My dear community,
At the end of our summer terms and as our field terms begin, I am writing with a glimpse into our work for this year. Despite the challenges we have all faced over the past two years, we have continued our efforts on all fronts – pushing our racial justice work ahead, hiring new faculty who are bringing exciting areas of research to the School and strengthening our School through new administrative structures.
Through the fall and winter, we will continue the work of the Anti-racism Planning Group (ARPG) that started this summer to develop a community-wide accountability process that includes processes of repair and healing. As you know the second of our five core principles asks that we ensure accountability at the individual, program and institutional levels and that there are meaningful processes for repair and reconciliation.
This fall, the ARPG will be under the leadership of Janae Peters and JaLisa Williams. We will be inviting back the M.S.W. and Ph.D. students, resident and adjunct faculty, staff and administrators who were in the workgroup this summer to keep us moving forward. You can read our draft Statement of Purpose here. The goal is to begin a roll out of our new processes by summer 2022. This work must be ongoing. This fall I will convene a second multi-constituent committee, the Strategic Visioning Group. This committee will be responsible for:
- determining the priorities for our work in the upcoming year to
- center our five core principles
- ensuring each priority is placed on the agenda of the most relevant committee or work group
- evaluating the impact of our efforts.
Similar to the ARPG, the Strategic Visioning Group will be composed of members of the resident and adjunct faculty, M.S.W. and Ph.D. students, Sotomayor Fellows, Pedagogy and Diversity facilitators, staff and administrators. Our goal with these groups is to ensure that adjunct faculty and student voices are brought into the center of this transformative work. In other news at the school, I wanted you to know that, after nine years in our Field Education Office, and five years as the director of field education, Katelin Lewis-Kulin has decided to step back and return to her clinical work. All who know Katelin, know what a quiet power she is! She has done an extraordinary job reconceptualizing the structure and delivery of field advising, deepening the field curriculum through the development of a field seminar that is taken through the field year and ably navigating us through the disruptions to field learning caused by the pandemic. I am deeply grateful to her for all that she has done and given to SSW. Katelin will continue to field advise for us.
In the next month, we will be starting a search for our new director of field education. We will be inviting representative student and faculty field advisers to serve on the search committee alongside resident faculty and staff.
Finally, our search for our new director of alumni engagement is underway. This new SSW position marks the great success of SSW in terms of our alumni and development work. You can read more about this change in my letter to students of September 24.
I am so excited by the work we are doing and the changes we are making within our School. I hope that you will join us as we engage with this work. We will continue to share updates with you as our work continues.
Wishing you all the best this fall,
Marianne R.M. Yoshioka, MBA, Ph.D., LCSW
Dean and Elizabeth Marting Treuhaft Professor
Co-editor, Smith College Studies in Social Work
Smith College School for Social Work
