Children
by Tasha Henderson, SWT
I believe social work helps me influence youths’ lives in our most vulnerable communities through positive youth development in school as well as out of school. The responsibility to make large-scale changes to benefit hundreds of students drives my passion for social work. The primary social work mission is to enhance human well-being. I aim to help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs while empowering vulnerable, oppressed, and impoverished populations. This mission resonates with me in both personal and professional contexts. Reflecting on a particular experience with families and children, I can recall feeling supported and motivated toward strengthening my students’ assets.
My classroom experience and direct interaction with a diverse youth group led me to understand the drastic differences in how each child views the world. The students lived within complex socioeconomic and ethnic families with scarce parental support. I was challenged by students who spoke different first languages from my own and represented a variety of cultures, such as Spanish, Somali, and Chin. I felt challenged in moments of daily communications, misunderstood statements, and conveyed interactions. To overcome these barriers, I developed personal relationships with each child, worked with translators, and shared resources. These relationships allowed me to understand and appreciate where the students were coming from, which in many ways was different from my own background. I learned as I worked through this challenge that I lacked knowledge of different cultures and had limited professional resources. I sought out mentorship from social workers who had worked with specific client populations. My knowledge and appreciation of individual differences improved as a result.
In an educational setting, I co-taught kindergartners and preschoolers. I realized a lack of collaboration across systems. The strengths and challenges these children experienced pushed me to look toward social work for solutions on how to connect children to services within the school day. By compiling resources from instructors and supervisors, I began to understand the power social work has in bridging systems to support youth, particularly education, social services, families, and community assets. Moreover, my reliance upon social workers in an interprofessional setting led me to the social work profession. The social workers I connected with prepared me to start my social work path.
We must continue to prepare future social workers to work with vulnerable youth and families through education. We need social workers to work with youth to identify their vast needs, inform evidence-based practices through rigorous research, and disseminate knowledge at multiple system levels. Past experiences support how we are able to integrate unique backgrounds and knowledge in interdisciplinary settings toward a singular goal of client well-being.
An appreciation of diversity led to utilizing partnerships at the school, parent involvement, key resources, and mentorship to support myself in the challenges I continued to face in practice. I hope to learn through pre-service education and research, resources for interventions, supports for families and communities, and an understanding of political climate and policies, which have an impact on these individual and system-level outcomes.
Tasha Henderson is a first-year master's student in the School Social Work track at The Ohio State University.