young couples, LGBT youth and teen runaways.

Every year since the federal homeless count began in 2008, volunteers like Van Cooten have hit the streets across the United States to help the government get a better picture of the nation’s homeless population.

Tracking the number of homeless people is the starting point in measuring gains, and progress in reducing those numbers is being made, according to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development’s 2015 Annual Homeless Assessment Report made to Congress in November.

The report states that since 2010, homelessness decreased overall by 11 percent, and there was a 26 percent drop in the unsheltered homeless population. Veteran homelessness declined by 36 percent, family homelessness was down 19 percent and chronic homelessness dropped 22 percent.

From the April 2016 NASW News. Read the full story here.

NASW played a small role in portraying the realities of homelessness in the movie “Time out of Mind,” starring actor Richard Gere.

Patano

The movie was first shown in 2014 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and released in September 2015.

The film’s production received help from NASW’s New York City Chapter. Robert Schachter, the chapter’s executive director, said the chapter helped link producers to sources that made the homeless aspect of the movie authentic.

“The New York City Chapter was pleased to be asked to provide links between the makers of this important film and leading social workers in homeless services in the city,” Schachter said. “I understand that this helped in the authentic portrayal of social work in the film.”

NASW Public Relations Manager Greg Wright said the film’s director and screenwriter, Oren Moverman, sat on NASW’s Communications Network advisory committee.

Moverman’s producers reached out to NASW to arrange visits to homeless shelters in New York City in order to make “Time Out of Mind” as accurate as possible.

“NASW has had a relationship with Moverman for several years and he has been very supportive of the social work profession,” Wright said. “We are honored we played a small part in helping him create such an important film and hope to collaborate with him in the future.”

Moverman said he visited a lot of homeless shelters while doing research for the film.

Gere plays George, a homeless man trying to survive on the streets of New York City. The film follows George as he gradually goes down the homelessness spiral mentally, emotionally and physically.

Supporting actors in the movie include Kyra Sedgewick, Ben Vereen, and Jenna Malone.

The film also features a social worker named Mrs. Jackson, played by actress Tonye Patano, who shows George kindness and empathy when he comes to a homeless shelter.

Visit http://bit.ly/1ivcJbk to read an article about the movie on SocialWorkersSpeak.org.

NASW also interviewed Tonye Patano about her social work role in the film. That article can also be found on SocialWorkersSpeak.org.

From the January 2016 NASW News

Cynthia Fernan came to Capitol Hill on a chilly January morning and informed federal lawmakers that she is an employed 19-year-old student from the Focus Learning Academy Southwest in Columbus, Ohio.

“I am also a couch surfer,” she said.

Cynthia Fernan (at podium) is joined by other youth affected by homelessness and supporters of the Homeless Children and Youth Act at a Capitol Hill briefing.

Fernan is homeless and has been for a few years. She relies on social media and friends to find new places to stay. She and other teens from the Columbus region traveled to Washington to put faces on the nation’s estimated 1.2 million homeless students.

“Close your eyes for a minute and imagine if you were 16 or 17 and kicked out of your house,” Fernan said. “Or you were being abused and had to leave. Or your family was homeless and could no longer take care of you.”

Fernan shared examples of the challenges she and her homeless friends face at a congressional briefing to discuss support of the Homeless Children and Youth Act (S. 256, H.R. 576).

NASW supports passage of the bipartisan bill, which seeks to:

• Expand the homeless definition and allow HUD homeless assistance programs to serve extremely vulnerable children and youth, specifically those staying in motels or in doubled up situations because they have nowhere else to go.
• Provide communities with the flexibility to use federal funds to meet local priorities.
• Improve data collection transparency by requiring HUD to report data on homeless individuals and families recorded under the existing Homeless Management Information System survey.

U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, as well as U.S. Reps. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, and Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, sponsored the briefing.

“Homeless children and youth are excluded from HUD’s definition of homeless, which makes it harder for them to get help,” Stivers said. “We need to fix that. This bill will streamline the process and amend the definition of homelessness to include youth homelessness.”

Joan Levy Zlotnik, director of the NASW Social Work Policy Institute, said it important that NASW support the bill.

“Ensuring that the needs of homeless youth are not only recognized, but that communities have more opportunity and flexibility to create effective programs will go a long way to improving outcomes for these youth,” Zlotnik said.

From the March 2015 NASW News.

The National Association of Social Workers is one of 17 organizations that is a partner on the report, which is entitled “Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for LGBT Women in America.”

About four percent of adult women, or 5.1 million people, identify as LGBT and about half are raising children, the report said.

Poverty rates for this population is higher, the report said. Almost one out of three bisexual women and 23 percent of lesbian women live in poverty compared to 21 percent of heterosexual women, the report said. Only 29 percent of LGBT women said they are thriving financially, compared to 39 percent of non-LGBT women.

Transgender women are nearly four times as likely to report annual incomes of $10,000 or less compared to the general population. And LGBT women of color, older LGBT women and LGBT women who are raising children are particularly vulnerable to poverty.

The economic disparities LGBT women face are the result of stigma, discrimination and the legal disadvantages they face because they are women and LGBT, the report said.

“LGBT women face added challenges not solely because of their gender, but also because of who they are and whom they love,” said Ineke Mushovic, executive director of MAP. “Discrimination and stigma, combined with the struggles faced by all women, make LGBT women and their families especially vulnerable.”

Please share the report via social media (use hashtag #UnfairPrice). And to learn more about what NASW is doing to improve the welfare of people from the LGBTQ community contact NASW Social Justice and Human Rights Manager Mel Wilson at mwilson@naswdc.org or Evelyn Tomaszewski, NASW’s senior policy associate for HIV/AIDS, LGBT issues and violence prevention, at ETomaszewski@naswdc.org.

Social workers rolled up their collective sleeves and joined in making a difference when President Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty 50 years ago.

Interviews with social workers targeting poverty alleviation today make it clear that just as society evolves, so do the challenges of poverty. However, they say giving up is not an option.

The widening gap

It is imperative that the social work profession seeks system-level approaches to alleviating poverty, said Michal Grinstein-Weiss, a national and international expert in social and economic mobility and an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work. She is also associate director at the Center for Social Development.

Grinstein-Weiss says progress has been made to mitigate severe poverty in the U.S. since the 1960s, through the creation of Medicare, Medicaid and increased funding for housing and food subsidy programs. But many battles remain, she said.

“What I find more troubling than the U.S. poverty rate — which measures the adequacy of income — is the increasingly widening gap in America between the resources held by the rich and those held by the poorest,” she said. “That gap has continued to grow since we began measuring net worth in the early 1980s. Last year, the top 10 percent of American families held 75 percent of the nation’s net worth — the bottom 50 percent held only 1.1 percent of it.”

There is also a pronounced gap between racial groups, Grinstein-Weiss said.  In 2013, white families held 90 percent of the net worth in the U.S, black families held 2.6 percent, and Hispanic families held 2.3 percent, she said.

“Access to financial resources — or lack of access — has consequences that reach into every aspect of an individual’s life and into subsequent generations,” she said.

Social workers have been developing innovative approaches to help lessen poverty levels, Grinstein-Weiss said, but the profession must also face increasingly complicated challenges.

“As advocates for vulnerable populations, social workers must continue to make contributions in the conversations surrounding poverty, and the profession must engage more actively in policy discussions,” she said.

There is good news to report. Grinstein-Weiss pointed out several policy proposals that have the potential to substantially improve the lives of low-income families, including the proposal to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and President Obama’s new retirement savings program, myRA.

In addition, the research by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating ways to educate and protect low-income consumers and the Center for Social Development is conducting research on universal Child Development Accounts, which holds promise as a policy to help close the gap in net worth.

“It is critically important for social workers to engage in these discussions,” Grinstein-Weiss said. “In part, their involvement is needed to ensure that the human face of poverty is not overlooked.”

From the November 2014 NASW News. Read the full story here.

Photo courtesy of Family Equality Council.

Discrimination is not just harming the emotional well-being of Americans who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). Discrimination also hurts their pocketbooks and makes it more likely they will live in poverty, according to a new report done in partnership with the National Association of Social Workers (NASW).

Paying and Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty of Being LGBT in America, examines how discrimination around the nation has a detrimental economic impact on people who are LGBT. The report also offers solutions to end such disparities, including enacting basic nondiscrimination protections at the federal and state level.

The report is co-authored by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) in partnership with NASW, Center for Community Change, Center for Popular Democracy, and the National Education Association.

Anti-LGBT laws at the national, state and local level create unfair penalties for Americans who are LGBT in the form of higher taxes, reduced wages and Social Security income, increased health care costs and more. For instance, in some places people who are LGBT can be fired from their job, denied housing and credit and refused medically-necessary health care simply because of whom they love.

This has dire economic consequences, the report said. Children raised by same-sex parents are twice as likely to be poor as children raised by opposite sex parents. And 15 percent of workers who are transgendered earn less than $10,000 per year compared to four percent of the overall American population.

Watch a Google Hangout on Oct. 1 at 2:30 p.m. to learn more about the report from the authors and officials from partner organizations. Use the hashtag #UnfairPrice to follow this issue on Twitter.

Solutions to this issue include implementing nondiscrimination protections, protecting students who are LGBT from harassment and discrimination, allowing same-sex couples to marry in all states, and letting parents who are LGBT form legal ties with the children they raise.

“The National Association of Social Workers and the broader social work profession has been on the forefront of fighting all forms of discrimination”, said Evelyn Tomaszewski, MSW, director of NASW’s HIV/AIDS Spectrum Project. “NASW has long sought equal treatment for members of the LGBT community, and we will  continue to push for legislative, regulatory and legal remedies to ensure that LGBT  individuals and families have a fair and equal opportunity to succeed.”

NASW is committed to equal treatment for all. To learn more visit NASW’s Diversity and Equity website. That website contains a link to All Children Matter: How Legal and Social Inequalities Hurt LGBT Families, a 2011 report that also looks at how anti-gay law harm members of the LGBT community.

Social workers and NASW played active roles in local, state and federal programs that arose from President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” initiative that he declared in 1964.

NASW Social Work Pioneer® Jack Hansan was one of these social workers. Hansan’s close association with area civil rights leaders and elected officials in the early 1960s helped him become the first executive director of the Community Action Commission of the Cincinnati area.

Community action programs were at the heart of the Economic Opportunity Act, signed into law in August 1964, Hansan said.

The Cincinnati Community Action Commission was among the first to receive newly available federal Community Action funds in late 1964.

The grants helped to establish a series of preschool programs in five counties, as well as neighborhood centers, dental clinics and other programs, Hansan said.

“We worked with the community leadership to establish new and autonomous organizations operated and controlled by community people,” he said of how the centers were operated.

Hansan noted that the Community Action Commission did not compete with the city government, the welfare department, school boards or community chests.

“We tried to use the prospect of new federal funds to get the established agencies and governments to be more sensitive to the needs of the poor and responsive to their demands for services,” he said.

Many of the programs the commission started were copied by the Office of Economic Opportunity and made into national initiatives, Hansan said. For example, the Cincinnati Community Action Commission preschool program was the genesis of the national Head Start program.

“It was an exciting time. I loved it,” Hansan said. “It was great.”

From the May 2014 NASW News. NASW members can read the full story after logging in.

January marked the 50th anniversary of the “War on Poverty,” declared by President Lyndon Johnson.

Battle

The late Mark Battle, who led NASW as executive director from 1984 to 1992, played a pivotal role when federal initiatives to address the needs of the underprivileged were enacted.

Battle was working as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Labor when the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was passed into law. In his retirement, Battle taught at the University of Maryland. In an undated interview published online by the University of Maryland at Baltimore County School of Social Work, Battle said, “I would say that the Economic Opportunity Act initiative gave everybody the chance to and the right to be employed, or be prepared to undertake their own work.”

The law led to the creation of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Job Corps and the New Careers Program. Battle was named the first national director of field operations for the Neighborhood Youth Corps, according to an article published online by the Carol Cole Center for Advanced Living.

Within two years, Johnson appointed Battle as the administrator of the Bureau of Work Training Programs in the Department of Labor, the article says.  In this role, Battle helped promote civil service appointments for professionals of color and women.

“In addition, Mark quietly fought for and succeeded in getting the acceptance of a social work degree as a qualification for two positions by the Civil Service Commission and the Dept. of Labor … ,  Social Science Analyst and Employment Development Specialist,” the article says.

In the University of Maryland interview, Battle said he had fond memories of working in the Department of Labor, pursuing methods that were not status quo at the time and promoting the value of social work.

“It was a hell of a team,” he said, “but I got a lot of satisfaction out of helping explain and interpret what social work was and watch the light bulb go on for those who had no idea what social work was.”

Evelyn Kays-Battle, Battle’s widow and an NASW Social Work Pioneer®, said her husband “believed deeply that government should play a role in addressing social injustices and economic inequality.”

“He was very honored to have a major role in the War on Poverty,” she said, “which gave him a unique and pivotal opportunity to contribute to a broad-based and unparalleled government initiative to address deeply rooted injustices in our society.”

From the March 2014 NASW News. NASW members can read the full story after logging in.