Many of the girls who were in the orphanage with me became either nurses or social workers.

All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a programme. Because a programme provides full employment for three generations of social workers. And they mess up.

Just as in policing there is an emphasis on civilians to help with paperwork, we must free up trained and experienced social workers to focus on children, not bureaucracy.

I met children who want to be social workers, lawyers, doctors, community activists and soldiers so they can help their people rise above still difficult economic circumstances.

In the 21st century when few of us stay in the same job all our lives, I would like to think there was flexibility so teachers could become social workers, or foster carers become teachers.

Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be - all need at least four years of college.

I lived all my life thinking the reason I was in care was because I was naughty. Because I was breaking and entering, pickpocketing, vandalism. I wasn't party to any social workers' reports.

We need a stronger national voice for social workers which leads to a change in how the profession is viewed and its ability to represent itself to other professional bodies and with central government.

For me the march was a labor - a labor of love - but I was busy handing out flyers for the National Association of Black Social Workers, so I really wasn't standing in the crowd listening and observing. I was busy.

Mum and dad worked so hard to help me and my brothers grow up as good people. They were both social workers, working with kids with learning disabilities. They are just great people. It means so much to me to make them proud.

We have to start imagining a new reality - this will mean fewer police and more social workers and teachers. This will mean creating more economic possibilities and investment that preserves and does not displace our communities.

People down on their luck deserve the best: beautiful surroundings and well-paid professional staff to help them out of their difficulties. Why not train thousands more social workers and let them sit in on claimants' interviews?

We also need people like social workers, volunteers, the Christian Industrial League, drug treatment programs to make sure you are getting them a job. That's what you have to do. Otherwise, we just keep stepping around these things.

Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.

I just followed my parents' example and advice on living, which was to leave the world a better place than you found it. They were professional do-gooders, ministers of the church, social workers, teachers, and missionaries, that sort of thing.

When I started in this business, everybody said the Democrats were the better communicators because they sounded like social workers, and Republicans were awful because they sounded like morticians. In some cases. they actually dressed like morticians.

The world is a horrible place, but no one worries because we have all been pacified by anodyne television in which incorruptible cops solve crimes, crusading lawyers keep the innocent out of prison, and streetwise social workers rescue children from abuse.

I think there's a need for more oversight by social workers, because there are a lot of foster parents who are just collecting checks. They need to look closely into the backgrounds of the people whose hands you're putting the kids into and then continue to monitor them.

One of the problems in America is that everybody focuses on their own narrow little bit of the problem without connecting punishment and prevention together, without connecting the schools and the police together, without connecting the pediatricians and the social workers together.

Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.

Many schools desperately need caring professionals like guidance counselors and social workers to ensure students' emotional, social and educational needs are met. But proposals to arm teachers are irresponsible and dangerous. The role of educators is to teach and nurture our children, not to be armed guards.

I think police officers can work with social workers and public health nurses to do so much in terms of addressing the problem of American families, of children in American families as a whole, and giving them an opportunity to get off to a fresh start, to become self-sufficient, to lead safe, constructive lives.

As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.

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