Senior Social Work Majors Focus on Addressing Grand Challenges in Society  

As part of their capstone experience this semester, students graduating with a BA in Social Work in May will be studying the Grand Challenges for Social Work and Society. Initiated by the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the Grand Challenges are part of a groundbreaking initiative to champion social progress powered by science. This effort is a call to action to work together to tackle the nation's toughest social problems.

For more than a century, social workers have been transforming our society. Society faces serious, interrelated, and large-scale challenges—violence, substance abuse, environmental degradation, injustice, isolation, and inequality. Work on the Grand Challenges engages social workers in promoting scientific knowledge and caring practice to advance individual and family well-being, a stronger social fabric, and a just society that fights exclusion and marginalization.

Social work students will spend the semester developing policy analyses on one of the 13 Grand Challenges and presenting them at statewide events and conferences.  They will also host a special session of their work at the 2022 Petersheim Academic Exposition.  Areas of focus include ensuring healthy development for all youth, closing the health gap, stopping family violence, advancing long and productive lives, eradicating social isolation, ending homelessness, creating social responses to a changing environment, harnessing technology for social good, promoting smart decarceration, and reducing extreme economic equality.

To kick off the semester, on January 27th, students had an interactive dialogue with Dr. Richard Barth, Past President of American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and a Professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work who co-authored Grand Challenges for Social Work and Society published by Oxford University Press.

In addition to pursuing a social work major or minor, all Seton Hall students, regardless of major, have the opportunity to earn a Social Work Policy and Justice Certificate or an Interdisciplinary Certificate in Gerontology, which are administered by the undergraduate social work program.  Both certificates directly relate to areas of focus in the Grand Challenges for Social Work and Society.

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