{"id":150779,"date":"2019-06-17T08:32:54","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T12:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=150779"},"modified":"2019-10-01T15:44:02","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T19:44:02","slug":"social-work-students-front-lines-connecticuts-congressional-offices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2019\/06\/social-work-students-front-lines-connecticuts-congressional-offices\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Work Students on ‘Front Lines’ in Connecticut\u2019s Congressional Offices"},"content":{"rendered":"

In October 2018, a Connecticut family celebrated the end of their seven-month stay at a church in Old Lyme. The parents, who had lived in New Britain for 18 years, sought sanctuary at the church when a federal deportation order threatened to send them to Pakistan after years spent struggling to obtain legal status.<\/p>\n

Their deportation order was suspended pending court appeals, allowing the family to finally leave the church and return home to their lives and business \u2013 a pizza restaurant in New Britain. At their restaurant on an October morning, one of the family\u2019s most high-profile supporters, Connecticut\u2019s U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, treated well-wishers to pizza, handing out slices while greeting the family\u2019s friends and speaking to local news reporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do a lot of work in a place that often fails to be inspiring or uplifting,\u201d Blumenthal told the Hartford Courant that day<\/a>. \u201cThis kind of story truly is inspiring and uplifting.\u201d<\/p>\n

That event, and the image of Connecticut\u2019s senior senator passing around slices of pizza, stuck with Tess Leone ’20, a master’s of social work (MSW) student at UConn\u2019s School of Social Work, who accompanied Blumenthal to the New Britain pizza restaurant that day.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was really nice to see all the support, just to hear this family\u2019s story and see that it had a good outcome,\u201d says Leone, who attended the event as part of her School of Social Work field placement in the senator\u2019s district office in Hartford.<\/p>\n

\n

Social workers help bring the humanity … to the people that the representatives are serving. — Tess Leone '20 MSW<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Leone was one of two UConn MSW students placed in federal district offices this past academic year. In recent years, MSW students have been placed in federal congressional offices throughout Connecticut and have worked alongside elected officials in Connecticut\u2019s state Capitol as well \u2013 handling constituent casework, developing policy, writing briefings, and actively engaging in the political process. Three students will work in congressional offices this coming academic year, with the possibility for more placements before the year starts.<\/p>\n

As a policy practice MSW student, Leone\u2019s concentration of study is designed to prepare social workers to work within organizations and government to improve laws, regulations, and policies that affect populations in vulnerable situations. Policy practice involves policy development and policy analysis, program design and implementation, and policy and legislative advocacy.<\/p>\n

\"Social<\/a>
Social work student Tess Leone, left, an intern at U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office in Hartford, with outreach organizer Ellen Graham ’06 MSW. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Field placements are an integrated part of the School of Social Work\u2019s master\u2019s program \u2013 giving students insight into the wide range of possibilities for social work employment, and providing the opportunity to integrate the theory students learn in the classroom with real-world practice. The School of Social Work\u2019s Nancy A. Humphreys Institute for Political Social Work<\/a> \u2013 which works to increase the political participation and power of all social workers and the communities they serve \u2013 supports and enhances engagement and collaboration between social workers and the field of political participation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think social work teaches you a lot about how to work with people and how to understand people,\u201d says School of Social Work alum Ellen Graham \u201906 MSW, who works as a community liaison for Sen. Blumenthal, and also coordinates the senator\u2019s internship program out of the Hartford district office.<\/p>\n

Graham, who earned her bachelor\u2019s degree in social work from the University of New Hampshire, was first drawn to UConn\u2019s social work program through the annual Campaign School for Social Workers<\/a>, then directed by the late Nancy A. Humphreys. She decided to pursue her MSW at UConn because of the school\u2019s Institute for Political Social Work, with its focus on policy and on so-called \u201cmacro\u201d issues of social work. “Macro issues” refers to social workers operating on community or systems levels, as opposed to an individual or clinical basis.<\/p>\n

In her professional work, Graham serves as the senator\u2019s \u201ceyes and ears around the state,\u201d and focuses on a diverse set of issues, including health care, the environment, women\u2019s issues, education, aging, municipalities, and the state legislature. Her extensive social work background is critically important, she says, to the work she does every day.<\/p>\n

\u201cI meet with people around health care, and it\u2019s very emotional,\u201d she says, \u201cso I think my background in social work has helped me to empathize with them, to understand where they\u2019re coming from.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her work with School of Social Work students, Graham tries to give them constituent cases to work on, involves them in policy areas where they have a particular interest, and has them travel to events with the senator, like the New Britain pizza celebration.<\/p>\n

\u201cInterns are really our front line; they\u2019re answering the phones, they\u2019re updating constituents on casework, maybe working on a case of their own so that they can see [the process,] from someone calling us and then working with a federal agency and then hopefully getting it resolved,\u201d Graham says. \u201cI think politics, whether or not you have a social work background, is all about relationships. It’s meeting people and keeping those relationships \u2013 and social workers are very good at relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Leone, who had never worked around politics or political campaigns before taking classes at the School of Social Work and attending the Campaign School, her time in the district office gave her first-hand knowledge of the work of a political staffer and the role that social workers can play in the political process.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I didn\u2019t have much experience, I thought it was a good way to learn how an office like that works, and to get that first-hand experience and learn what the people who work for a senator do,\u201d says Leone. She isn\u2019t entirely sure what she wants to do after completing her studies, but is interested in learning more about state-level government and advocacy.<\/p>\n

She says her placement taught her ways to find common ground with people who have different and often passionate views on issues, and that social workers have an important role to play in politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think as social workers, it\u2019s really important to know how the government works, because they\u2019re the people who are giving us funding and making laws that affect the lives of the people we work with,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd really, social workers help bring the humanity, I think, to the people that the representatives are serving.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In October 2018, a Connecticut family celebrated the end of their seven-month stay at a church in Old Lyme. The parents, who had lived in New Britain for 18 years, sought sanctuary at the church when a federal deportation order threatened to send them to Pakistan after years spent struggling to obtain legal status. Their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":150820,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1715,2193,1870,92],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2168],"class_list":["post-150779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-impact","category-hartford-county","category-ssw","category-uconn-hartford"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 12:52:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150779"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150842,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150779\/revisions\/150842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/150820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150779"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=150779"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=150779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}